Browsers are great. They display the web. Unfortunately, they all display the web differently. So part of web design for any project is knowing which browsers your site needs to look perfect in. You can say, “Well, all of them.” But that is unrealistic for all but the biggest (and sloppiest) budgets. Making your site work in some browsers will take a lot of time and may not be worth it. I keep up with the major browsers and use a programming framework developed by Yahoo!® to make it fast and easy for programmers to code web pages for most web browsers.

Microsoft® Internet Explorer® is by far the biggest in terms of market share. But each version of IE is different, so must be classified as different browsers. Based on this, my recommendation for a set of browsers to target is:

• Internet Explorer starting with version 6
• Firefox 2 and above for all operating systems.
• Safari browser for Mac OS X and Windows

This will account for most browsers. To target even more viewers, you can support current versions of Opera and Konqueror and other “niche” browsers. I don’t recommend supporting niche and older browsers. Their market share does not justify the cost of making your project work in them.