Force users to use Google Chrome

Question

I have a very selected group of users on my web application. Not everyone can just visit the website, and if they do they will need login information to see anything but the login box. The users have to contact in order to get an account.

I am almost complete with my application, and it is not so friendly with ie, and has a few glitches with firefox. It works perfect with safari and chrome.

Now, since I'm only going to have 100-200 users, is it OK to force users to use either safari or chrome?

Answer 1

It's never a good idea.

Chrome and Firefox (and for some feature IE10+ as well) have an excellent support of recent standard. One thing that could produce differents results is the different interpretations of errors (not-closed html tag, use of not standard calls or prefixes -webkit-)

So if you have some error (visual or logic) it's reasonable to think that the problem is not Firefox or IE, but it's your code, and for pure luck it works on chrome.

Before thinking your proposal, try to understand why your app does not works perfectly in FF and Chrome. If it's REALLY impossible to fix all errors (for time, or Megabytes of refactoring), well... you could only to suggest the best browser. Nothing more...

Answer 2

As correctly noted by others, you should not demand that the users use a specific application to visit your website (even a Chromium user may visit your website from different devices with different browsers).

In general, you should check your website's rendering on all major browsers (Firefox, Chromium, IE, Safari, Opera). If you use a specific new technology that is unsupported by some browsers, you should have your design gracefully degrade.

In addition to the explanations of others before me, I guess that one of the things that fail to work properly could also be HTML5/CSS3 techniques. If that is the case, check this Q&A and also take a look at conditional comments.

Answer 3

Well it isn't great to force a user to user a certain application, in some instances they may not be able to install that application (at work, corporate restrictions etc). What if they are on a platform that doesn't support Chrome? You may also come off as unprofessional/lazy greeting users with a 'Chrome of GTFO' sort of message.

One thing you can do that could make your app work fine in IE is to advocate the use of Chrome Frame, otherwise, if you want to provide the best service to your customers, you should make your web app work across all browsers.

Answer 4

You should always make web apps or websites that are compatible with all browsers. You should try making such an application a litter simply because such applications can be properly run on IE. You could get programming help on stackoverflow.com. Even I've got my website not showing a few CSS3 features properly, it doesn't matter because the text is readable, but still I alert them to use another browser in javascript like this:

function load(){                
var browserName=navigator.appName; 
            if (browserName=="Microsoft Internet Explorer")
            {
                alert("To view the website proprly, use a modern browser like Google Chrome, Safari, Mozilla Firefox and Opera. To download Chrome for, go to - http://www.google.com/ and download Chrome.");
            }
}

load happens on body onload.