As a follow-up to yesterday’s post on development for IE 6, I thought it might be appropriate to show you how to know if IE 6 (or any browser, for that matter) should be a consideration for your web development project. Here‚’s how to know.
I‚Äôve worked in quite a few development environments, from the big corporation (Circuit City, RIP), to small but successful e-commerce ventures (Crutchfield Corporation), and at a government-funded non-profit (United Network for Organ Sharing). While each organization had different testing guidelines, I didn’t notice a structured approach to why web sites/applications should be tested with certain browsers.
As our testing methodology has evolved at Rick Whittington Consulting, I’ve put a lot of thought into why certain browsers have to be tested. Simply put, here’s what I’ve found:
You must know your audience.
So how do you do that? I start with Google Analytics. Studying the Visitors > Browser Capabilities reports for a 6-month period for a given web site can give you insight into what should be tested. As a guide, any browser/browser version that has over 0.5% share, we test for.
That means that for really techie, Mac-oriented sites, we may test Camino, but not with a consumer e-commerce site with a more senior audience. If we’re testing code for a business application that has a defined audience, IE 6 and IE 7 are the focus, but not Opera.
What about mobile phone users? People are increasingly using their phone to surf the web. Again, we turn to Google Analytics. On one B2B-oriented site we‚Äôre currently working on, we can see that people are visiting using the Safari for iPhone, Safari for Android, Blackberry browser, PalmOS, and even using Safari on iPod. We got this data using Google Analytics’ Visitors > Browser Capabilities > Browsers and OS report. In most cases (both B2B and B2C), Safari for iPhone and Blackberry will be the two most widely-used mobile browsers).
Do the due diligence to see what browsers customers are using and your site won’t have nearly the browser display issues that most sites on the web do (I’m still looking at you, Verizon Wireless).
