Gotta be Google Chrome! (????)

[ChrisGreaves]

From a friend: Hi Chris, I'm going crazy!!!!! I'm trying to do courses online, but I need google chrome as my default browser and I can't make that happen! Could you please help me?

I emailed a reply "yes", and then phoned her. By now she had got Chrome installed as her default browser.

In conversation I said that "Any public online system that depends on one browser is a stupid system" or words to that effect.
Banking, Airline reservations, Libraries, News sites, Massive stores, Eileen's Lounge etc. If anyone tells you that their site works ONLY with Chrome, or only with the LATEST Firefox, or only with any other browser, then they are talking rubbish.

In the end it turned out that these online courses were put on by hubby's firm, so I figured that (a) the Help desk was reading from a script ("Clear your cache, run Windows 11, ...") or (b) they were so cheap that they had hired someone like Chris Greaves who doesn't have a clue about setting up web sites.

What's your take on this. Do you know of ANY public sites that run truly with only one specified browser??

Thanks, Chris

[BobH]

To answer your question, I do not know of any such PUBLIC sites. Having said that I must define what I mean by public. Some web pages are built for and intended to be used only by a small audience; however, nothing stops anyone in the world including a few million bots from pointing browsers in their direction. By 'public' I mean web sites intended for wide, unlimited audiences.

I have written and hosted and administered a couple of non-public web sites in the past hosted by GoDaddy. I am not a web site guru by any means, however. There are many different browsers out there; more than I had imagined. I considered my sites successful if they served pages successfully in Firefox, Safari, and Google Chrome. I simply lacked the resources to extend support beyond those browsers or beyond Windows and iOS platforms believing that anyone using an implementation of Linux would be technically capable to overcome issues I caused.

This is a great question. I think every web site should have a public proclamation prominently displayed telling users what operating systems and what browsers are supported and that all others are the user's responsibility.

I wonder what the admins' preferences here at Eileen's Lounge are for them.

[HansV]

This might have been true in the past - the now defunct Internet Explorer had a different DOM (Domain Object Model) than other browsers. I know of a web application that used specific properties of that DOM, so it ran only on Internet Explorer.
Nowadays, browsers are much more compatible.

[stuck]

I also knew of a ('mission critical') process at work where Internet Explorer was required in order to get something to work and that was as recent as three years ago. I'm retired now so I don't know what happened when that process was due to crop up again this spring.

Ken