Today's release of Firefox 3 seemed like a good time to re-raise the issue of browser support and Salesforce.

Back in August 2007, I posted about Salesforce browser usage.  At that time, Internet Explorer 6.0 usage represented about 65% of total browser logins, or just about 2 of every 3 users.

Since August, we’ve seen browser usage of our service change fairly dramatically. 

You can see that IE7 usage has grown to around one-third of all users.  And Firefox 2.0 usage has increased dramatically, to 14% of all users.

You can also see that IE6 usage has dropped a fair amount as users have upgraded or switched browsers.  But more than half of all users still use IE6 when accessing Salesforce.

Why do we pay attention to browser usage?  One reason is that recently we embarked on efforts to build the next-generation UI of Salesforce, which will include using JavaScript and other technologies that are, frankly, a challenge for IE6 to handle.

In addition to working on next-generation UI, we frequently wrestle with random, difficult-to-reproduce, hard-to-fix bugs in IE6.  And while we admittedly love a challenge…working around bugs in older browsers isn't really how we want to spend our time.  In fact, investigating and coming up with solutions for bugs that appear only in IE6 robs us of time we would rather spend on new feature development, which is what we love doing and where we believe our customers would also prefer we focus our efforts.

Rest assured, we are not planning to de-support IE6 any time soon.  IE6 is still far too heavily used by our customer base, and upgrading to IE7 or switching to another browser is too much to ask in the short-term.

However, as time goes by and more of our users upgrade to IE7 or switch to other browsers like Firefox and Safari, we move closer to the day when we will drop official support for IE6.

Another factor to consider is that Microsoft has already released a beta version of Internet Explorer 8, with a generally available release some time in the next few months (who knows?).

Given all of this, we at salesforce.com have been contemplating how we can move away from IE6 support.

Are we going to de-support IE6 in a single release?  No, absolutely not.

But our current thinking is that our next-generation UI enhancements, to be released starting later this year, will not be supported on IE6.

This does not mean you could not use IE6 with Salesforce.  However, it would mean that you would not have access to UI enhancements unless you upgraded to IE7 or switched to another supported browser like Firefox or Safari.

Thoughts on this post?  If you use IE6, does your company have plans to upgrade its users in the coming year?  Leave a comment and let us know what you think.

Share and Enjoy,

Jerry Sherman
salesforce.com

P.S. With regard to Firefox 3 support:  We usually target official support for major browser releases within 90 days of the initial release. Overall, we rarely see critical issues with Firefox, even from one major release to another.  (I'm actually using FF3 right now to type this post and am logged into Salesforce in another tab.)

If you decide to try out Firefox 3, you will probably see some minor issues here and there--usually small cosmetic display problems.  But in general it should work well with Salesforce.  If you see anything more substantial, please tell us!