The 2008 web browser explosion could not have come at a worse time: the most important online holiday shopping season ever. As a result, some online shoppers will be faced with website pages that load slowly, are missing text or graphics, or even fail to complete the checkout function.

"This year more than ever, websites can look and function differently from one browser to another," says Matt Poepsel, vice president of Gomez, Inc., whose services test and monitor the performance of websites. "Online retailers can no longer assume that all shoppers are using Internet Explorer. They must ensure their sites look good and work well across a wide range of browsers - or risk frustrating customers and losing the sale."

New browsers such as Firefox, Safari, Chrome and others today represent nearly 30 percent of the worldwide market share and are increasingly being adopted, especially by younger, tech-savvy shoppers, Yet the majority of online retailers still standardize their web development and testing mainly on Internet Explorer.

Exacerbating the issue is the multiplicity of browser versions running on different computer operating systems (OS), resulting in hundreds of different browser/OS combinations. Typically, only the largest e-commerce companies have the staff and infrastructure to test and optimize their web sites to handle this many variables.

"Today's shoppers expect a 'Google-like' experience, wherever they shop online, whatever browser they use," adds Poepsel. "In this weak economy where retailers are counting on e-commerce to pick up the slack for physical stores and online shoppers are eagerly searching for bargains, the stakes are higher than ever."

The majority of online retailers continue to be cautiously optimistic about how their businesses will perform during the next 12 months, according to the "State of Retailing Online, the 11th Annual Shop.org Study" conducted by Forrester Research. The report advises that online retailers must execute well to capture possible sales.