Pattern 10: Two-year-old browser **
 AKA:

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Your site is public. You are using tools to AUTOMATE TESTING (6) You want as many people as possible to be able to access your site and use all its features. However...

Many users do not have the latest software and have underpowered hardware. Browsers vary widely in what they support: Javascript, plug-ins, flash, frames, etc. One browser (which will remain nameless) even exhibits this variability from version to version. To make things worse, using recent features on underpowered hardware may lead to unacceptable response times.

Therefore

Test your pages against all versions of all known browsers in versions up to 2 years old. Repeat the tests on ten-year-old hardware. AUTOMATE TESTING (6) of this kind where possible.

As a consequence of this phenomenon, there should be NO FRAMES ON PUBLIC SITES (27).

Contributors and sources
Nielsen (2000)

Discussion - forces - known uses

This pattern applies only to public sites since intranet users can be provided with a known set of browsers by their employers.
Nielsen (2000) recommends that you keep a collection of all the major version of all well-known browsers for test purposes.
It is fairly easy to discover statistics on which browsers people are actually using from the web logs. However, these statistics do not guarantee that a different browser won’t be used by someone tomorrow. Better to be safe than sorry!

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