Paul Hammant's Blog: SVG Support in Browsers Today

Summary: Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is OK in the latest browsers, but there are inconsistencies. If the last mile were closed, then bloggers like me would appreciate the speed improvement (and scaling) for end-users.

Last week’s blog entry used SVGs instead of PNGs for the images, and here are clips of that so we can compare in all browsers (SVG made in OmniGraffle).

Chrome

It looks great, on Chrome (as I intended in OmniGraffle):

Firefox

The diagram is OK in Firefox, but text not at the bottom is not. Particularly the “r” and “e” of “are” smushed together:

Safari

Safari is close to OK, but some of the text in the boxes is inexplicably ghosted:

Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8

They’re really poor, and there’s no point showing pictures. Microsoft is racing to kill them in the enterprise, and on home machines.

Internet Explorer 9

The aspect ratio might not be as bad as it looks, as I’m using SauceLabs to crank up IE Virtual Machines.

The text below the boxes is really bad:

Internet Explorer 10

Looks OK in IE 10. Same aspect ratio thing from SauceLabs though:

Playing the waiting game

There’s caniuse.com/svg that’s worth checking out to track progress of things. It really needs shades of green though, as there’s still variance.

There’s also Ben Howdle’s svgeezy to allow a graceful fallback to PNGs for even older browsers (needs JavaScript)

Finally, there’s an ACID test for SVG that shows a lot of difference for even current browsers.