Designing A Site For Cross-Browser Support

As you can plainly see, I spent some time updating my blog theme the other day. One of the main problems whenever anyone does any web development is still unfortunately in the area of supporting multiple browsers. Usually a design that at first looks good in your development browser might look a bit weird in IE or another one.

It takes a lot of effort sometimes to make a site work in multiple browsers, something that should not be lost on those who visit sites frequently. For the most part, I’m lazy in this area. I generally target Sarfari and Firefox, and just sort of pray that it works in IE7 and above. For the most part that’s worked our nicely for me, but I rarely do anything complicated with my themes. I know several designers that are forced to still support IE6, which is apparently extremely difficult, and for them they have my sympathies.

I’m still rather amazed at the number of websites that don’t properly support Safari or any Mac browsers to be honest. I good example of this is Canada’s Low Cost Airline, WestJet. Upon hitting their website from a Mac, you are promptly told that your browser isn’t supported, and to try switching to something else. Of course, switching to something else doesn’t appear to work either, so it looks like the proplem is related to Macs.

I understand people with personal websites that might only target the browser they typically use (since it takes extra resources and time to test others), but I would think that corporations would spend more time trying to support the majority browsers out there.