How to decide which browsers to support

Posted: September 4th, 2011

I recently had one of my clients reach out to me for advice on deciding which browser to support. Below is my response.

Hi

I can’t make a recommendation on which browsers you should or shouldn’t support, but I have some thoughts on how you can go about deciding.

Questions the client originally brought up:

What percentage of people are on the browser?
This is a good question, but I think the number of actual people on this browser for a given time frame will be the more useful metric. Stick with me and I think you’ll see why.

Is the browser gaining tracking or losing?
Great question, this is useful for forecasting the future.

Coding implications to support the browser?
Exactly! And more explicitly, short term and long term cost (in actual dollars) for supporting a given browser. This is best to calculate in the sense that you commit to support a core set (a set that is obvious and a no brainer to support), you then calculate the extra dev hours to support and test each additional browser outside of that core set.

The business case

What you want to do is make a business case out of this. So there are a few more questions you have to ask and you’ll probably need to work with marketing and your IT team to get these answered. You guys are in e-commerce, so this stuff is important to due your due diligence.

What is the financial value of a customer coming to the site? Example with made up data: potential sell is $200 of profit per customer, average of 4% of customers who visit the site buy something, average visitor generates $8.

You then take that value of the average visitor and multiple that by the number of people for a given browser over the course of the year or month. You then have a rough projection of the value to the business for supporting a given browser.

Continuing on that logic with example data, say IE6 has an average of 94 visitors a month. Each visitor is worth $8 to you, so supporting IE6 is worth $752 a month to the organization in revenue. Take that number and subtract the extra development cost to support that browser and you’ll either have a positive or negative number. That number, in addition to your forecast of whether that number will go up or down over time will allow you to make a decision on what to support.

Note: aside from the strict business case, you’ll want to consider other special case factors (like if your boss is on a given platform).

It gets more complicated in your situation, because you then have to ask yourself if you want to support the same platform set across all countries so you have a consistent code base for efficiencies or you may have separate code base’s for each country/region that allow you to tailor your browser selection according to region. From a management perspective, it seems simpler to have a single code base and a single list of browsers to support, but that’s something for you guys to think about.

This mix of browsers and screen resolutions, gives you your giant list of platform combinations. Note: make sure you identify what platform combos are tablets like the iPad (which is probably your Safari browser with 1024×768 platform combo).

Anyways, I hope this helps!
Cheers,
Derrek

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