At this moment there are many web browsers available that are used to surf the web. When you build a website you should have in mind the concept of cross browser compatibility.

After you finish your website, the majority of common web browsers must render in the same way your web pages, by displaying all features implemented by the site structure design and content presentation techniques. If you skip the step of checking the cross browser compatibility for your website, then you should not be surprised if certain web browsers will not render the web pages correctly.

As a consequence you must perform tests that will provide you reports regarding the cross browser compatibility status for your website. The compatibility checking can be done in many ways. There are free or paid test scripts available that run online or on your own computer, but many of them provide reports limited to a single web browser on a single operating system. The natural way is to visualize your web site using various web browsers with distinctive versions on different operating systems.

But this could be hard to achieve on a single computer, even with virtual machines that allow you to run different operating systems. Some rapid solutions exist, such as the VPC Image which allows you to test a website on the same operating system with two Internet Explorer versions: 6.0 and 7.0. But it is limited to certain versions of Windows operating system.

Another method to simplify the testing of your website in multiple web browsers would be the identification of rendering engines common to different browsers. For example, Firefox, Mozilla and Netscape (starting from 6.0 version) have the same rendering engine and as a consequence, they can exist simultaneously on the same operating system. I also found out about the existence of a free cross browser compatibility checking service on browsershots.org website. Here you can test your website and the results are provided as screenshots of your site rendered by various browsers on different operating systems.

The reports' details, besides the screenshots contain: browser type and version, operating system, Javascript, Flash and Java compliance, screen size and more. It is suggested to compare the results obtained for different browser versions with various checking tools in order to create a global compatibility report, which will demonstrate the average degree of cross browser compatibility for a given website and will indicate the changes that must be made in order to eliminate all existing compatibility issues.