If your website is not coded properly, it may appear broken or be completely unusable for some visitors.

Many people don't realize that there is more than one program, known as a "web-browser," that can be used to access the Internet. This is because most use whatever browser came pre-installed with their computer or mobile device — often times they will interpret this program as BEING the Internet, when in reality, it is merely a program for viewing the content (pages) on the Internet

The table below shows the total usage of different browsers on the Internet as of September 2009.  This is a list of the most popular Internet browsers. There are many more that comprise a very small fraction of users. (W3Counter.com, http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php)

Because some browsers do not adhere to the same standards (some browsers ignore entire features or functionality), developers must often write special browser-specific code.

Making sure that your website will look and function the same way when viewed in each of these browsers is by far the biggest headache for developers — which is why many developers completely ignore older browsers such as Internet Explorer 6.0, a browser that is still used by over 13% of Internet users (and for some reason, every time we demo our sites on someone else's computer, they are part of that 13%)!

Imagine a store that offered limited or no access to 13% of visitors who came through the door.  If your website does not support all browsers, you may be turning away entire groups of people without even knowing it.

All visitors to your site are valuable and users should not be unknowingly penalized because of the program that they use to view sites on the Internet.  To ensure that your site does not turn away visitors, Variant Studios builds and tests all of our sites in Internet Explorer versions 6.0 - 8.0, and all versions of Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome.