Browser support

Status

DECIDED

Stakeholders


OutcomePC endorses TC Statement on Browser Support
Due date

 

Owner

Decision

TC Decision: Browser support

2023-06-15 Product Council Minutes

Rationale

Many accessibility laws, including European Union law, require compliance with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1. This includes to "Maximize compatibility with current and future user agents, including assistive technologies." Browsers are user agents. Some assistive technology may not work in some browsers.

Some institutions have policies that require a specific browser and/or the extended support version to be installed on staff desktops.

FOLIO is an open source project and therefore should support at least one open source browser, Chrome is propietary.

FOLIO/Stripes is built on React and Reduct that already support standard compliant browsers. This new browser support policy causes only small additional work [to be confirmed by Stripes Force development team].

No additional automated tests for more browsers are needed. Institutions should join the bug fest with their browsers.

Currently FOLIO/Stripes is intended for desktop use only, no mobile devices support is needed. FOLIO/Stripes has a responsive design and can resize text by 200 % as required by WCAG and therefore can be used on most tablets.

Microsoft Edge Lifecycle Policy

Firefox ESR release cycle

Statistics


statcounter
Desktop
2022-06
statcounter
Desktop Germany
2022-06
Wikimedia
Desktop
2022-06
Screenreadersurvey

2021
Chrome66.93%33.35%53.0%53.60%
Microsoft Edge10.64%14.25%9.2%18.40%
Firefox7.80%21.63%11.0%16.50%
Safari8.93%11.53%9.4%5.10%
Other5.70%19.24%17.4%6.30%

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worldwide/#monthly-202206-202206-bar
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/germany/#monthly-202206-202206-bar
https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#desktop-site-by-browser/browser-family-and-major-hierarchical-view
https://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey9/

History

2017 FOLIO decided that Chrome is the only browser supported. Since then bug reports about other browsers have been closed as "Won't do" (example: STCOM-594 - Getting issue details... STATUS ).

On 2022-06-23 the PC decided to create an international browser support group. To comply with this decision the German technical gap analysis group (Julian Ladisch , Axel Dörrer , Ingolf Kuss , Dennis Benndorf , Denis Mönch ) stopped their work on a browser support policy and handed over their draft to PC's browser support group.