As the old saying goes, “The great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from”.  HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are fairly ubiquitous web development tools, and there are plenty of standards surrounding them.  Sharing a web page with our visitors should be the easiest thing in the world.  Unfortunately, there are as many browsers as there are standards, and each one implements standards differently.

I wish I could just hand you a list of what techniques will work every time, in every browser.  But that just isn’t going to happen.  Because even when the browsers are working right, there may be graphics issues messing with your display.  The only thing that truly works is to look at your site in different browsers.

I don’t think there’s any question that Internet Explorer (IE), Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Apple Safari are the current top browsers.  So it’s important to at least test on those four.  But which versions?  And because different operating systems use different rendering engines, the same browser will look different in Linux, Windows, and OS X – which one do we use as the standard?  Earlier this year, Google celebrated the “death” of support for IE 6, and Microsoft itself has completely abandoned IE for the Mac.  Yet there are a handful of people still using those browsers – how much attention should they receive?  And that’s just for the desktop – the game changes entirely when you consider mobile web devices with matchbook screens.

Dealing with browsers is in some ways like dealing with small children – at some point, you have to put your foot down.  I personally believe that a home user who is still surfing on a 5-year-old browser is going to have problems no matter what tricks and hacks I manage to crank out.  And corporate clients, who are attached to an old browser because their IT infrastructure is dependent on an outdated framework are probably not allowed to be visiting my site during work hours, period.

In the end, the best strategy is to cross your fingers.  If your web design looks good in Safari, Firefox, Chrome, and IE, I say publish it.  It takes a lot of creative coding just to get that far – you’ve already solved 99% of the cross-platform compatibility issues.  Let the remaining 1% fall where they may.

For better or for worse, I have three laptops – a Dell running Windows, a ThinkPad running Fedora Linux, and a Mac.  Here’s a list of graphical browsers that I test my work on:

• Mac:
  • Chrome
  • Firefox
  • Opera
  • Safari
• Windows
  • Chrome
  • Firefox
  • Opera
  • Internet Explorer
• Linux
  • Chrome
  • Firefox
  • Galeon
  • Epiphany
  • Midori

For more information on browser usage statistics, see here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

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