SEO for Browsers, Market Share, Regression Testing, Firefox, Chrome, IE6, IE7, IE8

The Humble Web Browser, Center of the Universe

Ah, the humble Web Browser. Without it our customers cannot visit our site, yet there is a proliferation of browsers and we need an SEO-wise strategy to deal with them for development and regression testing.

Design for Firefox

No need to be other than didactic here, simply design for Firefox. It's got around 25% market share. That's the best argument. That's the only argument needed. We are Internet Marketers here and we go where the market share is (unless there is a strategic reason, and there certainly can be).

Test with Chrome

Webkit

• Chrome (uses Webkit, same html engine as Safari). However there is a different javascript engine, so there may be differences.
• ~ 10% market share (with Safari) of browsers

Test with IE6, IE7, IE8

Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer is still sadly the leader in terms of market share, sadly because of the pain and time needed to adequately refactor CSS and JS to work adequately in the various browser versions.

Must test with each of these versions, because of market size.

• 6.00.2900 ~ 20% market share
• 7.00.5730 ~ 15% market share
• 8.00.6001 ~ 20% market share

Note: these can be installed as stand-alone applications in the same Windows machine using the Internet Explorer Collection.

Other Browsers - Opera, Seamonkey, Flock

Can ignore, but not a bad idea to have them around

• Opera, can be good (faster) for some sites.
• Seamonkey, note Seamonkey 2 just got released! Plugin support will no doubt lag, but it should be faster, more stable. Another Mozilla project.
• Flock, not my favorite, but some users out there, integrates with social media sites. Another Mozilla project.

Browser Usage Data

See Browser usage data

No related posts.