I'm working on a new design, and have Firefox, IE 6 and 7 to check the design works properly. What other browsers should I be checking with?

Check your stats, see which browsers frequent your site more often - choose from there or, IE from v6 up, Firefox from v2 up and Opera are the ones i go for, others may also suggest safari if you have a mac or pc version. Other than that i wouldnt really bother, it could take you a long time to design an appealing site that blows every browsers horn.

why even worry about opera??

such a tiny, tiny market

matte wrote:

why even worry about opera??

such a tiny, tiny market

Because opera is the only browser to be fully standards compliant. Safari implements CSS3 and FF will do too.

Remember the saying "Develop in firefox, tweak for IE"? that was because ff followed more of the standards.

Now, if there was a tool as good as firebug for opera then you'd see opera take off as the developer's choice and the market share rise.

I think that many big companies are not so interested in standards as to say that if there was a version of FB for opera then it would take off.

These same companies don't care, they don't even test for FF compatibility by the look of their sites. Here I an talking national brand name companies who have invested hundreds of thousands on their  web interfaces - banks, utility companies etc.

Many still use tables for layout.....

So it seems IE remains the only default they care about

matte wrote:

I think that many big companies are not so interested in standards as to say that if there was a version of FB for opera then it would take off.

These same companies don't care, they don't even test for FF compatibility by the look of their sites. Here I an talking national brand name companies who have invested hundreds of thousands on their  web interfaces - banks, utility companies etc.

Many still use tables for layout.....

So it seems IE remains the only default they care about

I agree with thism i recall Dave mentioning it a while ago as well. Everything becomes redundant as far as coding is concerned... the question being, will a valid source = more conversions/sales for a large company? Im guessing that they have speent the money on the research and decided... nah.

Ryan - it even affects functionality at times - like a submit button oddly sitting half covering a data entry field, instead of sitting at the lower right like it should.

Truth is I think so many companies these days are stretched resource-wise and do not have time to worry about coding perfection or standards that are only guidelines being promote from a fairly narrow quarter (I seem to remember this style of discussion about a year ago!!)

LOL, That is very true as well... i can see the pitch though... "Not everyones computer is set up the same, therefore it would be pointless to spend money on trying to maximize compatibility"  You may even find a few of em also claim that ie is the only browser worth designing for.

Tight budgets certainly don't allow for such compatibility but there is no excuse for large corporations to not fork out the extra dough. I know they don't, but wish they did.... especially when it comes to the customer support sites, yech

Ryan:

http://browsershots.org/

Great site, works well for testing pages in many different browsers.

Just another option