A few of you know this, but I’ve been going through a health-related issue: gallstones. Me being the normal American male that hasn’t seen a doctor since the first Bush Administration, I had to use the Anthem Blue Cross website to find a doctor consults on internal medicine, and that was a chore.

The worst part about using the website was actually finding the doctor required some dynamic AJAX that (of course) didn’t work on my Mac Firefox 3.0.whatever.

The lesson here? Test all browsers with your application, because not doing so will result in some very angry users.

You might not thing that’s important (who really uses Mac Safari anyways!), but it is, especially if your site or application makes money, skipping one or more browser platforms may mean skipping millions of users, all of whom have credit cards and their “need” to use them.

PC Browsers I would test for:

• Internet Explorer 6 and 7
• Firefox 3
• Google Chrome

Mac browsers I would test for:

• Firefox 3
• Safari

The Anthem Blue Cross site is especially troublesome, because the issues there affect users that have very real health problems, and going to the wrong doctor means an extra cost to the insurance company; how much do you think this adds to the tab on insurance costs in America?