Supported Browsers

I would like to briefly explain why we decided to not support some browsers for untwist. When the internet was much younger, several companies tried to force their technology and philosophy onto the way websites and webapps were built. This is mostly sorted today.

One way they did this, was by ignoring agreed on standards and implementing their own standards, hoping that their market share would lead to the adoption of their standards by creators of websites. Leading this game was Microsofts Internet Explorer which not only ignored many standards but also changed the behaviour with every version. The image for this article is the result of IE8 performing the so called Acid-Test which showed a Smiley based on several standards if they were implemented correctly. If not, the browser showed something like above.

This created enormous additional workload for everyone involved. It is estimated that for getting IE compatibility for the latest versions of IE an additional 25% of the entire work going into a web-project was required. While the situation has changed to the better enormously, some browsers out there are still stubborn at implementing what everyone else agreed on.

In a decision to use the 25% of our capacity for those users of untwist who are willing to use a modern browser instead of wasting it on making untwist work with the rare browser that resists standards and the ethics of the internet, we are focussing on browsers that are both stable and available as open source and free products — at least as an alternative!