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Which browsers should I try to support when creating a portfolio?

Ermal Shuli on August 25, 2018

I'm on a mac and have the usual: chrome, firefox, and safari.

Do you have a set of browsers you aim to support when, at least, working on your own stuff. Is IE still supported?

And is there a virtual box instance what I could run on mac to test windows browsers?

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Stephen Chiang

I think generally for production solutions IE10+ and Edge along with the more modern browsers is the way to go, but personally (stuff that doesn't have customers or a part of commerce) I prefer not to add to the usefulness of IE. So then I only target chrome Firefox, Safari, and usually edge can keep up with it but I don't give edge any extra effort.

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Massimo Artizzu

IE10 isn't supported anymore, for us it's IE11 or pay more.
We should make customers pay for IE11 too, IMO.

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Stephen Chiang

Agreed, I would love to be able to do that.

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Ermal Shuli

Would you recommend that even to those starting out and looking for web dev work? Would I need to support lower than IE10+ to impress employers, or would the not care?

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Stephen Chiang • Edited

It depends on the employer... Is it a company that provides services to other companies with legacy stuff or requirements to support older browsers, then yeah talking about it shows them that you are thinking about it when developing. If it's a startup or a company that builds things knowing that their market largely uses modern browsers because they are technically inclined? Then no, it won't matter as much.

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Kalaiarasan Pushpanathan

Unless you are a web developer, I do not see a reason why you should create anything crazy for having to think about browser support.

A simple portfolio with projects linked to GitHub or some other repository should be enough in my opinion.

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Erebos Manannán

I'm mostly lazy and generally build just for Chrome, if it doesn't work on others I will consider fixing it if

1) I notice
2) The browser is notable enough (basically Firefox, maybe for Edge)
3) It's easy enough to fix
4) The breakage is significant

If you're trying to show off your skill with your projects you should put extra care on compatibility, documentation, and other such details that matter for released products. If you're just building for yourself, you can let others worry about their problems.

Microsoft provides free VM images for testing their browsers: developer.microsoft.com/en-us/micr...

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Erebos Manannán

I've been starting of thinking more about Brave recently, as it seems to have a lot of potential to becoming a significant player in the market, but since it's Chromium in the base I probably don't need to do any special tests for it. I would probably really consider it if I was doing anything like video, audio, or other such stuff where available codecs matter and might differ between browsers.

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Shalvah

This is me!

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stereobooster

Do you have a set of browsers you aim to support when, at least, working on your own stuff. Is IE still supported?

You can select what you need based on browserslist, like browsers which have more than 1% global usage

And is there a virtual box instance what I could run on mac to test windows browsers?

developer.microsoft.com/en-us/micr...

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Jack Harner 🚀

On the other hand, is it possible to test on desktop Safari without a Mac? Everything I've seen has pretty much been a) buy a used mac mini, or b) borrow a friend who owns a mac (since they probably won't let you run off with their $2,000 laptop without them being attached to it) or c) don't bother.

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K

Depends on what the portfolio is about abd who you are targeting.

If you wanna sell yourself as a front-end dev, you may want to go with older browsers, to show you got the skills needed.

On the other hand, if you don't wanna work on projects that need legacy browser support, don't bother, haha

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Ermal Shuli

Yes I want to sell myself as a front-end dev, looking for junior/ entry-level jobs

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tux0r

IE 10+ is actually rather decent.

Also, you should try lynx or any other text-based web browser. Chances are that you will have disabled visitors.

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Sethu Senthil

Just focus on Google chrome. It will magically work on all modern browsers.

NOTE: New API's and formats like webP don't work everywhere. So you might want to include some sort of polyfill.

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AndyGFX

I just focus on Chrome and Firefox