I work with an interactive web portal that has a few single-page apps and complex html structure. The aim is to support all browsers that our customers use. We have implemented responsive web design to handle mobile platforms. We test on multiple platforms (mobile and desktop) to make sure that it works everywhere.

I recognise that this is a goal that is difficult to reach, especially for customers that use uncommon browsers. However, the browser (or browsers) that has given us the most grief lately is the native browser on Android phones and tablets. We suffer copied canvases, strange phenomena where the user cannot click on html elements that are close to the edge of the screen, formatting issues that are difficult to understand and/or fix, and other things.

Also, debugging on the native browser is cumbersome since you can’t easily log from javascript using console.log.

My thought is basically that I want to ignore the native Android browser while testing, and bugs that show up only on the native Android browser in production will not get fixed. Is that a bad thing? Do people in general expect to be able to use their native Android browser to handle advanced web pages? I realize that there are a lot of Android users about, but perhaps they’re not as used to working with complex web sites compared to other platforms? Will users understand if we recommend them to install Chrome to be able to use parts of our web site?