One of the challenges with creating and maintaining applications for the web is keeping up with all of today’s different web browsers and their differing under-the-hood technologies and functionality. New versions of browsers and operating systems are released frequently for a number of reasons, such as feature enhancements to security fixes. There is a wide variety of web browsers available today, each offering something a bit different from the others. Operating system vendors have their own, some of them are cross-platform and work on other operating systems, then there are the third-party browsers, and we haven’t even explored the mobile browser realm yet… Creating and maintaining a set of browser and OS combinations as a company standard toward which applications can be developed and tested has become key for us.
Our standard has been created using statistics on browser and OS usage from W3Schools, broken down by brand and version. By collecting this data and observing trends over time, we can decide when it’s appropriate to either start or discontinue supporting a browser, OS, or combination of the two. Our process is to evaluate our browser/OS support matrix each time a new major or minor version of a browser or OS is released, or at most every 6 months (assuming no browser or OS updates have occurred). Doing an evaluation of the statistics is important even if no updates have occurred, because some browsers may fall below a percentage of use needed for support, or others may have increased enough in usage or popularity to now be supported.
It’s also important to be able to test those combinations to ensure compatibility. Rather than bearing the expense of having every possible combination in-house, we use a service on the web that specializes in providing those tools to help us test. The service that we use is called BrowserCam, which gives us the ability to take “snapshots” of our applications in various browser/OS combinations on the web, and remote access on those machines for interactive testing. And to answer the original question, we have no idea – PlanetWeb2.6 on Dreamcast is not one of our supported combinations.