Over at TechCrunch today, Michael Arrington shared his findings on the messed up WalMart Video Download Store on Firefox. Although from the comments it seems that the problem can be fixed with a hard refresh on Firefox, for my case, every single page needs to be hard refreshed! Its not going to work this way.

So it seems WalMart is not doing their work to make sure the pages load nicely in both IE and Firefox!

Here is the screenshot in IE:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/02/06/nice-one-walmart

And here is the mess in Firefox!

Walmart Screenshot in FireFox

To tell the truth – I wouldn’t believe they were the exact same site! Come to think of it, its not an easy task to pull off, this one! How did they get the sites to look so different between browsers?

I think this really serves as a reminder for us to always test across browsers – and IMO, at least on IE, Firefox, and Opera (and even better with Safari). Like one commenter said

when your site looks like this, expect them to never come back.

This also reminds us about usability in optimization – some of us are so caught up in the SEO process that we neglect the aesthetic appeal. I think ultimately, there must be a good balance between optimizing for humans verses search engine bots. That, I think, is what a true SEO expert capable of.