[cosmo-dev] Safari 2

[Matthew Eernisse]

Blacklisting -- i.e., not letting people log in at all -- might be a bit 
draconian, given that there may be *degrees* of brokenness even in a 
known bad browser. :)

An alternative would be to whitelist the supported browsers, and present 
the rest with a message of "your browser is unsupported, use at your own 
risk. Here are our supported browsers" -- but still allow people to log in.

This makes it clear that things may be broken (whether it's because the 
browser is too old, too new, too experimental, or too minor a player), 
and puts the onus on the user to decide what to do. We wouldn't have to 
maintain a blacklist.

This is what we did at my last job (over a period of seven years or so 
and many browser upgrades), and it seemed to work reasonably well.


Matthew

Bobby Rullo wrote:
> +1 IFF we have a page for "unsupported browsers" - like "Your browser is 
> not supported by Chandler Server. Please use one of the following..."
> 
> Most sites accomplish this via a whitelist - only allow known supported 
> browsers. I am against that in principle - it basically says "only 
> browsers which we know can play along" and it means that if some new 
> cool browser/platform is introduced which completely supports 
> web-standards we would be blocking them just because we didn't know 
> about them.
> 
> For this reason I'd rather have a blacklist - block versions web 
> browsers of the major families (Firefox, Safari, IE) which are known to 
> break.
> 
> bobby
>