Hi Bubble community,
Revamping our responsive engine is one of our current high-priority projects. While the current responsive editor works and users can achieve the responsive designs they want, we know this is a common pain point - especially for newer users to learn - and we want to do better. Rolling this feature out has a few implications, one of which is browser support.
Upcoming Browser Support Policy
The project is in the early stages but under way. As a preview, the first phase will involve shifting Bubble apps to the modern web technologies of CSS Flexbox and CSS Grid, the current state of the art. Not only will this unlock more powerful design capabilities both sooner and later, but upon rollout it should also represent a performance gain for page loads, a performance improvement when showing / hiding elements, better compatibility with custom CSS, and more.
However, these frameworks are not supported on certain older browsers, so we also wanted to take this opportunity to clarify what our official browser support policies are. This is about which browsers we support for the end-user experience, i.e. when an app is running in runmode. The current proposal of the policy is:
- Bubble officially supports Edge, Firefox, Chrome and Safari on web and mobile web
- We encourage end-users to upgrade these browsers to the latest version widely available. Note that the supported browsers come with auto-update functionality; this is relevant in this case because when a new version of a browser breaks something, there will often be a fast follow-up version that fixes that bug
- With the supported browsers, we will consider any bugs that only affect older versions of those browsers, but we do not guarantee we will fix them
- In addition, if it’s a bug specific to one of these browsers when run on a much older operating system version, we will certainly triage the bug but do not guarantee that we will fix it
In case you’re curious, here’s a useful link to data about browser usage: https://caniuse.com/usage-table
We are publicizing this to allow for any comments and so that you can make any desired preparations. We intend for the policy to go into effect when the new responsive engine becomes available to everybody (i.e. at the start of our usual public beta rollout phase), which will be later this year (not before Q2 for sure).
About the new responsive system
You might also be curious how the rollout of the responsive engine will be handled: this will be a “breaking change” for Bubble. Like Bubble did when the current responsive engine rolled out several years ago, apps will have the option of staying on the current responsive engine for a very long time into the future. App creators will have the option of “converting” their apps to the new responsive engine. Although we’ll offer an attempted translation from current to new responsive system, it’s unlikely we’ll be able to get it 100% correct, so you’ll want to check and make any needed tweaks before deploying to live.
To call things out specifically - you’ll note, for example, that Internet Explorer is not in our list of officially supported browsers in the new policy. Indeed, even Microsoft has stopped supporting IE! Per the above, if it’s important to your app to continue supporting IE end-users, you have the option of staying on the current system for an indefinite time into the future.
It’s worth noting that when we transition to the new responsive engine, it’s not that everything will suddenly stop working on IE or older versions of common browsers. For example, IE specifically doesn’t support CSS Grid, which would only apply to your app if you use certain repeating group features involving CSS Grid. So, another alternative you have for supporting IE end-users is to use the new responsive engine but avoid the CSS Grid-specific features - but note that any bugs encountered with IE will be outside our official support policy above.
This won’t take place until later this year (at least a few months from now) and even then nothing should break for your app upon rollout. Let us know if you have any questions or concerns!
Best,
Allen