Your last sentance says it all… It’s not WordPress that’s compatible with browsers, it’s the themes that people use that are (or are not) compatible. On top of that, a theme can be compatible with a range of browsers, but any changes made to the theme, or applying a child theme, has a chance of breaking that compatibility anyway.
Andrew Nevins
(@anevins)
WCLDN 2018 Contributor | Volunteer support
You should also consider hiring someone to do a proper browser-compatibility job for you, because it’s really a lot of work and may be too much to expect from free theme vendors.
Thanks for clarifying. Unfortunately it’s a must to use child themes. I recently looked into which were the most widely used browsers and frankly it’s not worth worrying about ones like Safari which have a market penetration of about 3% of users. Nor is it worthwhile going back too many version of IE, for example. IE 9 is more ubiquitious than IE 8 now, but I wouldnt be concerned with anything earlier (not worth the effort for the return). The bulk of users tend to upgrade when prompted.
BTW there are issues with IE 10, but I hear version 11 is okay.
(Un)Fortunately it’s completely up to you to decide which browsers you do and don’t want to support. Personally I haven’t seen much difference IE110 and IE11, but I have been working around the normal IE “issues” since version 6, so I guess I’m used to the way it’s rendering things these days too.
Where I work, and in previous places, the decision has been made that we develop to support the latest 2 versions of IE and the latest versions of FireFox, Chrome and Safari. Unless of course the client wants something more then that, and in that case they pay extra for the extra work that goes into getting the compatibility right.
That’s interesting about IE, I’ll bet a lot of workplaces use this policy. My site renders okay on Firefox and will check Safari as I’ve heard of people on Macs uninstalling Firefox in preference for Safari.
Joined a Linkedin forum and one member has suggested:
” You have to make changes in the css of your child theme. Better to make another css file for IE – use webkit and moz for browser compatability.”
Is that good advice?
BTW – dont instal the latest version of Firefox. Last weekend my husband went to official Mozilla Firefox site to download the latest version and we got massively spammed with adware for mobile apps, that downloaded and started changing settings on my PC. Never seen anything so aggressive in all my life.
Luckily we have an uninstaller utility and it took some time to get the crap off.
Changing the CSS for I Eonly is pretty much the only advice that you can give for this issue. There are conditional hacks available that can make a CSS block work for IE only and for specific versions only.
I have to say that I haven’t needed to do that for a few years now – mainly because I’ve taken the time ro understand teh box model and how it works on different browsers and content types, and I code around that. It’s actually not that hard to get almost all designs working in all browsers when you take the time ot understand more about HTML and how it gets put together then just learning the tags that you can use.
Thanks catacaustic for your time, I’ll take your advice on board. 🙂
