Canvas compatibility

[Jackolantern]

I have been doing some heavy thinking about the display technology to use for a game project I am working on that will require fairly low-requirement real-time animation. The decision is between DOM and Canvas rendering. Both of them I believe would have the performance to do this, but the real question is compatibility. The game is aimed to be fairly casual, and I would want it to be playable by a majority of people on any browser (including their browser at work that they likely have no control over updating).

I am having a hard time finding up-to-date statistics on who is using what browser at work. Obviously at home most people can run Canvas content, and most people today seem to be using Chrome (with a heavy skew in casual-to-hardcore gamers towards more modern browsers). But what do you think about what businesses are using today? IE still owns a lot of the business environment, and only the most recent IEs are Canvas-capable.

Older browsers is where DOM manipulation excels, and even early browsers that have not been updated since the early days of Canvas support could possibly run DOM with better performance. But on the other hand, I am worried about growth of the game later, and possibly hitting a point where the game can't grow further due to DOM display holding it back.

[a_bertrand]

IE 10+ do support canvas which can be installed on 7 without problem. I would say most do have at least IE 10, some sadly still 9 or less.

If you want for best compatibility go for DOM, yet you can't do a lot of the nice tricks you could do with canvas. I would personally take the canvas road.

[Jackolantern]

Thanks for the info! Do you happen to know what the highest version of IE that works on XP? Hopefully the end of support for XP will be a final nail in the coffin of it for the businesses who haven't upgraded, since I think only up to IE 8 can be installed on XP.

I have actually gotten re-interested in Enchant.js, which I believe can auto-detect the client capabilities, and run the game in either DOM or Canvas. It is probably at least worth a look.

[hallsofvallhalla]

IE8 is the highest version for XP. and yes it is missing so many features and has TONS of issues with current APIs out there.

Where I work we have some XP machines in the training rooms and they all have IE8. Google APIs, Bootstrap, and a few other libraries all break.

[Jackolantern]

Thanks Halls! That is what I thought Since I don't have access to IE 8, maybe it is kind of silly to make major architectural decisions based on being able to run on a browser I can't test on haha

Has anyone ever seen business-only browser market shares? You really can't tell based on the overall market shares.

[hallsofvallhalla]

I have not but have worked for some major corps and they all still use and demand IE. My previous company had 40,000 agents and all using IE. Only IT could have chrome or FF. My current company is the same way. 1,000 employees using IE.

[Jackolantern]

Yeah, IE is definitely the browser of business. But the version is really what I am after. A lot of it can be directly extrapolated from Windows version market share in business, which does have better stats out there. Companies who use XP, like was already mentioned, are no higher than IE 8. If they have Windows 7, they may have IE 9 or 10, I believe. No idea on Vista (which I don't think ever became popular in the corporate world).

[hallsofvallhalla]

It will not be an issue here quite soon as with XP no longer supported it has become a PCI compliance thing for most companies. They have to upgrade.

[Jackolantern]

I saw that. About damn time lol