According to a survey released in January 2009, almost a third of Internet users view web sites in browsers other than Internet Explorer.

Here is the breakdown:

Source: Market Share by Net Applications

(Internet Explorer's market share has declined 7% in less than year, while Firefox, Safari and now the upstart Chrome showed significant gains in that same period.)

Why is this important? Because web developers often use Internet Explorer (IE) exclusively to view and test their web pages ... but IE often interprets the HTML code in a web page differently than other browsers do, so pages that look just fine in IE can look terrible in other browsers - and vice versa.

In other words, if you don't look at your site in other browsers, you risk looking bad to a third of your visitors.

The solution is easy. Preview your site in more than one browser. They're all free downloads. At least install Firefox and Safari (both have Windows and Mac versions); that way you'll have over 97% of your visitors covered. But hedge your bets with Chrome, a Google release that's growing quickly. (Opera has its die-hard fans and pops up on cell phones, but Netscape - retired by AOL - is not in current release.)