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Having a whitelist of tested browsers you officially support is understandable. Having a blacklist of tested browsers you know to be so incompatible that the s
by pluma 7y ago
Having a whitelist of tested browsers you officially support is understandable.
Having a blacklist of tested browsers you know to be so incompatible that the site is unusable for them would be even better.
But the optimal course would be that if a browser is not on your whitelist, you show a warning but allow the user to decide to give it a try nevertheless and have an option to go back to the degraded but more compatible legacy version of the site.
I understand building your intranet tool to only work in a small range of handpicked browsers or devices. But we're talking about a public video platform by a multi-billion dollar company with billions (well, 1.9 bn last I heard) of monthly active users.
- runarberg 7y agoThe currently agreed best practice is to detect if a feature is supported and gracefully degrade if it isn’t. Do this on a feature by feature bases so that users gradually get better experience as they upgrade their browsers. However, as other comments have pointed out, feature detection is not always optimal—or even possible—so a whitelist is sometimes needed. This is where YouTube fails. It wrongly doesn’t add the new Chromium based Edge browser to their whitelist. And even then the site doesn’t progressively enhance as it detects supported features.