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Documentation for the Numbas editor
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Minimum Web Browser Requirements #19

Closed mjpoo closed 5 years ago

mjpoo commented 5 years ago

Is there any documentation available about the minimum web browser requirements for using Numbas (e.g. Internet Explorer versions 8 and above)?

christianp commented 5 years ago

There isn't, so I'll add some. I try to make it work on Internet Explorer 9, and other browsers at least as recent as that. If you have any machines stuck on Internet Explorer 8, with no alternatives, please let me know!

mjpoo commented 5 years ago

Many thanks for that Christian. I am not surprised if it does not work in IE8 given that it is ancient and does not support so much else (HTML5, ES6, etc). As far as I am concerned we do not need it to work in IE8.

It would be useful to know how far back we could go with browsers other than Internet Explorer.

Many thanks again.

christianp commented 5 years ago

Getting old versions of browsers running is difficult, but I don't think there's anything in IE9 that the other browsers didn't have when it came out, so Numbas should be compatible with any of the major browsers released at that time. Mobile browsers are a different kettle of fish.

Wikipedia has a browser release timeline which says that when IE9 came out, Chrome was at version 10, Firefox at version 4.0, and Safari at 5.0.

Thanks for bringing this up. We really should make some explicit claims about compatibility. I'll have to do some work to find out what those should be, and I'll get back to you here.

For the future, I'm keen to drop IE9 as soon as possible, so I can start using more modern ES6/2018 features. caniuse.com says it's at 0.17% market share now, but I feel it's much higher in an education context.