When developing websites, not all browsers are equal. What does this mean exactly? The main web browsers – Internet Explorer (IE), Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari – all display the code that builds a website slightly different. If I design a website that looks great in Firefox, it may end up looking terrible in IE, or vice versa.
As browsers upgrade and patch, they are beginning to display the code similarly. While these patches usually fix errors browsers have when displaying pages, your clients may not always have the latest version of a browser.
Let’s look at a breakdown of percentage of users using different browsers. Here are the current stats at the creation of this post.
22.4% IE
40.6% Firefox
30.3% Chrome
3.8% Safari
2.3% Opera
You can view these statistics at http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp.
From this information, we see that developing for Firefox, IE, and Chrome is important, since such a high percentage of potential visitors to your site may be viewing your site from one of these browsers. However, is there much incentive for developers to design for Safari and Opera? Is it worth paying someone for the extra time to develop for older browser versions or unused browsers?
Let’s take a look at the information from the past month of one of our highly trafficked local sites we developed. Here’s how our site compared to the W3C site statistics.
45% IE
15.62% Firefox
8.84% Chrome
22.8% Safari
0.24% Opera
This is quite different from the international averages. Out of those using IE, 16.26% – or 607 visitors – are using IE7, an old and notoriously problematic browser. This is 607 potential clients that could be seeing a broken website – a break you would only find if you test multiple browsers and browser versions.
Thankfully, developers have solutions to fixing errors that may be in some browsers/versions but not others. However, not all developers take the time to check your site in multiple browsers. At Pacer Design Studios, we test our sites across multiple browsers and versions to insure that your clients will see the site we personally designed and customized for you.
If you have concerns about your current website working across multiple browsers, call us today at 724.709.7261 to setup your free consultation.