When building a Web site, a key facet often overlooked is browser compatibility. “A current fact of life for site designers, application developers and your entire IT department is Web pages can look and perform differently from one browser to another,” said Imad Mouline, CTO of Gomez, an on-demand Web management provider.

Mouline warns the new generation of browsers signals a major change in the way browsers operate, and though this signals faster, better-looking, easier-to-develop Web site experiences in the future, the next year or two will be quite a difficult transition. “In the current economic environment, your business can’t afford to lose even one visitor who uses a browser for which your site is not optimized.”

So, to prevent this, he gave some measurements to provide a quality end-user Web experience, using cross-browser testing:

• The visual—Does your Web site look “right?” Do graphics look the same across all browsers? How is text rendering? Are Web apps showing up in the right place? Any missing function buttons?

• The functional—Do Web Is your site fully compatible? site functions work correctly? Do critical business functions (i.e. the checkout process) work successfully across all browsers and OS combinations?

• Performance—Overall, how does your site perform? Use these three benchmarks to assess end user Web application performance—availability, response time and consistency.

• Perceived performance— What the user actually sees. A Web application isn’t what the developer builds, it is what the end user sees. This essentially captures the time it takes for your application to be available for user interaction.