At Ballyhoo we spend a significant portion of our project budgets on a serious testing regime, after all we want the fantastic websites that we build to look and work as intended for as many users as possible. We hate the thought of your next biggest client failing to get in touch with you because your website didn’t look spot on while your competitor’s did!
This means trying out the website on as many browsers and devices as we can get our hands on. We’ve even gone to the extreme of establishing a device lab with a huge range of smartphones and tablets to test on as part of every website build.
Future proofing
Not only do we test on older devices and browsers still in circulation but we also ensure the websites we build work well on future browsers yet to be officially released. With that in mind we keep a close eye on the popularity of browsers to ensure we are one step ahead of the game.
For some time now we have been supporting the antiquated Internet Explorer 8 browser, first released in 2009, as there are still a small minority of users stuck with it. In their defence these tend to be users within large organisations that don’t have permission to install software on their work devices. However, this minority has been in decline for some time now and some statistics are now showing that this figure has dipped below 1% of users for the first time in June 2015. Microsoft themselves have now announced that they will not be supporting Internet Explorer 8 as of January 12th 2016.
Meanwhile, Microsoft have been hard at work developing a new web browser, Microsoft Edge, which will be the default browser on all devices running Windows 10 (due for release in July 2015 as a free upgrade for all users of Windows 7 or 8.1).
Getting to the point…
We have therefore taken the decision to drop support for Internet Explorer 8 and focus on testing for Microsoft Edge. Not only will this allow us to better ensure the websites we build are future-proof, there is also an opportunity to build more efficient and interactive websites with the latest technologies available to us that were previously unsupported by Internet Explorer 8.
However, we do still have the tools and knowledge required to support Internet Explorer 8 if that is required for your project. In fact, for projects where historical data is available, we will still be checking to see what proportion of users access your website using Internet Explorer 8 and planning accordingly. However, our default stance will be to not offer support and we’re very pleased to be ridding ourselves of something that has been holding our industry back for many years!
