We been working on a new project which has a very short time line and several people are involved adding to the complexity of the project. The application calls for lectures being streamed over the web utilizing the same technology we use for our online lectures which takes some of the pressure away since the system has been tested and it is a scalable application.

What is this all about? well, today while coming up with some technical requirements for the project one of my colleagues said we should only support Internet Explorer. I walked in late to the meeting and caught him mid-sentence so I asked what that was for since our applications are 100% cross-browser. Now, to his credit, this is an application that used to require IE as its only player but the version we are running these days don’t have this limitation. I argued that we should not require IE for our users when the application also supports Firefox and Safari.

His response to listing IE as the only supported browser was to limit the number of variables when we have to deal with technical support questions. A valid argument but it is not 1991 anymore and we need to make sure that we support all of our users not just that use a specific platform. Specially when the technical choices we have made support multiple platforms. I agreed to take all issues with non-IE browsers but I know that won’t be a problem. I would be far more concerned about the user having the proper media player installed and updated than having the proper browser.