Supporting Multiple Browsers for Web Developers

I work as a full stack developer and in that, I had to work on frontend too. We mostly use Angular and sometimes React too, though whatever frontend framework you use, you have to work on HTML, javascript and CSS because those are the base of any web application. One thing which we have to take care of is supporting multiple browsers, that means Chrome, Firefox, IE and Edge all these browsers have to be supported.


PC: Pixabay

The problem arises when some things work on some browsers but do not work on other browsers like recently I have to modify the scroll bar to make it touch-friendly, the easiest option is to change the CSS which works only in case of chrome but other browsers we don't have that option. Similarly, even if some of the browsers are on the same technology still some browsers support something whereas some browsers don't.

I usually use https://caniuse.com/ to check if some feature is supported or not. Just like webkit scrollbar to change the scrollbar CSS is only available in Chrome and others it does. That's why as a developer our job is to deal with the fact that all the features will not be available on every browser or phone simultaneously and thus we need to find a way to do something about it. There is literally no way that we will have a perfect design and thus all browsers will be supported automatically, even if we ignore outdated versions like IE7, IE9 or even Firefox77, we cannot almost support all the newer versions with single implementations.

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Though there are some libraries to make it work in some browsers like, Angular 9 does not work on IE 11, thus we need to write the polyfill to run it, which actually relies on Javascript. There are other methods too, like jQuery which we usually ignore most of the times it's not suggested to use two frameworks simultaneously i.e. Angular and jQuery. The problem is IE seems to be a better secured than the others and thus some business does not allow any other browser to be installed, but if you ask any web dev he is happy to support Chrome and Firefox because both of them works really well and they are always up to date with the new features. IE, on the other hand, is a pretty pure browser, very hard to debug, its slow, and not very user friendly.

My favourite browser is Chrome, anything I developed I first test it in Chrome, I usually develop and test the whole product in that browsers, but again it's not how we should work in the industry. Our goal should be to create a product and let the users use any browser, we cannot say to the users that use only one browser that's not feasible. Just check the numbers which are taken from https://gs.statcounter.com/ which says that the Chrome holds the market share with 68.33% usage, still, we have others users too which we cannot ignore.

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So our main motto or aim as a web developer is to provide all the users the same experience across all browsers. The problem which we have to overcome is that we have to stay up to date with the latest technologies keeping in mind the minimum changes for the user, testing everything carefully across all browsers and pleasing look and feel for all users.

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