Cross-Browser Compatibility Testing for Website Owners

[snakeair]

This just a reminder for the designers to make sure your creations are tested in all browser's.

Whether your website exists to reach out to customers, engage with them, build a community, sell products or act as a voice for your offline business, all of your efforts at maintaining your digital presence may be in vain if your website itself doesn’t display correctly!

For most web entrepreneurs and bloggers, it’s easy to overlook something like cross-browser compatibility testing, as most of us fall into the trap of thinking that it’s either too small of an issue to worry about or that it’s something your web designer will have taken care of. Unfortunately neither of the scenarios is always accurate.

There are plenty of different web browsers on the market today (see chart below from StatCounter for current distributions), and web users have their own reasons for using one particular browser over another. So for web business owners, bloggers, web designers and developers, it’s now imperative that websites be designed so that they’re compatible across browsers – meaning that a website should look the same, no matter which browser internet users fire up to surf.

Imagine building a website, only to realize that your painstakingly created designs don’t look the same on Firefox or Internet Explorer as they do on Safari. What if your site loads on Chrome, but not on Opera?

Beyond separate browsers, there are...

Continued at: http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/crossbrows...website-owners

Any feedback?

[indybail]

This issue is important. I have a simple HTML website with pages that render quite differently in Firefox than in Chrome or IE and ...oops, I need to check with Safari.

[setx_webdev]

My most recent case of browser incompatibility involved a client who does nothing but affiliates.

One day he sends me this email asking me to update a few of his sites with some new videos one of his affiliate accounts came up with.

Once the coding was done I ran the gambit .. Opera, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari .. well, you know the drill ..

Anyway, the vids worked best in Internet Explorer and Safari .. dragged in Opera, and to my amazement .. choked in Firefox. It appeared that Firefox doesn't do well with "object Moz URLProperty". ..

Most of his visitors use Safari and Internet Explorer anyway, so he wasn't real concerned with my wanting to get after a workaround for this .. I did eventually resolve the issue with Firefox. I'm still surprised that Firefox did what it did.