There are lots of people browsing the net still using Internet Explorer 6 (actually just over 1/4 of the users out there) so you will not want to alienate a quarter of your potential customers. That is precisely what will occur if they arrive at your site and it just doesn't work for them. They will just move on to the next website.
Actually, the top 10 browsers by market share (according to Net Applications) are:
Okay, I know the percentages do not add up to 100%, but that is due to rounding. It is still close enough to give you an idea.
As you can see you are going to need to test your site on a number of different browsers to make sure that at least the majority of visitors can see what you have to offer. What is the point of limiting your market to just IE7 (just because that is what you use). You could potentially be limiting your market to 20% of internet users, which is just not enough.
One option is to install multiple browsers on your computer, this will work for some of the but not others. For example, I believe that you can only install Internet Explorer once on each windows machine. If you have more than one Windows machine around (like say a laptop or netbook) then you can have each one with a different version.
One other problem is testing Mac browsers on a Windows machine and vise versa. There are online solutions to that issue and I will go into them later.
As for the other browsers, it is easy to install each one on your computer, just do a web search to find out where to download each one and install it. You may decide to skip the bottom few on the list as they account for such a small amount of internet users, I will leave that decision up to you.
Now when you update or write a new page for your website, or when you are starting with a new design, check how it looks and handles on each of the different browsers you have installed. Watch for anything that just doesn't look right. One of the biggest problems is with your CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) especially with IE8.
Fixing all the bugs you find during your test will save you a lot of frustration in the future. Doing this test before you have 100's of pages online which only work in IE7 will save you so much time in later repairs.
Online solutions to testing your site on multiple browsers are available. Do a web search for "Browser Compatibility Tester" and see what comes up. Most are pay services, but there are some free ones available, even some pay ones also offer limited access free services. One service like that which will test pages through the eyes of a Mac is browsrcamp.com (when their Mac server is actually working). All you do is give them the URL to the web page you want to have tested and tell them what browser you want to test in, and there you go.
Now you know how vital it is to check your site for browser compatibility issues, make sure you get to it right away. You do not want to lose any more visitors by giving them an horrible experience, it was hard enough getting them to your site in the first place.
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