DD - Browsers

Hey everyone! Have you ever wondered why, when you call our customer success team, we often ask what browser you’re using? A lot of people think that all browsers will work for all websites, but that isn’t actually true.

In a perfect world, browsers would all show websites in the same way. Unfortunately, that’s not the case – different browsers are all built by different companies, each of them with different ideas of how best to render webpages. On top of that, new features and bug fixes are often being released for the languages that run in the browser (JavaScript and HTML), and browsers aren’t always updated to support these features. This means that web developers will sometimes have to actually write a certain piece of code in multiple different ways in order to ensure that it’s compatible with every browser. Some browsers, such as Brave and Opera, have extra features such as built-in ad blocking that can cause even more issues.

Now, I need to say this: if you’re using Internet Explorer, I highly suggest that you switch to a different browser. Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox are both great options, and Microsoft even has an official replacement for Internet Explorer called Edge. Because Internet Explorer is so old, it doesn’t support many of the newer features that have been added to JavaScript and HTML, meaning that you’ll be missing out on the best user experience on a lot of websites. In some cases, modern websites may not even support Internet Explorer at all.

But even Chrome and Firefox aren’t perfect. Chrome, especially early in its life, was known for having a lot of compatibility issues. This is because their JavaScript engine (called V8) was heavily optimized. This made it fast, but that optimization didn’t work with every feature that JavaScript offered. Nowadays, Chrome is such a heavily used browser that almost all websites have added in code to improve compatibility, but bugs are still being found.

So when we’re asking which browser you use, this is what we’re trying to figure out – is there an issue that we know your browser has with the code that we’re running? We do our best to make sure that our platform is compatible across any browser that you want to use, but it’s always possible that bugs you’re seeing are caused by specific browsers that we haven’t accounted for.