When I am working with my designer on a development product, I constantly check the new website in Safari and Firefox since I use a Macbook. My designer also uses a Mac, so he has the same browsers that I have. It’s critical to also check your site in other browsers (like Internet Explorer) since so many users use other browsers regularly.
Before learning about BrowserShots.org, I would email friends and family to ask them to check the site’s appearance in Internet Explorer. Needless to say, it can be difficult to get exact feedback when they’re interpreting what they see, and some aren’t familiar with taking and sending screenshots.
BrowserShots.org allows you to see how your website looks in various browsers, and it also lets you see them in different versions of the browsers. While most people are using Internet Explorer 7 or 8, there are still a small percentage using IE6, and your site should reflect this so everyone has an identical experience. BrowserShots.org gives you screenshots of different browsers, allowing you to see how your site looks in different browser windows.
Don’t wait until your site has already launched – use BrowserShots.org along the way. You can also use W3Schools.com to see the percentage of users for the most popular web browsers.
Technically speaking though, you can’t always provide the same exact visual experience for every older browser since they don’t support all the current css and html codes. You’ll end up spending way too much coding time trying to get things perfectly the same across every platform. Some components on a web site will inevitably break on these out of date browsers so often best thing to do is embed a notification message with a link for them to upgrade.