COMPATABILITY: Cross Browser Compatibility

Ensuring the Cross browser compatibility of a website means it can be viewed on all the major browsers thereby maximizing the number of visitors that can access and view your website.

Just as the internet is constantly evolving along with the technology that powers it, web browsers are also evolving to keep pace with the development and growth of new technologies and methodologies. 

Web Standards have been developed to ensure that different internet browsers produced by different vendors will be able to render web pages correctly irrespective of the browser being used by the website visitor.

The implementation of web standards is crucial to the ongoing viability of the internet and in theory should mean that a website designer or developer can design a website using web standards compliant coding and methodologies that will result in the website looking the same irrespective of the browser that the visitor is using to view the web page. This is referred to as Cross Browser Compatibility.

It is however only recently that many of the different browser vendors have reached the point where their browsers comply with the current web standards. For many years web site designers have had to build in browser specific work a rounds or hacks to enable some browsers to display the website pages the way that the designer intended them to look. This has not only been the case with different browser makes but also across different versions of a browser. 

Until full compliance with web standards by all the major browser vendors is achieved the website developer is going to have to continue to tweak certain parts of a websites coding to accommodate browsers that are not fully standards compliant.

The important thing to consider when commissioning a website developer to design a website for you is whether or not the developer has a good understanding of cross browser compatibility issues and how to accommodate the differences in how they are implemented on different browsers. 

Virtual Showrooms carries out extensive testing of websites during development to ensure maximum cross browser compatibility. In situations where the use of certain technologies and methodologies, that will not work on older non-compliant browsers, is desirable or required then measures are taken to ensure that when displayed on non compliant browsers the degrading of these elements is graceful and the website remains usable.