One of the most critical steps in building a website that is often overlooked is quality assurance. It is critical to make sure that your web pages render properly in different browsers across different platforms. Understanding your target audience can assist you in determining if testing for more obscure platforms and browsers is necessary, but as a general rule of thumb, it is important to test the most commonly used browsers. After the top 5, the usage significantly drops off. According to W3 Counter, these are:
| 1 | Internet Explorer 6.0 | 46.10% |
| 2 | Internet Explorer 7.0 | 20.18% |
| 3 | Firefox 2.0 | 18.30% |
| 4 | Firefox 1.5 | 6.18% |
| 5 | Safari 2.0 | 1.77% |
| 6 | Firefox 1.0 | 1.02% |
| 7 | Opera 9.2 | 0.70% |
| 8 | Mozilla 1.8 | 0.58% |
| 9 | Opera 9.0 | 0.53% |
| 10 | AOL 6.0 | 0.52% |
Each browser annoyingly has its own nuances. There are host of services out there to help you test. Smashing Magazine has an excellent write up on these different services. I have used BrowserCam in the past, and it is very good. It lets you pick and choose which platforms and browser versions to test and then captures screen shots for you.
Does anyone have any experience with these other services?
Technorati Tags: browser testing, quality assurance, web design
October 13th, 2007 at 10:31 pm
its not often we find people who understand these issues and feel as passionately about them as you. Thank you. From
your friends at Unix Commerce Web Design