Continuing on my browser thread from last week, another browser trend is the recent growth of browsers that need to be supported/tested on.

Since IE 4 or so, the number of browsers out there seemed to be shrinking. It was easier when you just had to make sure things looked right in IE 6, Firefox and Safari.

On one hand, I’m glad that there are folks building browsers – choice and options are good things. On the other hand, it’s a fair amount of work to test in all of these browsers and tweak accordingly.

Here are the browsers I feel I definitely have to test in:

• Firefox 2 (with Camino, Flock, etc.)
• IE 6
• IE 7
• Safari 2

The second tier of browsers includes:

• Opera
• Firefox 1.5
• Safari 1.x

Then you’ve also got:

• Mobile browsers (lots of them)
• Custom browsers (Wii, PSP, etc.)

This testing situation is one of the big reasons I want to get a Mac Pro so I can run a bunch of Parallels instances for testing.