Why do some websites only work on certain browsers? Sometimes it’s only safari or sometimes anything but safari
In: Technology
When you are accessing a website, what really happens is your browser download some sort of recipe that the browser can follow to create the website.
The problem is, different browsers are created by different people. And when the recipe says “put just enough salt”. They interpret it differently. And some browser doesn’t even know what salt is. That’s why.
Oh yeah, sometimes the recipe owner only let a certain browser to use their recipe because they only test it in that certain browser. It could work on other browser but they don’t want to take the risk because they do no testing on that.
A web browser is a program on your computer that reads instructions, and uses them to draw things onto your screen. You can send a web browser any instructions you like, but it can only correctly draw using the instructions it knows. If a browser hasn’t been programmed to know what to do when it reads a certain instruction, that functionality is unsupported in that browser.
Web browsers are competing products, so each company is trying to add more features to their own browser. Sometimes they even create new instructions that only work in their browser, and no one else’s. This is what Apple has done occasionally with Safari.
There are standards for what browsers should do, but each browser is free to interpret those standards as they see fit. They might handle some things slightly differently or they might not bother implementing something altogether.
When developers create a website they will often work with a particular browser. Good developers will test on all browsers to make sure it works but a lot of developers don’t bother.
Because the browsers don’t all behave exactly the same and so the developer has to write code that will work in all the browsers that they want to support. There is no guarantee that browsers the developer doesn’t bother supporting will work correctly the website.
Sometimes the website will use really old code and only some browsers are designed to run this old code. Internet Explorer is the general example of a browser that both runs a lot of old code that wouldn’t work in Chrome and for doing things different from other browsers.
Netflix would only stream 1080p HD video in browsers that supported a special feature that only Edge supported.
Apple used to stream their keynotes that only worked in Safari because of the video format there were using only worked in Safari.
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