As web technology advances and development standards evolve some web browsers are falling behind.

Many lack the ability to support new technologies and file types or even provide the best available user experience. These lagging browsers put e-commerce businesses in something of a quandary. How do you offer customers the best possible user experience without leaving some of those customers behind?

Unfortunately, not every browser complies with the W3C standards. For example, Microsoft has consistently chosen to ignore many aspects of the W3C standard, making its browser harder to work with. And although the CSS3 working group has made a lot of recommendations, almost no browser fully supports what will soon be the CSS3 (Cascading Style Sheets 3) standard.

According to browser statistics from W3schools.com, 45.5 percent of Internet users surfed with a Firefox browser in January 2009, making Firefox far and away the most popular single web browser. Some 25.7 percent of Internet users in January 2009 browsed using Internet Explorer 7 (IE7), and 18.5 percent of Internet users had Internet Explorer 6 (IE6).So if we design for Firefox, IE7, and IE6, we can safely reach 89.7 percent of Internet users. And since Firefox is one of the most compliant browsers around, when we design for Firefox we get good renderings in Google's Chrome (3.9 percent of Internet users) and Opera (2.3 percent of Internet users) too.