Choosing A Browser For Optimising Your b-Hive Experience

TL:DR (too long, didn’t read) – Buttercups recommends Google Chrome to optimise your b-Hive Experience!

Back in the day the choice of what web browser to use was pretty simple. Namely because there wasn’t much choice! Microsoft had the emerging market nailed down by requiring that Internet Explorer was pre-installed on all new PCs and, to be honest, most people were happy with that.

This was fine, as the internet at the time wasn’t very complicated - just text, the odd image and a few different styles were needed. However, we soon began to demand much more from our websites to satisfy our increasing need to consume media, games and ever more complicated interactivity. Internet standards developed in order to meet this need to the point where we can now create impressive app-like experiences within the browser itself. 

Over the years different web browsers have emerged which each interpret these internet standards slightly differently, or adopt them at different rates. We now have Edge, Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari, as well as good old Internet Explorer. We have also witnessed the mobile revolution and an explosion of different devices that we consume content on – meaning we need to provide the same user experience but often with slower internet speeds and less screen space.

This presents a problem for all web developers who want to develop sites using the latest technologies and this includes us here at Buttercups too. Through the b-Hive, we are now beginning to develop our course content natively within the web browser and we use the latest standards and internet technologies to make our courses as media-rich, interactive and accessible as possible with a great user experience. However, it can also sometimes provide situations where the experience is better on one browser over another.

The courses we develop in the b-Hive will always be available across all supported web browsers – and we work hard to make sure that will always be the case. However, whilst developing we have found that Google Chrome consistently out performs the other web browsers in terms of faster page load times, styling and consistency, and is simply just a smoother experience in general. Therefore, although the other web browsers work just fine, we would recommend that Google Chrome is used when accessing your courses on the b-Hive for the best user experience.

For any questions on this or feedback, feel free to comment below.