This is an extremely important issue and I always pay special attention to it.

I have Internet Explorer 7, which you can download from Microsoft website for free here:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/dow.../getitnow.mspx

I have Internet Explorer 6, which you have to download the Standalone version so it can run with IE7 from here:
http://browsers.evolt.org/download.p...e6eolas_nt.zip

FireFox from here:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all.html

Opera from here:
http://www.opera.com/download/

And finally Safari, which is now available for Windows from here:
http://www.apple.com/safari/download/

PHIEW

It might sound a little too much, but when I'm making a web page I have all my different browsers open and pointing to it, and I make sure my web page looks the same on all of them.

From my experience, a little bit more than 50% of visitors use IE7 and IE6, the other 50% are using all the other browsers I mentioned here.
The days that Internet Explorer shared most of the browser market are over and even if it wasn't, I would do the same.

I also don't think anyone wants his/her website to look broken on say 10% of their user's browsers, and this is the only way to test it and be sure.

At first it's a little hard to get used to making a web page this way (it means extra work, of course), but when you get used to it (which happens very fast) then there is no way that you'll want to make a web page any other way

__________________
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
Albert Einstein

Hamid - just out of curiosity, I've noticed alot of our users are creating websites with programs that provide a ready-made template approach; most notably Microsoft Live.

Do companies take cross-browser issues into account when they create these kinds of website building programs or is it still something website owners who build with these programs should consider?

Also, does the Safari for windows display exactly the same as it does in a mac?

This is great advice, and so true - I don't know how many pages we've created for clients that looked great in ie7 but had some odd little twitches in 6 and looked completely bizarre in Opera....

In the end it meant quite a bit more work because then we had to go back in and code corrections in so that the page looked the same in ALL of the browsers but it was so worth it. My biggest fear was giving the client the site and them opening it in a mac or on Opera and seeing it all mixed up - it's got to be perfect no matter what computer, screen size, browser, resolution, etc. they're using!

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Quote:

Do companies take cross-browser issues into account when they create these kinds of website building programs or is it still something website owners who build with these programs should consider?

I didn't use Microsoft Live but it's easy to find out, I just need a URL to one of those websites to check it out on all of my browsers, 5 total

I don't think Microsoft or any other big company wants to loose users because of not thinking of browser compatibility issues, so I'd say yes.

Quote:

Also, does the Safari for windows display exactly the same as it does in a mac?

A browser has a rendering engine that parses and displays the HTML pages and the only thing Apple needs to do is to adapt the same rendering engine to work with Windows, writing a different rendering engine for Windows is a waste of time.

In programming we have a technique called adapter (adapter pattern) and it's much like the adapters you must use to connect your computer to the electricity in another country.



This Safari has an adapter to work with Windows.

So the answer is yes

__________________
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
Albert Einstein

Cute illustration of your point
I wasn't aware of the new Safari for windows and will grab that now.

Thanks for the info!