Do you know how many web browsers your website works in?

Do you know how many web browsers there actually are?

The correct answer is: Lots. Hundreds! Thousands more likely.

Thankfully for us, however, there are really only two types of browsers you need to consider. If you run a fairly standard website, these will probably account for 99% of your audience.

• Firefox, Safari, Opera & Internet Explorer 7. These are the most modern and standard compliant ones. Chances are if your site works in FF and IE7 it will be fine in the others too. These browsers generally hold about 70% of the market.
• Internet Explorer 6. The name that will send a shiver up every web developer’s spine. IE6 still holds something like 28% market share. It is also incredibly bad at rendering websites the way they were intended.

So what are the other browsers, you ask? Usually mobile phones, email/newsreader clients or other devices that can access the web. There are also hundreds of smaller name browsers out there, but personally I think you’d be mad to use them (for security reasons).

At Kintek, we test in Firefox, IE7 and IE6. This means we can guarantee support in about 90% of browsers, and fairly confidently state that the remaining few percent will work, too. Safari and Opera are very good browsers, which means you don’t need to pull your hair out making your sites work in them.

There are also resources out there you can submit your website to that will show you what that site will look like in hundreds of different browsers, which we use from time to time.

Very soon we will see the release of Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3. When that happens, the browsers will all be so good at following Web Standards, that all this worrying about Cross-Browser-Compatibility should hopefully become a thing of the past.