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Matthew Adams By Matthew Adams Co-Founder
We are in the era of the modern browser - market share analysis January 2016

We're on the cusp of a new age - the era of the "modern browser".

As older IE versions are effectively mothballed by Microsoft (bar a few holdouts in the UK public sector and elsewhere, because they weren't able to get their act together with 2 years' notice), I thought we'd take one final snapshot of our browser market share analysis, based on the traffic from a couple of sites: one that targets global Devs, CIOs & CTOs, and another that targets English ABC1s.

Global Developers, CIOs and CTOs

Browser % Share
Chrome 69.09%
Firefox 12.51%
Internet Explorer 7.86%
Safari 5.60%
Edge 3.27%
Opera 0.79%
Opera Mini 0.18%
Safari (in-app) 0.18%
Android Browser 0.10%
UC Browser 0.09%
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Developers still heavily favour Chrome - almost 70% of you! Firefox is in at number two with 12%, and IE is hanging on in there with a shade under 8%. Microsoft's 10% share amongst developers is, however, maintained, by the 3% usage of Edge we now see.

Looking at IE Versions

Version % Share
11 87.23%
9 6.92%
10 4.31%
8 1.22%
7 0.24%
6 0.08%
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Basically, everyone is on IE11. There are a few devs being punished with Vista and XP (And still an IE6 holdout there somewhere, the poor lost soul.)

English ABC1s

Browser % Share
Safari 48.52%
Chrome 32.66%
Internet Explorer 9.82%
Firefox 5.19%
Safari (in-app) 1.23%
Edge 0.91%
Android Browser 0.76%
Amazon Silk 0.51%
Opera 0.17%

IE Versions

Version % Share
11 70.20%
9 15.12%
10 9.16%
8 4.65%
7 0.87%

Firefox's decline continues, as does IE's. Edge has just appeared. Safari on IOS continues to dominate with nearly 50% of all browser visits - though this has peaked over the year.

IE's share is now utterly dominated by IE11. A few Vista diehards are on IE 9, and a tiny rump of XP diehards are on IE7 and 8. The number of visits is so low as to be ignorable (fewer than 3% of all visits)

In summary - we really are in the age of the modern browser; not just by dictat, but by consumer behaviour. It's time to forge ahead, and stop specifying IE7/8/9/10 fallbacks in our site designs.

Matthew Adams

Co-Founder

Matthew Adams

Matthew was CTO of a venture-backed technology start-up in the UK & US for 10 years, and is now the co-founder of endjin, which provides technology strategy, experience and development services to its customers who are seeking to take advantage of Microsoft Azure and the Cloud.