Your goal should be to make sure your website looks good and functions properly for as many of your users as possible.
In today’s world of multiple operating systems, browsers, plugins, and even web connection speeds, making your website work well for everyone and every system can be a tough task. While there are quite a few choices when it comes to browsers today, there are really just a handful of standard web browsers that you need to worry about when testing your website.
What are the Most Popular Web Browsers?
According to w3schools.com, as of April 2017, the majority of web users were using:
- Google Chrome 75.7%
- Firefox 13.6%
- Internet Explorer/Edge 4.6%
- Safari 3.7%
- Opera 1.1%
While Chrome has, by far, the largest percentage of internet users today, that still leaves about 25% of users who will access your website using a variety of other browsers. Moreover, many government agencies still only allow the use of Internet Explorer (and often with limited or no scripting), so you’ll definitely want to ensure that your website looks good and works properly for your specific audience and customers.
At the very minimum, you’ll want to test your website on the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, and Opera. You’ll also want to test on some previous versions of each as well. Of course, if your audience is a particular government agency or agencies, it is a good idea to ask them if they have employee browser requirements and make sure your website is optimized as needed.
Keep in mind that, while potentially very time consuming, cross-browser testing is a necessary evil. And, while ensuring that your website code adheres to web standards is an important first step, actually testing your website on different browsers and versions of browsers is imperative.