How Many Browsers Should Your Website Be Compatible For?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

You’ve optimized your website to the hilt, made the design look sleek and pretty, ensure it meets all the latest W3C standards, now what? Is it ready for public consumption and viewing? Not quite. You should make sure that it is compatible with all the browsers.

Many a webmaster have spent hours working on their website only to see it go live and get an e-mail weeks down the road saying that something on the site isn’t viewable or “looks funny.” When the webmaster goes up to take a look they don’t see anything but a pretty site. This is caused usually by one very common mistake that new web designers make. They don’t cross check their work with other browsers.

There are several browsers on the market that are popular enough that you should ensure your website can be viewed the way you want it to be seen by site visitors. Here is a list that I’d start with:

• Internet Explorer
• Mozilla Firefox
• Safari
• Opera
• Flock
• Google Chrome

There are several more browsers out there, but these are the main ones you should concern yourself with. Google Chrome is the latest. You should make sure that your website is viewable for the latest edition of each browser plus the previous edition. Most text editors will allow you to program several browsers into their preview feature to allow you to see what your site visitors will see when viewing your site with that browser. It’s a simple check that you can implement and ensure that your site is viewable by the most people possible.