If you have a website, you need to know how it is displayed to your visitors. In a perfect world, your website would look the same on every browser. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Here's an example of a serious problem that could have been avoided by testing.

As you can see, FireFox 3.0 on Server 2003 displayed the navigation bar correctly, but K-Meleon 1.5.0 on Windows XP wasn't even close!

Imagine trying to test every version of every browser on every operating system. It would be a nightmare. The combinations would be in the thousands and unreasonable to test.

So which combination should you test?
Here are the top ten configurations that visitors see at Recognized Expert. This is how I prioritize my testing. (You can get this information from your Google Analytics account.)

1. Internet Explorer / Windows: 52.21%
2. Firefox / Windows: 28.33%
3. Firefox / Macintosh: 6.23%
4. Chrome / Windows: 4.06%
5. Safari / Macintosh: 3.01%
6. Firefox / Linux: 1.48%
7. Opera / Windows: 1.24%
8. Mozilla / Linux: 0.71%
9. Mozilla / Windows: 0.47%
10. Firefox / FreeBSD: 0.42%

It's easier than you think.

1. Go to Browsershots.org
2. Enter your website address and view what your site looks like in as many as 80 different browsers!
3. Start fixing problems!