SharePoint Browsers Compatibility
SharePoint, being a web application, is not dependant on the platform the user is running on. The only requirement is a web browser, capable of cooperating with SharePoint sites and pages. Since SharePoint is a collaborative technology oriented mostly towards the corporate environment, it is important to review the browsers being used prior to the implementation.
This brings up a fairly important question: Which browsers are compatible with SharePoint features? Microsoft divides commonly used web browsers by this criterion into two levels: Level 1 and Level 2:
- Level 1 browsers take advantage of ActiveX features and offer the richest user experience. They provide the complete functionality of all SharePoint sites and all the features.
- Level 2 browsers allow only the basic functionality, consisted of reading and writing SharePoint sites. Since there is no ActiveX support, the user experience is notably reduced.
The browsers that do not belong to any of the two levels are incompatible with Microsoft SharePoint.
Level 1 browsers are Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7. They are the only ones that provide users with the full benefits of SharePoint implementation and integration. They cooperate well with all applications from Microsoft Office suite, especially the 2007 edition, which extends the capabilities of the SharePoint even further.
Level 2 browsers, however, do not. The browsers that belong to this group are Mozilla Firefox 1.5+, Safari 2.0, Mozilla 1.7, Netscape Navigator 7.2 and Netscape Navigator 8.1. As stated before, these browsers are capable of only the basic operations involved with SharePoint sites, which is really not much. There is no extension to Microsoft Office, no drop-down menus, no multiple files upload and so on.
It is obvious that the users are pretty much bound to the choice of Internet Explorer, no matter how high or low their demands for the SharePoint features are. Furthermore, Internet Explorer runs only on Microsoft Windows, which ties the users to that platform as well. The basic idea of the web applications is to be platform-free, which doesn’t seem to be the case here. This appears to be an issue of a considerable importance.
Prior versions of Microsoft SharePoint Services and Microsoft SharePoint Office Server, the current being the 2007 edition, had no compatibility with browsers other than Internet Explorer whatsoever. We can only hope, and we should hope, that these cross-platform and browser compatibility issues will be completely resolved in the future.
For detailed browser compatibility with SharePoint, you might be interested in:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263526.aspx
http://www.utexas.edu/its/sharepoint/answers/ts_browser.php
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