Browser support for ArcGIS API for JavaScript?

Question

Can anyone give me information or a good pointer on browser version support in the ESRI ArcGIS JavaScript API v2.4?

I can't find much in their documentation beyond changes in support for specific browsers in each API version's "What's New".

I have seen that the API uses SVG for some client-side rendering, which must affect cross-browser support. Beyond this I imagine there are some peculiarities for older versions of all major browsers.

I will most likely be targeting recent versions of desktop-based browsers in my upcoming project but I would like to know any issues in advance as we are probably going with JavaScript over Silverlight specifically for the wider platform support.

Answer 1

I work on the JS API team and honestly, we could do a better job of documenting this. That being said, we support the browsers supported by the version of dojo we're using. The lastest versions of ArcGIS JS API (2.3 and 2.4) use dojo 1.6.1. The dojo 1.6 release notes list the supported browsers: http://docs.dojocampus.org/releasenotes/1.6

The only caveat is that we don't really go out of our way to support IE6 these days.

There's also the list of supported browsers for the 2.0 release of the Web APIs: http://resources.arcgis.com/content/webapis/2.0/system-requirements The only big update to that is that we support IE9 at v2.3 and beyond.

Regarding SVG, this is one of the big reasons we use dojo. Dojo's gfx module abstracts away browser differences so we can use SVG in browsers that support it but fall back to alternative technologies (VML for IE < 9; Canvas for android) when necessary.

• tomfumb: That's fantastic thanks Derek. I didn't know Dojo was capable of levelling browsers on client-rendered graphics. I'd be interested to see the variations in performance (e.g. zoom, pan, click events) across browsers but this is something I could easily test myself. If anything I think there's merit in going out of your way to NOT support IE6 so that we might someday remove that vile beast from the market (with IE7 soon to follow).
• Derek Swingley: Glad to help! Ideally, we could get rid of IE 6 - 8 all at once...
• Derek Swingley: Also, two simple apps I did to mess around with graphics performance: servicesbeta.esri.com/demos/graphics-performance/points.html and servicesbeta.esri.com/demos/graphics-performance/polys.html
• D.E.Wright: @Derek, does that mean you will or won't support a IE6 issue?
• tomfumb: why did I have to try with 50,000 features??? Thanks very much for these