Which browsers should you make sure your site supports? There are certainly a lot out there (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera, Konqueror…and SeaMonkey, to name a few).
It’s not possible to support every browser to the same degree, and the right answer is going to depend on your particular site audience. How will you know what to target? These are the steps that you should follow for public-facing sites:
- Make sure you handle the basics: the predominant IE version(s) and Firefox.
- Get an analytics solution installed on your site if you don’t have one already. A free package like Google Analytics does just fine (see next article).
- Monitor your analytics over a few weeks and find what browsers your users are in fact using.
- Decide what you can live with. 90% of your users getting the best experience? 95%? Set a reasonable cut off and use that to decide where to put your resources.
- Test on those browsers and continue to monitor.
For intranets you generally have a better handle on which Web browsers your staff are using, so target those. Extranets should be treated like public Web sites.
Oh, and SeaMonkey? It generally behaves like Firefox and has less than 0.5% browser share. So you don’t need to worry about it.
Tags: analytics, browser support, Browsers, newsletter, statistics
