Cross Browser Platform Compatibility

Compatibility between browsers isn’t as big of an issue nowadays. But it still is important to check that your site appears the way you want it to in the major browsers, especially if your site receives a lot of traffic. Below is the table of the market shares of the major browsers from the reputable source, MarketShare.

As you can see from this table, nearly all internet users either use Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari. So in order to ensure that your website is compatible with the majority of your users, simply download IE, Safari and Firefox and debug with each browser. For those seeking professionalism and have extra time on their hands, you could debug for all the browsers. I personally only check with IE and Firefox, which is more than 90% of the traffic anyways.

Even if you don’t debug for other browsers, as long as your website works in your browser, it should work in other people’s browsers too. Debugging shouldn’t be a major issue. Usually, differences in appearance between browsers are the cause of coding errors where each browser tries to process the errors differently or usage of code unique to the browser.