Originally Posted by
andrew4life Do note that just because a webpage "says" you are using a unsupported browser, doesn't necessarily mean it won't work properly.
The problem is with the number of different browsers that are available, and the different ways that everyone parses an HTML page, they pages will look different from browser to browser. So what web programmers do, is they make a webpage that works for IE7, then one for IE8, then one for IE9, then another for FF, then for Chrome. Sometimes, just very small snippets of code that might make the webpage work differently. Obviously they can't make one for every single browser out there so if they detect an unknown browser, they will display a message.
Now, here is one caveat where having better HTML5 compatibility doesn't help. If the most popular browser is IE9, and FF, web programmers might make their webpage work for IE9 and FF only and then just leave it at that. So if you are using Playbook browser, it might not work correctly since the webpage was only checked on IE and FF. This actually used to be a MAJOR problem because many people were using old IE browsers, so web programmers had to make sure their code accounted for the way older browsers parsed, except the older browsers had terrible parsing rules. So if you code it according to HTML, CSS, PHP, ASPX, etc standards, it actually won't work. Stupid eh? Then there are things like using different content providers like apple quicktime, adobe flash, microsoft silverlight, html5, some of which are proprietory.
Conclusion, not all problems are RIM's fault. Many times they are due to the web programmers that are trying to make sure content is delivered to as many clients as possible as quick as possible.