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Browsers and Operating Systems | Web Directions

• About the Survey
• The Audience
• Operating Systems and Browsers
• Markup
• CSS and Presentation
• JavaScript and the DOM
• Rich Media
• Server tech­nolo­gies
• The Cloud
• Conclusions and predictions

• What oper­at­ing sys­tems do they use in their day to day work?
• What browsers do they use?
• What browsers do they test with?
• Mobile Browsers

The next set of ques­tions we asked focussed on the respon­dents day to day tech­nol­ogy use — the browsers and oper­at­ing sys­tems they use them­selves, and then asked which browsers they test the web sites and appli­ca­tions they build with.

What oper­at­ing sys­tems do they use in their day to day work?

Given the still very high reported mar­ket share of the Windows oper­at­ing sys­tem (as high as 92% accord­ing to Hitslink in November 2009), the fact that the sin­gle largest oper­at­ing sys­tem respon­dents reported using was Mac OS X 10.6 (at 37%), with Mac OS X 10.5 reported as the OS of choice by a fur­ther 13% of respon­dents, and 10.4 still at 1.3% mak­ing gave a total of over 50% of all respon­dents using Mac OS X. This is up from around 46% mar­ket share for Mac OS X among respon­dents last year. In the 13 months between sur­veys, Mac OS X 10.6 was released, and yet this is now the OS of choice for 70% of Mac OS users — show­ing how rapidly Mac users tend to upgrade.

Last year, Windows through all ver­sions slightly lead Mac OS X in mar­ket share terms, but Mac OS X now leads Windows 50.7% to 41%.

Last year we observed that Windows XP had a four­fold lead over the much newer Windows Vista, and while XP is still the num­ber 1 ver­sion of Windows used (24.5% of all users), Windows 7 has shown much higher rates of adop­tion at 10.3% than Vista (down to 6.2% from 9.2% last survey).

The other sig­nif­i­cantly used OS is Linux, which around 4.2% of respon­dents use as their pri­mary OS. This is down slightly (4.5%) from 2008, but sig­nif­i­cantly higher than var­i­ous sources report for gen­eral Linux use.

Which OS do you pri­mar­ily use for day to day work?

2010

OSCount%Windows XP34324.47%Windows Vista876.21%Windows 714510.34%Mac OS X 10.4201.43%Mac OS X 10.518413.12%Mac OS X 10.650736.16%Linux594.21%Unix00%Other40.29%

2008

OSCount%Windows XP46537.68%Windows Vista1139.16%Mac OS X 10.4655.27%Mac OS X 10.551241.49%Linux564.54%Unix10.08%Other70.57%

Overall OS share

2010

OSCount%Windows57541%Mac OS X71150.71%Linux594.21%Unix00%Other40.29%

2008

OSCount%Windows57846.84%Mac OS X57746.76%Linux564.54%Unix10.08%Other70.57%

What browsers do they use?

Of more prac­ti­cal inter­est par­tic­u­larly to web pro­fes­sion­als, is the ques­tion of which browsers respon­dents use. Here we asked sev­eral related ques­tions. We asked respon­dents which browsers they use them­selves, and in addi­tion for the first time, what fac­tors are impor­tant in that deci­sion. We then asked which browsers respon­dents tested their sites in which should reflect the sense of which browsers remain rel­e­vant in the mind of web professionals

As with last year, among our respon­dents, all ver­sions of Internet Explorer com­bined (includ­ing IE8, released since the last sur­vey) were used sub­stan­tially less as a pri­mary browser than Firefox or Safari alone. IE 6, 7 and 8 com­bined had a share of under 2% (last year IE6 and 7 com­bined were around 3.5%) Internet Explorer 8, the most widely used ver­sion of IE at under 1% (last year IE7 was used by 3.2%) was used less than any other browser we asked about, other than Safari 2. But there were other big move­ments as well.

Last sur­vey, Firefox 3 was the 800lb Gorilla, with 60.5% mar­ket share. Now, Firefox 3.5 (16.3%) and 3.6 (37.8%) com­bined have a share some­what lower, at 54%. In the interim Safari 4 was released and now has a nearly iden­ti­cal share at 20.26% that Safari 3 had last sur­vey (20.91%). Evidence for how rapidly Safari users upgrade is to be found in the fact that only 2 respon­dents our of over 1400 now user Safari 3. Opera has seen a drop off from around 3% to under 2%, but the big mover is Google Chrome, up from 4.2% to 17.2%.

As Chrome and Safari share a very sim­i­lar under­ly­ing core, Webkit, among our respon­dents, Webkit with 37% has gained dra­mat­i­cally on Gecko, Firefox’s engine in the last 13 months.

These are of course pro­foundly dif­fer­ent results from gen­eral browser mar­ket share. For exam­ple as of late 2008, Hitslink was report­ing IE mar­ket share of 61.5% (down from around 70% in late 2008), Firefox 24.2% (up from 21%). Safari 4.5% (down from 7.3%), and Chrome at 5.6% (up from less than 1%). In gen­eral browser share Opera is also up con­sid­er­ably to 2.4%, from under 1%.

Which browser do you pri­mar­ily use for day to day browsing?

2010

BrowserCount%IE600%IE7110.78%IE8130.93%Firefox 3.522916.33%Firefox 3.653037.8%Safari 320.14%Safari 428420.26%Google Chrome24117.19%Opera241.71%Other100.71%

2008

BrowserCount%IE6151.22%IE7403.24%IE830.24%Firefox 2443.57%Firefox 374160.05%Safari 210.08%Safari 325820.91%Google Chrome524.21%Opera383.08%Other272.19%

Rendering Engine mar­ket share

2010

EngineCount%Trident241.7%Gecko75954.1%Webkit52746.6%Opera241.71%

2008

BrowserCount%Trident584.7%Gecko78563.6%Webkit31125.2%Opera383.08%

Summarizing last years results, we observed

Exactly why such a high per­cent­age of respon­dents opt for a browser other than the default plat­form browser (pre­dom­i­nantly Firefox, though Opera on Windows is nearly as widely used as Internet Explorer) on both the Mac and Windows is hard to say, and would be worth inves­ti­gat­ing in fol­low up sur­veys. Reasons might include the wide­spread use of devel­oper tools like Firebug for Firefox, and DragonFly for Opera.

So, this year, we went ahead and asked. We iden­ti­fied sev­eral fac­tors that might be rel­e­vant to a respondent’s choice, and then gave them the option of say­ing how impor­tant (on a scale of 1 to 5) this fac­tor is. We then grouped these into three bands — not impor­tant (1 or 2 out of 5), impor­tant (3 out of 5) and very impor­tant (4 or 5 out of 5).

We were some­what sur­prised by the results. Based on some ad hoc sur­vey­ing via Twitter, we thought that devel­oper tools (like Firebug), would have played per­haps the most sig­nif­i­cant role. In fact, built-​​in and plug-​​in devel­oper tools received the the low­est per­cent­age of “very impor­tant” (and com­bined “impor­tant” and “very impor­tant” responses) (though between 40 and 50% of respon­dents still reported that these tools were very impor­tant to their deci­sion). At the top of the list was “stan­dards sup­port”, with 81.5% of respon­dents say­ing this was a very impor­tant fac­tor in their deci­sion of pri­mary browser. Stability and per­for­mance also proved pop­u­lar, while CSS3 sup­port (with 62% rat­ing it very impor­tant and a fur­ther 19.6% rat­ing it impor­tant in their deci­sion) com­fort­ably out­pointed HTML5 sup­port, with 55.8% and 23.3% respectively.

What fea­tures are impor­tant in your decision?

2010

Featurenot impor­tantimpor­tantvery impor­tantBuilt in Developer Tools30.16%23.62%42.73%Plug in Developer Tools30.4%14.3%51.84%Performance10.06%12.08%74.41%sta­bil­ity9.98%11.71%74.84%Standards Support9.01%6.1%81.41%CSS3 Support15.4%19.61%61.51%HTML5 Support17.45%23.24%55.83%User Experience Design14.59%20.61%61.32%Familiarity18.57%20.3%57.67%

Mobile Browsing

While we didn’t ask explic­itly which mobile browsers respon­dents use, we did ask devel­op­ers what other browsers they use in addi­tion to their pri­mary browser. From the results of this ques­tion (which required users to enter the names of the browsers, and not merely select from a list, and so if any­thing under-​​represents the nom­i­nated browsers), Mobile Safari was men­tioned by 29% of respon­dents (up from 16% the pre­vi­ous sur­vey). Android was men­tioned by 3.8% of respon­dents, Opera Mini 2.6%, Opera Mobile 1.5% (both more or less hold­ing steady), while Blackberry increased from .75% to around 1.1%. A Nokia browser (which spe­cific one it is often not pos­si­ble to deter­mine) was men­tioned by .8%, down from 1.6% last year. Palm’s Pre, while being in many ways the most web devel­oper friendly, was men­tioned by only 3 of the respon­dents to the survey.

Mobile Browser Summary

2010

BrowserCount%Mobile Safari41329%Android523.8%Pre3.2%Blackberry151.1%Opera mini362.6%Opera mobile201.43%Nokia11.8%

2008

BrowserCount%Mobile Safari20016%Blackberry9.75%Opera mini423.4%Opera mobile201.6%Nokia201.6%

What browsers do they test with?

While even in the last two or three years browsers have made big strides in more con­sis­tently sup­port­ing under­ly­ing web stan­dards, mean­ing fewer cross browser headaches for devel­op­ers, respon­dents still found it impor­tant to test their sites in mul­ti­ple browsers. Which browsers they choose reflects the col­lec­tive judge­ment of the indus­try as to the rel­e­vance of par­tic­u­lar browsers.

In the 13 months between our two sur­veys, there’s been con­sid­er­able change in the browsers respon­dents test in. In the first sur­vey, the sin­gle most widely tested in browser was Firefox 3, at 92%. IE7 was tested in by 89.5%, with IE6 still occu­py­ing the atten­tion of 78.5% of respon­dents. The then in late beta IE8 only had a sur­pris­ingly low 29.5% of respon­dents con­cerned enough to test with it. Meanwhile Safari 3 then had over 80% of respon­dents test­ing their sites in it.

In this most recent sur­vey, IE8, and IE7 top the list, with 83.5% and 82.5% of respon­dents test­ing in them respec­tively. Safari 4 still has 80% of respon­dents test­ing with it, but Firefox 3.6, in com­par­i­son with Firefox 3’s 92% has 69% of respon­dents test­ing in it, along with 61% test­ing in Firefox 3.5. This in part reflects the frag­men­ta­tion we saw among Firefox users — split between ver­sions 3.5 and 3.6, rather than all using the same ver­sion as in the pre­vi­ous year. IE6 is fol­low­ing IE5.5 off the radar as a browser which respon­dents feel needs to be tested in, drop­ping from 78.5% to 59.7%.

Reflecting its increase in use by respon­dents (and not least its arrival on the Mac plat­form since the last sur­vey) Chrome increased from a healthy 39.5% to now 76.9%.

Opera, for its rel­a­tively low mar­ket share and use as a pri­mary browser among respon­dents, man­aged to more or less hold steady among respon­dents who test their sites with it at just under 50%.

On the mobile front, Mobile Safari jumped from 21% to 38%, while Opera Mobile edged up from 4.9% to 5.7%. Android recorded a sur­pris­ingly low .8%, given its much higher men­tion by respon­dents as a browser they actu­ally use! Blackberry is men­tioned even less, with the Pre receiv­ing only a sin­gle men­tion. In the case of the Pre, and per­haps Android, being webkit based, per­haps devel­op­ers con­sider that a site which works on the iPhone will also work fine on these other webkit based browsers. There’s also the chal­lenge that only actu­ally phys­i­cally using a device allows for ade­quate testing.

Which browsers do you test your web sites with?

2010

BrowserCount%IE5181.28%IE683759.7%IE7115882.6%IE8117183.52%Firefox 215711.2%Firefox 352237.23%Firefox 3.585961.27%Firefox 3.697369.4%Safari 2362.57%Safari 335825.53%Safari 4112480.17%Mobile Safari53338.02%Google Chrome107876.89%Opera66047.08%Opera Mobile805.71%

2008

BrowserCount%IE5534.29%IE696878.44%IE7110489.47%IE836429.50%Firefox 260448.95%Firefox 3113591.98%Opera61649.92%Opera Mobile614.94%Safari 223719.21%Safari 399280.39%Mobile Safari25920.99%Google Chrome48839.55%

In the last sur­vey wrap up, we observed

It will be inter­est­ing to see how the num­ber of peo­ple test­ing in mobile browsers changes in the com­ing 12 months, and it would be expected that a con­sid­er­ably higher per­cent­age of devel­op­ers will be test­ing in some kind of mobile browser 12 months from now.

While test­ing on the iPhone has increased dra­mat­i­cally, test­ing on other devices, par­tic­u­larly Android, has not seen any­thing like this increase. As we’ll see later in the sur­vey, the num­ber of respon­dents opti­miz­ing their sites for mobile is still sur­pris­ingly low. As that per­cent­age increases, we’d expect to see a related increase in the num­ber of respon­dents focussing their test­ing specif­i­cally for mobile devices.

Next

Next we’ll look at the markup tech­niques and philoso­phies that respon­dents use to develop for the web.