How many browsers should I optimize for?

[Makaveli2007]

I'm wondering if when it comes to building sites for different browsers, is it the same thing as optimizing for search engines? You basically care about the top few that own most of the market, make sure your sites look perfect in all of those browsers, but dont worry about the other 8%? (so even if your sites looked completely bad for the other 8% (or so..depending on your industry) of users, youd still allow 92% of the people to view a perfect version of your website..probably more like 92-100%)

I'm a beginenr and I'm trying to create useful sites, but in the end I must admit I'm doing this for my own benefit (I guess most of us who aren't successful, yet would have to admit to that?) so it all comes down to ROI and whether it's worth for me to worry about the other 8% of browsers that are being used or not.

Do you make sure your site looks great in almost every browser or do you simply look at IE6,IE7 and Firefox and make sure the site looks perfect in those browsers?

P.S.: I'm also not a big brand or in a technology niche.

[tedster]

We had a discussion a short while back that may help you:

[webmasterworld.com...]

[rocknbil]

Do you make sure your site looks great in almost every browser or do you simply look at IE6,IE7 and Firefox and make sure the site looks perfect in those browsers?

You're on the right track - but I like to follow it though so it's at least **presentable** to the other 8%. In terms of potential business, 8% can mean 100, 1000, or 100,000. The important thing is to insure they can access the content, if presentation problems don't bother you, it's a non-issue.

[Makaveli2007]

thanks for the replies,

to be honest, though, I think it doesn't matter how much the 8% is in absolute numbers. The only question really is, is whether the time would be spend better doing something else. If it's easy to optimize for all other 8%, it's probably worth it for a business, but if it was really complicated and made you spent a whole lot of time, maybe that time would be better applied to doing link building, tuning PPC campaigns or analyzing the stats, etc.

but I guess you think of it the same way, which is why you make it at least presentable to them (which probably takes up little time?) w/o worrying about them in-depth, right?:-)