1. Market Share of Browsers and Devices

We kick off this report with the aggregated data on the market share of each browser and device. It is difficult to get a solid snapshot of this, due to the major discrepancies between geographies and/or websites. For example, smartphone penetration varies greatly between countries and usage of Internet Explorer is much higher in corporate environments than at home. An analytics package like Google Analytics will tell you the exact breakdown for your site(s).

In this report, we use market data from StatCounter, one of the world’s largest analytics firms. We combined their desktop andmobile data into a single report. Roughly 74% of the market now supports HTML5, up from 66% last quarter, when we first published this report. Since IE 6/7/8 do not support HTML5, alternatives like Flash remain very useful for video playback. However, both Chrome and Firefox surpassed the IE 6/7/8’s combined market share last month.

On the mobile front, iOS and Android still lead by a wide margin; both support HTML5 video. Android at large still supports Flash, but we noticed that Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) is not always released with built-in Flash support (e.g. not on Samsung’s Galaxy S2). Eventually, mobile Flash support will disappear entirely.

Note that connected TVs and set-top boxes are not yet a factor. The number of shipped devices is simply too small. Gaming consoles do have a decent install base, but they lack (intuitive) web browsing capabilities.