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Tomasz Niezgoda (LinkedIn/tomaszniezgoda & GitHub/tniezg) is the author of this blog. It contains original content written with care.

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Target Web Development Platforms, October 2017

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IE's share has been steadily decreasing. Chrome is well in the lead worldwide according to all the gathered records and it's lead is significant.

IE 11 should probably still be supported in most situations. A lot of projects use compilers such as Babel that polyfill or somehow add support for new standards to older browsers.

Version 11 of IE was a standards compliant browser on release in 2013. But it will continue to ignore the latest standards. It's clear that Edge is Microsoft's main focus now.

And currently, Edge has better support for standards, but also lower adoption compared to IE's decrease in popularity. Edge is also only available on Windows, but Microsoft is testing Edge for iOS and Android and it may get released soon on both platforms.

Statistics (averaged and not meant to be exact, information relates to worldwide usage):

All platforms

  • Chrome 51%
  • Safari 18%
  • Firefox 6%
  • IE 6%
  • UC 4%
  • Opera 3%
  • Edge 2%
  • Remaining 10% (can use the same engines as leading browsers, ex. Webkit)

Mobiles: Chrome 52%, Safari 18%, UC 14%, Samsung Internet 7%, Opera 6%, Remaining < 1%.

Tablets: Safari 61%, Chrome 31%, Android 6%, Remaining 2%.

Desktops: Chrome 60%, Firefox 11%, IE 10%, Safari 8%, Edge 4%, Remaining 4%.

Usage of mobile browsers is now passing desktop browsers and tablets are used by about 4% of users.

UC Browser is mostly used in China, India and Indonesia. It was created by Alibaba and runs on a derivative of Webkit.

Statistics checked:

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
  2. http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share
  3. https://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php
  4. https://www.sitepoint.com/browsers-website-support/

By the way, StatCounter is a great place for finding clean usage statistics graphs of the most basic device characteristics, such as screen resolution, browser and vendor.