Extended browser support

I'd propose ZC team to focus on browser support, now limited to Firefox 3.0+ and IE 7 + . I was in situation to ask a client to put a notice for the visitors of his website to use only IE or Firefox, knowing that almost half of his visitors use Chrome or Safari, and this because the solution I provided in ZC does not work with these browsers.

More than that, Firefox will be upgraded in a few months to the version 3.5, it will be a major upgrade, and if you are a developer and use latest beta builds, you'll have some problems with some parts of the script builder and even with the (new) code editor. If all will remain the same, probably when in 2-3 months Firefox 3.5 will be launched, the developers will not be able to use the much improved browser because it will be not supported by ZC.

For a long time I read "ZC was tested only with IE and FF" (and, I'll add, even with those browsers not well enough tested). The problem is that if ZC team will continue to make the new features only for IE and the actual version of FF which will soon become history (because the new Firefox version will mean a major change and improvement), the promised extended browser support will become more and more difficult to achieve. The more complex ZC platform will become, it will much more painful to change it in order to extend browser compatibility support. I even think that ZC team should be focused mainly of the bug fixes and browser compatibility support (at least for the browsers using Webkit rendering engine and the new javascript engines such as TraceMonkey and V8), before developing new features.

The features proposed by Gaev and Binaryspinner are great, but I think that the extended browsers support will need to be achieved before these features to be implemented. And probably ZC team should change something in the strategy of development and testing in order to be able to face the rapid development from the browsers market.

George