Browser support for a website

[ugh]

Hi folks,

Some background beforehand I'm working for a company which provides financial tools to subscribers. This said application has been live since 1999 and they've *finally* reviewed the browsers to be supported.

The site currently support NS4, IE4+, Firefox and Safari. I've been assigned the task to update this list to remove unsupported browsers and include newer browsers. The road to include alternate browsers has been a painful one as we use a Java Applet + LiveConnect (JavaScript <-> Java calls) in the site as well. Older versions of NS7.x and FF/Moz have problems with this feature. Even now, FF seems to behave rather oddly at times. Unfortunately, a browser restart is required to fix it.

What I have in mind is to support only current versions of browsers i.e. IE6 (IE5.5 is no longer supported by MS), Mozilla 1.7.x, Firefox 1.0.x, Netscape 8+ and Safari 1.2+. Although ~90% of the customers use IE, the rest of the customers who are using the alternate browsers are on the rise.

Since I'm also supporting this application, I wouldn't want to make life hell for myself Any recommendations on what browsers I should support *now* and in the *future*? I'm thinking, supporting the current version of a browser in addition to 1 or 2 previous versions. Not sure if that's a good idea.

Any help/ideas/suggestions is greatly appreciated.


Thanks!

 

[PseudoKnight]

Well, ideally you'd support as many browsers as possible, even previous versions. Of course, depending on the type of customers, you can get away with not supporting earlier versions.

My suggestion is to support Opera. I use it. Many of my friends use it. It is an incredible browser that just recently became totally free. It has an "Identify as" feature which fools the website into thinking you're using IE or Mozilla. (some sites block you altogether if you don't have one of those browsers) Unfortunately, this could be screwing up browser statistics so you wouldn't know so many people really do use Opera, and more are starting after the announcement that there won't be an ad banner for the free version anymore.