Browser Survey Results

The results of the Strictly Software Browser Survey

If you have visited my site in the last couple of months you may have noticed the survey on Browser usage that popped up. It was geared towards developers to gather information about their favourite browsers in terms of developing, debugging and features.

I have let it run for a couple of months and now I am publishing the results. Thanks to everyone who took the time to answer the questions.

Question 1: Which browser do you use when developing new code

Firefox 56%

Internet Explorer 21%

Chrome 10%

Opera 6%

Safari 5%

Other Option... 2%

Question 2: Which browser has the best inbuilt features for developing

Firefox 44%

Chrome 19%

Internet Explorer 17%

Safari 8%

Opera 8%

Other Option... 3%

Question 3: Which browser do you use for personal web surfing

Firefox 50%

Chrome 22%

Internet Explorer 14%

Opera 8%

Safari 5%

Other Option... 1%

Question 4: Which developer tool do you consider has the best features

Firebug 64%

IE 8's developer toolbar 17%

Webkit's Developer Tools 7%

Other Option... 5% (the majority of which said Web-Developer add-on for FireFox)

DragonFly 4%

Firebug-Lite 2%

Question 5: Which one feature could you not live without

Element inspection 40%

Dynamic DOM manipulation 20%

View generated source 18%

Clear cookies and cache 14%

Disable Javascript 6%

Other Option... 2%

I don't think anything stood out for me as a major surprise in the answers I received. In any survey done over the last 10 years or so over the whole web surfing community Internet Explorer always comes out in top place for browsing but the majority of users questioned are not developers and a large percentage of those are still only using it because they actually believe the little blue e on their desktop IS the Internet.

This is shown by a recent NetApps survey that found IE 8 has just taken the top spot from IE 6 and that Firefox 3.5 has taken 3rd place narrowly just beating IE 7. This is not much of a surprise to me as my own reports from the 200+ sites I run always show IE 6,7,8 taking the top 3 spots with over 75% of all usage between them.

However when looking at browser usage for people in the industry i.e web developers and designers FireFox seems to always take top spot purely because of the numerous add-ons and built in features. However I also know from personal experience and from colleagues that within the year or so Chrome has been around it has built up quite an on-line following and for pure web surfing I personally don't think it can be beaten for speed, simplicity and usability and this seems to be proven by it taking 2nd place as the browser techies like to use when surfing.

Anyway thanks for taking part.