Advance warning: Numbas v9 will require newer browser versions

[Christian Lawson-Perfect]

We’re planning on releasing v9.0 of Numbas this Summer, hopefully on 19th August. This includes a completely rewritten user interface in the default theme, using newer browser features to improve accessibility and the user experience.

This means that some old browsers will not render Numbas exams correctly when using the new Standard theme.

The minimum supported browsers versions are as follows:

• Chrome version 112 (released 2023-04-04).
• Firefox version 117 (released 2023-08-29).
• Edge version 112 (released 2023-04-06).
• macOS Safari version 16.5 (released 2023-09-18, with MacOS Sonoma).
• iOS Safari (iPhone/iPad) version 16.5 (released 2023-09-18).
• Safe Exam Browser for Windows version 3.6 (released 2023-12-06).

We aim to ensure compatibility with at least 95% of browsers currently in use, as measured by MDN browser-compat-data. At time of writing, the features used by the new theme are supported by 95.82% of observed browsers.

We understand that it won’t always be possible to require students to use new browser versions straight away. For such situations, the old Standard theme will still be available within the Numbas editor, and existing custom themes will continue to use that as their base. The old theme does work with Numbas v9.0 but we won’t continue to update it and it doesn’t include any of the accessibility improvements.

Feedback on the new theme from our testers has been very positive, and we can’t wait to release it!