Alot of my sites have been displaying oddly in different browsers. The trouble is, there are 3/4 browsers that you have to make sure your site displays in properly, and when it works in one browser theres an issue in another.
Which browsers should i focus on and is there any way of avoiding these problems?
Those stats are fascinating, i didn't know ie6 was still so widely used and that some people still use ie5?
BTW, you can use CSS hacks that allow you to have different code for different browsers which should help solve most of your problems.
a lot of people bumped back to IE6, especially XP and older Microsoft OSes. IE7 was designed for Vista and a lot of people don't like the new design for varying reasons. as for Firefox, it has always been a huge browser and always will be. IE7 is a default and looks and acts much better in Vista, with a large number of Windows lovers who bought Vista the second it came out, and those who have bought a computer during the time when it was the only Windows OS available, will use IE7 or Firefox. other browsers such as Opera or Popfly (I think that's the C++ viewing browser, if so, I meant another that I can't think on the name for) are widely used but there are many of them and they are not widely advertised nor are they capable of viewing sites the way IE and Firefox can because IE and Firefox are the browsers that most sites are optimized for.
I think that you should focus mostly on Mozilla Firefox. It is overall a faster and a more secure browser and more and more people are realizing that and switching to Mozilla. But, don't focus too much on one browser because people still use other browsers. You don't want your site to be impossible to view in one browser. You might want to put up a sign that says this site is best viewed in Mozilla Firefox.
That's exactly what it says on top of my (under construction) site! It says: "This site is best viewed using the latest version of Firefox and the Adblock Plus add-on"
(the reason for the add-on is that it is being hosted on a free site which puts stupid ads all over the page)
You can use CSS to cover up that add with the Mozilla sign. Just make it into an image just as big and use absolute position and in a few tries you can align them perfectly. You might want to make the image a little bigger to save yourself from the hassle.
I think you should mostly focus on IE6 and mozilla. Those seem to be used by people a lot.
Exactly. If you need another browser still, go for Opera.