Cross Browser Support in SharePoint 2007

In this morning's session, one of the questions that BillG could have answered better was about cross-browser support. Simply put, it's not that strong in SPS / WSS 2003, and every admin with Mac or public clients to support wants to know what will be different.

The answer is that cross-browser support will be great. The presentation layer is no longer a SharePoint thing, it's an ASP.Net thing and with v2 (aka Whidbey), ASP.Net does a fantastic job of supporting browsers other than MSIE. Pop open any site hosted with it (http://www.asp.net/) and see how it behaves. Another big step forward is support of forms authentication - Safari was the only other browser that supported NTLM but now that's becoming a non-issue. Again, this is an ASP.Net advance that SharePoint can simply take advantage of. Ditto support for mobile devices.

AJAX in fact is dividing industry standards all over again with proprietary DHTML features. If anything, IE7 is coming back in from the cold by supporting core standards, and it's the other guys coming up with non-standard ways to do things. That makes true cross-browser AJAX support difficult for the Atlas guys, given their tacit goal of making all the team's products cross-browser. Decisions have to be made at some point, and people on either side of the line will criticise where that line is drawn; so inform yourself and at least understand why the line is where it is.

I'll leave you with a specific example. In WSS v2, you have drag and drop Web Part layout. At PDC 2005 we saw better-organized fly-out menus in WSS v3 listing web parts, but drag and drop wasn't there. Why not? Because you can't provide a great, consistent experience in all browsers. If that's the sort of sacrifice you need to make for this to work, I'm all for it. For the SharePoint team to now bring drag and drop back, they would need to branch from the ASP.Net way of doing things, and personally I hope they don't create another SharePoint-ism at the presentation layer by doing so. But that's just me. What do you think?