The Internet is a wonderful thing that allows applications to be accessible from a wide range of devices, from mobile phones to desktop computers. However, ensuring compatibility with this variety of devices requires significant efforts, especially when each of them can run different web browsers.

It’s hard to both ensure compatibility and bring new features on a regular basis. Most of the time, compatibility is about trade-offs. This post explains why we prefer improving iceScrum rather than ensuring old browser compatibility.

Browser compatibility

You may know that because of their big divergences from the web standards, ensuring compatibility for Internet Explorer, mainly IE6, IE7 and IE8, requires significant dedicated efforts.

We are agile, we prioritize our work regarding the value brought to end users. We think there is more value in bringing new features on a regular basis and increasing mobile compliance than in maintaining support for outdated browsers. If we could, we will do both, but we don’t have enough resources to do so. Thus, we chose moving forward and definitely break the compatibility with these browsers.

Therefore, supported browsers are Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer (9 and 10), Opera and Safari in their recent versions.

We didn’t want users of unsupported browser to be surprised of unexpected behaviors. That’s why we introduced a warning message in iceScrum R5#5, which could be discarded. In iceScrum R6#4, this message now prevents from using iceScrum.

Please note that if you can’t install a supported browser, you can use the Google Chrome Frame IE plugin.

Moving forward

Thanks to our decision to not support old IE versions, we are able to develop new features relying on new standards such as HTML5 or the W3C WebRTC standard we use for video chat in iceScrum Pro.

In 2013, we will increase mobile support for iceScrum. You can already use iceScrum on your tablet with a rather good user experience, did you try it? Would you be interested in a mobile application?