Browser support depends on what features and web APIs you need.
Security as a baseline
Well, considering that SSL v2 and v3 are insecure, and TLS 1.0 and 1.1 are weak too, we don't support any of those encryption protocols on our web-servers. The baseline is browsers supporting TLS version 1.2 or newer.Internet Explorer 8-10 can support TLSv1.2, but it is disabled by default.
Modern web features
To name just a few interesting features, that may affect your project:- CSS Grid, for page layout and minor parts too.
- WebP, a new-ish image file format, with better compression, resulting in smaller files.
- WOFF2, is a web-font file format, with brotli compression, resulting in smaller files.
Features by browser version
| Desktop Browsers | TLSv1.2 | CSS Grid | WebP | WOFF2 |
| Chrome | 30 | 58 | 32 | 36 |
| Edge | 12 | 16 | 18 | 14 |
| Firefox | 27 | 54 (52-53) | 65 | 39 |
| Internet Explorer * | 11 (8-10) | - | - | - |
| Opera | 17 | 44 | 19 | 23 |
| Safari (Mac OS) | 7 (OS X 10.9) | 10.1 | 14 (macOs 11) | 12 |
| Mobile browsers | ||||
| Android | 4.4.2 | 57 | 4.2 | 36 |
| Internet Explorer (Win Phone 8.1) | 11 | - | - | - |
| Safari iOS | 5 | 10.3 | 14 | 10 |
*) Internet Explorer 11 was retired and went out of Microsoft support on June 15, 2022. You probably don't need to support it any more.
Firefox 52 is the last 32 bit version. Users with old 32 bit PCs may be stuck on that version.
Claiming that Internet Explorer 11 has no grid support, is not entirely true. The IE-team pioneered the Grid layout standard, but didn't keep up with the developing standard, and thus IE11 is stuck with a non-standard implementation, just like the first versions of Edge.
ES6 or any of the new Javascript APIs may be important too. It depends on your application. Feel free to extent the table above, with new columns of features, that is important in your project.
Conclusion
Browser support is becoming less of a concern, as Internet Explorer is finally considered unsupported, and the other browsers are auto-updated. But, you still need to keep an eye on Safari and Firefox, as they tend to lack a little behind on certain features.Sources
- https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/clients.html
- https://caniuse.com/css-grid
- https://caniuse.com/webp
- https://caniuse.com/woff2
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