HTML5 and Browser Support

All the leading browsers—Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera Software’s Opera, Apple Safari, and Microsoft IE—support HTML5 in varying degrees. These days, most browsers release updated versions frequently, and HTML5 support improves in each new version. IE is lagging slightly behind as far as the frequency of new releases is concerned, but IE9 does support several HTML5 features.

As a good programming practice, you should always test your Web Forms, views, and plain HTML pages in the browser you’re targeting. There are two ways to check whether the target browser supports a specific HTML5 feature:

• Statically at development time
• Dynamically at runtime

Checking for HTML5 Support Statically
With this approach, you manually ensure that the features used in your web pages are supported by your
target browser. You can get help from any of the online utilities that tell you whether a specific browser
version supports certain HTML5 features. Consider, for example, http://html5test.com, which provides a
nice way to detect browser support for HTML5. Figure 1-6 shows the home page of the HTML5 test site
displaying the HTML5 support score for the browser being used to view the site.