Browsers compliance - Test all or only selected ones? | sotarsoft.pl - oprogramowanie

There are far more than ten browsers currently used for searching in the internet. Each of their creators have their own opinion on what the standard is, that webmasters should stick to.

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) responsible for the HTML standard worked out an internet pages validator for checking the conformity of the code with "the perfect". Unfortunately even if according to this tool a website is a "standard one", there's no guarantee that it will look identically under every browser in the world.

Testing websites under every browser would be as much advantageous as adaptation of restaurants dishes to every potential client's taste.

So when not to test websites under every browser, then under which ones? The answer is 'We should measure'.

According to the statistics around 60% of Internet users choose Internet Explorer - in Poland as well as in the whole world. The most popular among them is IE6, but it's slowly replaced by its latest version - IE7. Second place is occupied by Firefox, which has a little bit more than 30% users. Older Mozilla versions, similarly to older Internet Explorers are used by about 1% of www users. We can also put Safari & Opera on the list. Their popularity reaches a few percent. The role of other ones (for example Camino, IBrowse, iCab, K-Meleon, Konqueror, Lock or Netscape) is insignificant.

You may find the exact data about browser popularity on the w3Schools website, which is a part of W3C. Stats regarding only the Polish internet are published on ranking.pl. They produce reports involving far more information than only about browser types.

As long as browsers show the html pages incorrectly, every webmaster must test his/her project under 10 main important browsers, to be sure, that his/her websites are accessible for 97% internet users around the world. A consolation may be the fact, that Mozilla, Opera, Firefox and Safari may work in many of their versions on one operating system. It's not much, but it's better than nothing. Internet Explorer doesn't offer this opportunity – installation of a new version blocks the previous one. The hope is overcome this difficulty is the Multiple-IE. It gives you ability to install IE version from 3.0 till 7 not integrated with the well known system called operating in some societies.