Overview

Browsers come and go and their quality ebbs and wanes. Features change, bugs come and go.

There are several browsers we officially support, which means we try very hard to keep our products working on them.

There are a limited number of browsers we try to keep running on, but we don't try as hard as we do on the officially supported browsers and we don't officially support them.

There are several browsers we know we don't work on, and there are 100's of browsers we have no intention of ever testing on, and if you want, you can fairly easily create your own using libraries like WebKit – and no, we probably won't work on that unless you put a lot of work into doing it to the most up to date standards, and to be blunt, that is near impossible.

Supported Browsers in order of quality

Chromium, (Edge, Chrome, Brave): the current and previous version (as of install)

With each release of MCxLE/MCe, we support the 'then shipping' version of Chromium and the previous version. (These browsers are extremely easy to upgrade on any devices that can realistically run our software, so if your device does not support this you can be pretty sure your device can't run our latest software.)

Chromium has only 'not worked' for us for about 2 weeks total in several years (They introduced a serious bug in late 2014 that they fixed a week later and a couple other minor ones that they fixed literally hours after releasing the bad version).

Our application pushes browsers to perform and Chromium Browsers haves shown to be a solid candidate as long as you shut it down and restart it every day or two. As of 2020: even less often, once a week is now fine. (Like most people, we regularly see memory leak problems with Chrome even when not using our application, and shutting all tabs down day or even twice a day isn't really that hard for most users, and all the other browsers have similar problems, though Opera, Edge and Safari seem to be the worst.)

Brave does a LOT of work to make it VERY fast with any ad sites and sites trying to trick you into clicking on things you have no interest in. Unfortunately, while it works perfectly with our software, it makes our software very slow, literally 2 to 8x's slower (so 1 second in Edge takes 2 to 8 seconds in Brave, 10 seconds in Chrome takes 20 to 80 seconds in Brave.) Noting that Edge and Chrome are both about the same speed, but Edge has fewer memory leaks (though they do push their fixes to the Chromium project so eventually Chrome catches up. This is why currently we have a SLIGHT better report for Edge.)

We do not run in privacy mode.Chrome disables major features like data caching in privacy mode.

The only problem for some users is that Google¹ is removing more and more features unless you run in HTTPS. Officially we only support HTTPS so in theory this is not a problem. But we understand that some of our users ignore our 'requirement' to run in HTTPS so we are just noting that for those customers Chrome is not a good choice and Chrome promises to be a worse and worse choice in the coming months/years. (But Edge and others are also following suit, sometimes faster, but usually slower.) 2020: Almost everything beyond the very basics no longer works in HTTP.

See https://w3c.github.io/webappsec-secure-contexts/#dom-windoworworkerglobalscope-issecurecontexthttps://w3c.github.io/webappsec-secure-contexts/#dom-windoworworkerglobalscope-issecurecontext and https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/deprecating-powerful-features-on-insecure-origins for more information on why Chrome is CHOOSING to be the only browser that basically does not work on HTTP.

One thing that is impressive: We have only ever come across 2 bugs in Chrome on Android that were not in Chrome on Windows. (And we created a work-a-round for both of them.)² But see note below about Chrome on Safari. We do not support that product –Chrome on Safari is not at all the same product as Chrome on Windows or Chrome on Android.

Note: Chrome on iOS is not 'real' Chrome, it is Chrome on top of WebKit/Safari. This is due to restrictions placed by Apple not the fault of Google.

Legacy Edge, the current and previous version (as of install)

A good browser. We have few problems with it on desktops. Like Chrome and Safari we have memory leak problems with Chrome even when not using our application, and shutting all tabs down once a day isn't really that hard for most users. Unfortunately, on the 'not really Windows' platforms Edge is unusable – so we do not run on Win10 phone Edge for example. But then, our VP development is one of only 18 people³ in the world that own, use and like a Win10 phone!

It is a tossup whether Edge or Safari has the more irritating memory leak problems. But if things start to run really slow – just shut down Edge and start it up again.

We also do not support Edge on Safari or Edge on Chrome/Android, those 'Edge' products are the Edge UI on the underlying engine, and while that may be great for some people, it isn't practical most of the time for applications like ours.

Note: Edge on iOS is not 'real' Edge, it is Edge on top of WebKit/Safari. This is due to restrictions placed by Apple not the fault of Microsoft.

Note: Edge on Adroid is not 'real' Edge, it is Edge on top of Chromium/Chrome. This is due to restrictions placed by Google not the fault of Microsoft.

IE 11, we don't support this browser anymore.

We have tried hard to 'support' it, but it is impossible for many new features to run on it and as of March 2018 we have given up, there is just too much functionality we want you to benefit from and, since IE 11 has not been feature upgraded in years, it has reached the point of being impossible. IE 11 is an 'end of life' product and you should be looking at moving away from it for everything if you haven't already. Microsoft's purpose for IE 11 is for products that were written in the 1990's.

Warning: You really should not use IE 11 for anything. It has known security flaws that Microsoft has said they are not going to fix (because it would break many legacy apps that haven't been upgraded to modern browser standards.) ONLY use IE 11 if you really have no other option at all. Do NOT use IE 11 for MRO, use Chrome or any of the browsers supported by MRO.

Being realistic, most people stuck on platforms that Microsoft only supports IE do have other browser options like Chrome.

Safari, the current and previous version (as of install)

We run fairly well on Safari. The biggest problem is if you want to put lots of data on it.

Don't shoot the messenger. We know that Apple is a perfect company with no bugs (Apple users have told us that any bugs have to be in our software since Apple has no bugs.) But unfortunately, Safari is one of their weakest products. It has several known serious bugs that they admit (the worst, for more than 4 years many companies report it usually fails after asking you if it can give us or any application more database space, so it can only be used with smaller amounts of offlined data, and it has terrible memory leaks most notably with Unicode characters⁴ that case it to restart every few minutes if you make heavy use of Unicode for anything) and it is, according to their marketing department 5 years behind everyone else in terms of features (things like giving the browser access to the video stream, this means our native/software barcode reader works much better on Android than on iOS). They claim the reason is so that they are more stable. Unfortunately, they fail at their objective and it puts them the furthest behind of the major browsers. But all the 'basic' functionality we can usually keep working. There have been several periods of time where Apple broke the browser for a week or two, but usually either:

1. We are able to create a work-a-round quickly or
2. Apple pushes a very quiet update a few days later that fixes the bugs

Unfortunately, with bugs like the browser not expanding space for the database will require a fix by Apple. In the meantime, iOS/Safari products are great for most work order technicians, but they are not good if you want to use a lot of different MCe modules with lots of offline data, but we keep trying.

Safari has surprisingly dropped in 2015/2016 significantly in market share, our only guess is that as Samsung and Huawei have increased share of cell phones that Safari has lost market share as well. As of early 2017 Apple only sells about 33% more cell phones than Huawei.

The good news is, in 2017/2018 despite the VP of Marketing at Apple saying that they try to stay 5 years behind, they caught up with Edge in several key areas that are important to our users, and it appears that the developers have finally decided to ignore the instructions of the Apple VP of Marketing and try to catch up in other areas. As a result, Safari now is much better than it was in the 2016 timeframe.

2020 Update. Sadly though, it took the literally 5 years, 2020, to catch up on everything most other browsers had in 2015.

Ongoing Tested Browsers

We don't officially support any of these browsers, when we find a bug on one, we test on one of our supported browsers to see if the bug is one we need to prioritize.

Opera (desktop)

This browser is only really popular in central Africa. But despite that it is 'well known', just not commonly used, and since it is based on the same base that Chrome is, most of the time when we test on it, we have no problems. While Opera isn't very popular, it often scores well on tests against other browsers – but the biggest feature that people like (compression and filtering for HTTP) only works on HTTP and our application requires HTTPS⁵, and the whole internet is moving towards HTTPS as browsers like Chrome, Firefox and Edge remove more and more features from HTTP. (HTTPS can be thought of as 'Secure HTTP')

Firefox

Firefox used to be one of the best browsers and up to 2014 we supported it, but shortly after their co-founder, ah, left, Firefox started to go downhill, and by mid 2015 we had to stop supporting it. We still test it about once a month, but it fell terribly and quickly, and we just can't support the quality they dropped to. 2020 Update: We test it once a year. It has continued to drop in usage overall and we have given up trying to get it to work.

As of 2017.03, Firefox has significantly improved itself, and passed a ½ hour test, but over the next few months failed from time to time tests that ran perfectly in Safari, Chrome and Edge. As of 2018.03: Not enough for us to support yet, and given their track record, it will take at least a year of constant success before we will be comfortable considering adding it back to our supported list.

Interestingly, in May 2018 they moved ahead of Chrome in terms of blocking old features on HTTP that we use and only supporting them in HTTPS. This may be one reason they have dropped from 11% usage to, in 2020, 4% of the market share.

Untested Browsers

Here are most of the browsers that are currently in 'the top 10' or used to be in 'the top 10' browsers that we don't test (or no longer test on).

Chrome on iOS

This is, due to Apple's requirements, essentially lipstick onto Safari's WebKit engine. This means that it has most of the bugs of Safari in it and on many tests it runs slower and it adds its own bugs that are not in other versions of Chrome. We don't test on it – however, some people use it when Apple temporarily sends a bad upgrade – sometimes the bugs Apple adds to Safari don't make it into the Chrome layer. Note: But in other cases, Chrome 69 on iOS broke because of the Chrome lipstick when they started claiming to us that they were Safari version 0.

Brave on iOS

Essentially the same as the above comments about Chrome on Safari.

Edge on iOS

Essentially the same as the above comments about Chrome on Safari

Edge on Android

Essentially the same as the above comments about Chrome on Safari, except Edge on Android is lipstick on the Chromium engine not 'real' Edge.

IE 10 and before.

These browsers are too old, we don't even attempt to test them anymore. There are so many features we use since IE 11 became the last browser in that Microsoft product line. So there is no point testing them – we know we don't work on them.

Opera (Mobile)

This browser is only really popular in central Africa. We have reports that it works with our software but we don't test with it. Over a 2 year period from 2015 to 2017 it rose from 3 to 4% use, so it may someday be a major player – or it may stay down in the least used list. We don't test with it.

UC

This browser is only really popular in India. We have no experience with it and no reports of any of our customers or even our affiliates in India attempting to use it. We don't test it.

Sea Monkey

This browser was an offshoot of Firefox that includes an office suite. We do not test with it. It used to make the top 10 list, but it has fallen in popularity and we no longer test with it.

Iron

We have no experience with this. But it makes the 'top 10' browser list – at considerably less than 1% total use.

Phantom

We have no experience with this. But it makes the 'top 10' browser list – at considerably less than 1% total use.

Various vendor specific 'Android' browsers

These would be browsers each phone comes with that was based on the so called Android browser. We used to try to run on them, but the cell phone and telco companies refuse to keep them up to date or even just fix bugs, and basically most people have abandoned them for Chrome, so the telco's can't make money sticking stuff in your face you don't want anymore, so they have even less incentive to keep them working. We don't test on them anymore and last we checked, we didn't run on them.

We wanted to support 'this' browser as the manufacturer default – the same reason we support Edge and, well Safari is the only choice really on an Apple. And even though Edge, IE and Safari are very low in total number of users, for some companies that lock out anything other than the 'official' browser, we choose to support them.

Having said that, the Android browser is so poor quality we are unable to do that. And it doesn't really matter how much of the lack of quality is due to Google and how much is due to the telco's or the phone manufacturers, the end result is that you need to use a working browser, and that likely means today that you need to use Chrome on Android.

Blackberry

How fast the mighty fall. We used to run on some of them. But they stopped keeping up with the industry, and as everyone knows, basically they disappeared. We do not test on Blackberry and the last time we did, we did not work on them.⁶

Netscape Navigator

The owners of Maintenance Connection Canada used Netscape Navigator as their very first browser, in 1994 before it was version 1.0 and we had a web site pushing dynamic data to it, and later other browsers, from a database⁷. It ran for 10 years only rebooting the Windows NT 4.0 server once – when it was moved to a building 52 blocks away.) Depending on how you look at it – Netscape Navigator became FireFox in 1998 (Codenamed Phoenix–rising from the Netscape ashes) or it died in February 2008.

http://gs.statcounter.com/

The above chart shows browsers down to 0.005% of world market. To put 0.005% in perspective: Microsoft's Edge Browser as of early 2018 had less than 2% (1.98%) of the world market.

And then there are the browsers that are less than 0.001%

The following is a list of browsers that customers have told us they have tried and they failed:

Zebra Enterprise Browser, appears to use the standard⁸ (very out dated) WebKit.

Ivanti's Industrial Browser

It is very hard, and since none have succeeded, perhaps better to say impossible, for companies that have specialized browsers to keep them 'up to date'. In some cases, like Zebra, even relying on Standard WebKit to not be more than a few years behind. Some of these browsers have special features – they've implemented things like barcode reading done in a way that only their product does. (Both our barcode reading methods are based on standard features in modern browsers, not custom features), and features like locking the browser down to one URL (or better you could use a proxy server to do the same thing – and use standard solutions rather than a custom browser that is outdated in so many ways.)