Browser Support
The Library of Virginia’s (LVA) web resources are available to viewers across the internet, anywhere in the world, using a wide variety of web browsers. These web browsers are developed by a number of different organizations with a variety of motives (some commercial), each of which interpret the source code used to produce web pages slightly differently. As a result, any single web page may not be uniformly rendered by all web browsers, to produce a consistent user experience as intended by the producer.
Our web standards exist so as to produce web resources that can be viewed (as consistently as can reasonably be achieved) by the greatest number of people possible. As outlined by W3C standards we separate content and styling whenever possible utilizing HTML and CSS. Still web browsers employ varying degrees of compliance to W3C web standards and consequently we often need to employ ‘hacks’ and ‘work-arounds’ to provide a standard or consistent end product. Any additional effort to employ these hacks and work-arounds cost additional time and money for supporting older, less standards-compliant browsers which also account for a smaller percentage of our users. While we do recommend updating your browser regularly for compliancy as well as security reasons the LVA does not provide any service that gives a competitive advantage to any particular product.
Out list of supported browsers does not include all browser that will work with LVA web resources only those that have been and are continually tested. The list of browsers is also in regards to when installed in a Windows, Macintosh or Linux/Unix based operating system. Even though most LVA web resources work on mobile browsers at this time the LVA does not have the resources to build or support web resources specifically for PDA's, phones and other mobile devices.
Browsers
- Internet Explorer 9, 10, 11
- Firefox 35, 36, 37
- Chrome Latest Version†
- Opera 9.5.x, 9.6.x, 10.x
- Safari 3.x, 4.x
† Chrome Versions auto update without user intervention, so the supported version is the most recent non-beta version.
Helpful Definitions:
- HTML: Hyper Text Markup Language, a set of tags and rules used to create media readable by web browser.
- CSS: Cascading Style Sheets, is a style sheet language used to instruct a browser how to stylize a page.
- Web Browser: A software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web.
- Hack: Code applied to a page that is not valid but generates a desired effect in one or multiple specific browser(s).
- Work-Around: Code applied to a page that is valid that generates a desired effect in one or multiple specific browser(s).
