Browser Market Share 2014
In a world with constantly changing technologies, it's extremely important to keep tabs on what changes effect your business's existence and functionally on the web and what steps should be taken to keep these changes on the positive side.
One major aspect of our responsive web design and development analysis comes in the form of browser testing. Different browsers can and do display and render websites in different ways, whether that's though available web fonts, image rendering, code adaptations or overall website display. It's necessary for us to make sure our websites render and function properly between all browsers, and their various versions.
In our constant attempt to stay current with the times, we run a periodic browser share analysis on our own data, track national averages and run comparisons of the two.
Here are the latest national browser market share as of March 2014 reported by NetMarketShare:
- 48.97% Internet Explorer (IE)
- 16.73% Chrome
- 14.48% Firefox
- 13.04% Safari (including iPhones)
- 3.60 Android Phone Browser
- 3.18% Other
- 21.14% - IE 8.0
- 15.71% - IE 11.0
- 8.76% - IE 9.0
- 7.12% IE 10.0
- 4.15% - IE 6.0-
- .80% - IE 7.0
Most notably, the major changes from a year ago include a slight decrease in the market share for IE, a slight increase for Chrome, and decrease for Firefox.
Driving the changes with mobile browsers, Safari experienced an increase in the browser share as well as Android. This is basically attributed to higher numbers of individuals accessing the web from their phones and tablets.
Within the 48.97% market share for Internet Explorer (IE) we further track the breakdown between IE browser versions:
The various versions of IE create the most issues when it comes to browser compliance and capabilities of a website's display and functionality. However, on a positive note, with new Windows computers having the IE browser settings come preset for automatic updates, hopefully this will lead to less confusion and quicker updates for novice users, making our job of browser testing and compliance easier.