In July 2020, two thirds of people use Chrome as their preferred desktop browser. Safari comes in at second place with a 17% market share. Good web developers and designers should be designing sites to meet web standards so that sites will function seamlessly between browsers. At the very least, they should be testing the user experience in at least Chrome and Safari.
Google develops Chrome, and since they’re the most dominant search engine by a country mile, they have enormous reach. Chrome is also fast, user-centric and easy to develop for. It has endless extensions, which make work and play easier and it displays HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript seamlessly. It’s good for developers and users.
Chrome is also the most popular browser on mobile with just over 60% market share (with Safari usage to 23% market share in July 2020).
Apple’s historical dominance of the tablet sphere makes Safari the most popular browser for tablets at 47% market share (with Chrome rapidly gaining more traction over the past year to 39% market share).
What does all this mean for you?
Well, you should make sure when performing user testing on soon-to-be-launched (or just updated) websites that you test everything works as planned on any browser and on any device or at the very least cross device and in the most popular browsers of Chrome and Safari.
So, we know which browser people prefer to use, but what devices are they using?
In July 2020, mobile has the largest market share at 51%, compared to desktop’s 46% share. Tablet usage is still comparatively low, at 3%.
We’ve all known it for a while now, but the data just reinforces the fact: websites must be responsive so they work well on any device and in particular on mobile.
If your site only works for desktop users, you could be turning away almost half of your potential traffic. Your website needs to work for every visitor. The best way to do this is to create a responsive site and tailor content to give users the best possible browsing experience.
A Content Management System (CMS) is the platform used by developers to build and organise websites.
WordPress has the largest market share, with 44% of the top 1 million websites.
This market share demonstrates the significant popularity of WordPress. WordPress is an actively supported Open Source software platform we typically recommend for business websites both big and small. It has a large community and ecosystem around it making it a popular choice not only in Australia but also globally.
WooCommerce is the most popular eCommerce platform for the top 1 million eCommerce sites around the world. Both Magento and Shopify also have a healthy share of the eCommerce market.