A number of Buzzword Preview testers have asked us to support some of the newer browsers such as Opera, Camino, K-Meleon, Shiira, or Safari 3.0 (currently in beta). The question arises from the observation that most of these are based on the same engines as the browsers we already support, so why don’t we support these others as well?
We actually have to do a lot of work behind the scenes to make keyboard handling and system clipboard import/export function correctly, and we have to do this a bit differently for each browser, even those that are based on the same underlying engine. We have focused so far on the most popular browsers, with the goal of making sure that every user, whether on Windows or Mac, has two supported browsers from which to choose.
The trade off is that we need to use developer and tester hours to support each browser. These are the same hours that we can also use to develop and test features like Spell Check and File Import/Export. It’s a matter of prioritization, and our thinking is that since we know that everyone has Internet Explorer, Safari, or Firefox available to them, we’ll support those for now.