6 June 2009
There are so many different web browsers out there at the moment. Which ones does my site need to work with, and which ones can I safely ignore? Let us answer a few questions for you.

When I first started in the web industry, Internet Explorer 2/3.0 and Netscape 3.0 were the primary browsers in the market, and it was quite simple that you had to make sure your web pages displayed correctly in both of these browsers.

Looking back it was a pretty horrible time for web designers and developers. Neither browser really stuck to the standards (though Netscape made more of an attempt to), and both had some annoying problems. Netscape had the early start in terms of market placement and initial popularity, but IE soon overtook them to become the dominant force.

So it was usually a case of design your site in IE, and then fudge around to make it work in Netscape. (Whilst tearing your hair out at some of the frustrating differences between the two.)

Nowadays, we’re faced with a host of different browsers, all competing for market share. Though we have better practices in following the standards, and the latest versions of the most popular browsers do a very good job of this, in actual fact it’s never been tougher for a web designer to create pages and sites that are compatible with the majority of browsers.

Still the biggest player (but losing ground), is Internet Explorer. However it’s not just one version that we have to contend with. The usage demographics are split across three different versions, IE 6, IE 7, and now IE 8. All three of which are basically completely different browsers, and all three of which display web pages in different ways.

IE 6 is the biggest pain here, because although it’s not officially supported any more, it still carries a fair percentage of users to make it silly to ignore. This browser didn’t really follow the standards as set by the W3C, so this causes problems for us. However there are usually some quick and easy fixes to make well structured, standards driven sites display fine in this browser. In this case, once our sites are developed, a final check to in IE 6 is often the case (often accompanied by shouting and screaming – “WHY THE HECK IS MY DIV ALL THE WAY ACROSS THERE!” etc etc).

Let’s look at the list of the current main browsers (in no particular order)

Internet Explorer 7.x
Internet Explorer 8.x
Firefox 3.x
Chrome 2.x
Safari 3.x / 4.x
Opera 8.x / 9.x

Out of those listed above, Safari and Opera only cover around 5% of the market (at the time of this article being written: 6th June 2009), however if your website is getting 1 million hits each week, that’s 50’000 hits to consider. Would the potential loss of that many hits/leads/sales impact on your business?

As a company, our current procedure is to co-test the site in IE 8 and Firefox 3.x concurrently during development. Doing it this way, we’re making sure our sites function correctly in the two largest browsers. Along the way we’ll check how the site looks in Chrome. Most of the time it’s fine, and you can safely assume that if the site works in Firefox, it will work in Chrome.

Once the development of the site has progressed nicely, it makes sense to check the site in IE 6. 90% of the time you’ll have a few display issues here, but these are usually corrected by adding “display:inline”; to the odd floating div. Hopefully this will sort any issues and you can get back to making web pages.

To fully be satisfied of your websites compatibility with as many browsers as possible, once your site is near-ready; give it a test in Safari and Opera. If you develop on a PC running Windows, test the site on an Apple running OSX, and vice versa.

“Is it really worth all this cross-testing?” – I hear you ask. Well yes. If you’re having a website developed or creating one yourself, why would you want to exclude or annoy people from viewing it, however small the percentage? Certainly the larger sites, and the ones bringing in more traffic will need to function correctly in all browsers, after all a customer lost through a page not being displayed, or a page looking odd (and therefore making your brand/business look amateurish), is a potential sale in the making.

It’s our job as web designers and developers to make sure that our sites work in all the major browsers. We’re experienced at it, and we have a number of PC’s / Mac’s with different version of each browser all readily available and constantly used to test on.

So if you’re planning a new website and you want to maximise its potential, then let us take the hassle out of it for you, and deliver you a fantastic, multi-platform, multi-browser compatible website. Then you can sit back and watch the money flood in!