Browser Compatibility Testing - How far?

bigbadcon

Im working on a couple of sites at the moment and im wondering how much effort should I put in to get my sites looking good on different browsers.

I personally use IE and FF so I was going to at least make sure they look ok in these.

Bear in mind these are sites for myself and are not for a client or anything.

Should I be looking into making sure my sites look ok in different versions of IE and FF also?

What is normal practice?

Cheers

28064212

Personally, I'd do IE 6, 7 and 8, Opera 9 and 10, Firefox 2 and 3, and Safari 4. IE 6 is probably the most annoying, but there's still a huge amount of people using it. BrowerShots is handy for checking

DJB

I'd agree with that list. Here's a great tool I found recently: http://www.xenocode.com/browsers/

Scotty #

I use IEtester http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage It's alpha but very good for a quick look at each version of IE.

Personally, I'd do IE 6, 7 and 8, Opera 9 and 10, Firefox 2 and 3, and Safari 4.

You left out Chrome

Of the last 10,000 visitors to my site only 19 used Opera. Unless you have a 'techy' site I wouldn't bother with it.

28064212

Scotty # wrote: »

You left out Chrome

Deliberately . Ok, maybe after the Google OS comes out and gets some decent market share it will be worth it. Besides, it uses the same layout engine as Safari

Scotty # wrote: »

Of the last 10,000 visitors to my site only 19 used Opera. Unless you have a 'techy' site I wouldn't bother with it.

I added Opera in because it's traditionally the most standards-compatible of the browsers. That's changed a bit in the last few years, but it's still a useful browser to test sites on

Scotty #

28064212 wrote: »

I added Opera in because it's traditionally the most standards-compatible of the browsers.

Yea I think it's the most HTML 5 compliant at the mo as well.

DJB wrote: »

Here's a great tool I found recently: http://www.xenocode.com/browsers/

Bloody amazing!!! thank you for sharing!

bigbadcon

28064212 wrote: »

Personally, I'd do IE 6, 7 and 8, Opera 9 and 10, Firefox 2 and 3, and Safari 4.

Is this a shared view? According to this it looks like only 10-11% of people use anything besides IE and FF.

Eoin

And a much higher percentage of visitors to a site like w3schools will use Firefox then your average non-techie related site.

My stats tend to show 60% IE, and 30% Firefox, though that's the best stats I've seen so far for Firefox. 65%/25% is probably as common.

Edit - actually using stats over more months, IE is closer to 70%.

Goodshape

eoin wrote: »

My stats tend to show 60% IE

How does IE break down for you, in terms of 6, 7 or 8?

Morlar

I think for a personal site the most recent IE & FF are sufficient. looking at your logs will most likely illustrate that they are the majority visitors.

There is always some linux & safari etc and even nokia browsers etc but the vast majority are latest IE & FF.

mewso

Our stats (irish local government site) for the month of June are:-

IE7 - 46.27%
IE6 - 26.96%
FF 3.0 - 10.32%
Safari 3.0 - 5.12%
IE8 - 4.51%

Rest below 1%

Eoin

Goodshape wrote: »

How does IE break down for you, in terms of 6, 7 or 8?

This is from one site.

IE 7: 56.47 %
IE 8: 25.46 %
IE 6: 18.07 %

The stats on another two of my sites show a slightly different breakdown for the same time period.

IE 7: 50.71%
IE 6: 33.73%
IE 8: 15.57%

CuLT

Boards.ie browser usage this month, rough figures (they don't all tot up to 100%)

Browser|Version|Percentage
Internet Explorer|All|50.65%
|7.0|27%
|8.0|11.85%
|6.0|11.75%
Firefox|All|36.24%
|3.0.*|27.3%
|3.5.*|5.2%
|2.0.*|0.8%
Safari|All[1]|5.94%
Chrome|All|5.20%
|2.0.*|4.87%
|1.0.*|0.03%
|3.0.*|0.09%
Opera|All (Desktop)[2]|1.04%
|9.64|0.57%
Others||<1%


[1]Safari is exploded evenly across a whole bunch of WebKit builds, mostly 500+, I don't want to figure out what corresponds to what browser
[2] Opera Mini not included, and the rest of the Opera versions were all evenly spread over the last six or seven Opera 9.6.* releases.