As I’m in the midst of writing a book on JavaScript, I’m hyperaware of browser market share at the moment. Although my “Modern JavaScript: Develop and Design” book takes a progressive enhancement approach, which means the end result will work reliably across all browsers and devices, it’s still good to pay attention to what people are commonly using. At the very least, watching the browser market share helps you to know what devices and browsers to test on first. Anyway, InfoWorld had an article last week discussing how IE’s market share is dropping towards 50% (really? still that high?), based on statistics from NetMarketShare. As the article points out, in the mobile realm, Safari remains the clear leader, even increasing its share to over 50%. This despite the fact that Android phones far and away outsell iPhones. But Safari is also running on the iPad and the iPod Touch.
An interesting note to me is that the two most commonly used browsers–IE on the desktop; Safari on mobile devices–are not the browsers that most developers and designers are using, at least not as their primary tool. This is another example of the developer’s primary hurdle with any Web site or application: bridging the gap between what the developer thinks is right and what people will actually do!
