We care an awful lot about the kinds of browsers and computers visiting Flickr. As people update to the latest versions of their browsers, the capabilities we can build against improve, which lets us build cool new things. At the same time, if lots of people continue using older browsers then we have to do extra work to gracefully support them.
These days we not only have incredibly capable browsers, but thanks to the transparent and rapid update process of Chrome, Firefox, and soon Internet Explorer (hooray!), we can rely on new features rapidly showing up en masse. This is crazy great, but it doesn’t mean that we can stop paying attention to our usage statistics. In fact, as people spend more time on their phones, there’s as much of a need for a watchful eye as ever.
We’ve never really shared our internal numbers, but we thought it would be interesting to take a look at the browsers Flickr visitors used in 2014. We use these numbers constantly to inform our project planning. Since limitations in older browsers take time to support we have to be judicious in picking which battles to fight. As you’ll see below, these numbers can be quite dynamic with a popular browser dropping to nearly 0% market-share in just a year. Let’s dive in and see some specifics.
Fort Vancouver by Kate Dickerson
Top level OSes and browsers
At the highest level we learn a lot by looking at our OS family data. Probably the most notable thing here is how much of our traffic is coming from mobile devices. Moreover, the rate of growth is eye-popping. And this is just our website – this data doesn’t include our iOS or Android clients at all. A quarter of our traffic is from mobile devices.
| 2013 Q4 | 2014 Q4 | Y/Y | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Windows | 56.55% | 50.61% | -5.94 |
| Macintosh | 21.49% | 21.42% | -0.07 |
| iOS | 11.09% | 17.61% | 6.52 |
| Android | 5.39% | 7.82% | 2.43 |
| Other | 5.48% | 2.54% | -2.94 |
Let’s slice things slightly differently and look at browser families. We greatly differ from internet-wide traffic in that IE isn’t the outright majority browser. In fact, it clocks in at only the #4 position. More than half of Flickr visitors use a Webkit/Webkit-heritage browser (Safari and Chrome, respectively). Chrome rapidly climbed into its leadership position over the last few years and it’s stabilized there. Safari is hugely buoyed by iOS’s incredible growth numbers, while IE has been punished by Windows’s Flickr market-share decline.
| 2013 Q4 | 2014 Q4 | Y/Y | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chrome | 35.71% | 35.42% | -0.29 |
| Safari | 24.11% | 27.50% | 3.39 |
| Firefox | 17.94% | 18.29% | 0.35 |
| Internet Explorer | 13.98% | 10.31% | -3.67 |
| Other | 8.26% | 8.48% | 0.22 |
Fine-grained details
We can go a step further and see many details in the individual versions of OSes and browsers out there. It’s one thing to say “Windows is down 6% over the year” but another to say “the growth rate for the latest version of Windows is 350% year over year.” When we look at the individual versions we can infer quite a bit of detail around update rates and changes in the landscape.
OS version details
A few highlights:
- Windows 7 is on the decline, XP and Vista fell by roughly 50% each, and Windows 8 and 8.1 are surging ahead.
- iOS 8.1 and Android 5.0 don’t appear in the list due to their late appearance in Q4. Our current monthly numbers have iOS 8.1 far outpacing every other iOS version.
- OS X 10.10 has accelerated Mac user upgrades; since its launch 10.9 has shed over a percent per month, and the legacy versions have sharply accelerated their decline.
| 2013 Q4 | 2014 Q4 | Y/Y | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Windows NT | 3.39% | 0% | -3.39 |
| Windows XP | 10.12% | 4.49% | -5.63 |
| Windows Vista | 3.56% | 2.41% | -1.15 |
| Windows 7 | 36.29% | 33.14% | -3.15 |
| Windows 8 | 2.01% | 2.31% | 0.30 |
| Windows 8.1 | 1.06% | 8.22% | 7.16 |
| Macintosh OS X 10.5* | – | 0.65% | 0.65 |
| Macintosh OS X 10.6* | – | 2.90% | 2.90 |
| Macintosh OS X 10.7* | – | 1.91% | 1.91 |
| Macintosh OS X 10.8* | – | 1.83% | 1.83 |
| Macintosh OS X 10.9* | – | 8.26% | 8.26 |
| Macintosh OS X 10.10 | 0% | 5.69% | 5.69 |
| iOS 4.3 | 0.19% | 0% | -0.19 |
| iOS 5.0 | 0.12% | 0% | -0.12 |
| iOS 5.1 | 0.59% | 0% | -0.59 |
| iOS 6.0 | 0.42% | 0% | -0.42 |
| iOS 6.1 | 2.02% | 0.61% | -1.41 |
| iOS 7.0 | 7.36% | 1.54% | -5.82 |
| iOS 7.1 | 0% | 5.76% | 5.76 |
| iOS 8.0 | 0% | 3.27% | 3.27 |
| Android 2.3 | 0.77% | 0% | -0.77 |
| Android 4.0 | 0.82% | 0% | -0.82 |
| Android 4.1 | 2.11% | 1.22% | -0.89 |
| Android 4.2 | 0.84% | 1.16% | 0.32 |
| Android 4.3 | 0.39% | 0.56% | 0.17 |
| Android 4.4 | 0% | 3.80% | 3.80 |
| Linux | 4.37% | 1.94% | -2.43 |
* We didn’t start breaking out individual versions of OS X until Q1 2014. So unfortunately for this post we don’t have great info breaking down the versions of OS X, but we will in the future. OS X 10.10 did not exist in Q1 2014 so it’s counted as a natural 0% in our Q1 data.
Browser version details
These are the most dynamic numbers of the bunch. If there’s one thing they prove, it’s how incredibly effective the upgrade policies of Chrome and Firefox are. Where Safari and IE have years-old versions still hanging on (I’m looking at you Safari 5.1 and IE 8.0), virtually every Chrome and Firefox user is using a browser released within the last six weeks. That’s a hugel powerful thing. The IE team has suggested that Windows 10’s Project Spartan will adopt this policy, which is absolutely fantastic news. A few highlights:
- Despite not being on a continuous upgrade cycle, Safari and IE were able to piggyback on successful OS launches to consolidate their users on their latest releases.
- IE 8.0 is the only non-latest version of IE still holding on, thanks to its status as the latest version available for the still somewhat popular Windows XP.
| 2013 Q4 | 2014 Q4 | Y/Y | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chrome 22.0.1229 | 1.67% | 0% | -1.67 |
| Chrome 29.0.1547.76 | 1.39% | 0% | -1.39 |
| Chrome 30.0.1599.101 | 8.94% | 0% | -8.94 |
| Chrome 30.0.1599.69 | 3.74% | 0% | -3.74 |
| Chrome 31.0.1650.57 | 6.08% | 0% | -6.08 |
| Chrome 31.0.1650.63 | 6.91% | 0% | -6.91 |
| Chrome 37.0.2062.124 | 0% | 4.59% | 4.59 |
| Chrome 38.0.2125.104 | 0% | 3.05% | 3.05 |
| Chrome 38.0.2125.111 | 0% | 6.65% | 6.65 |
| Chrome 39.0.2171.71 | 0% | 4.09% | 4.09 |
| Chrome 39.0.2171.95 | 0% | 4.51% | 4.51 |
| Safari 5.0 | 1.96% | 0% | -1.96 |
| Safari 5.1 | 5.60% | 2.50% | -3.10 |
| Safari 6.0 | 6.21% | 0.86% | -5.35 |
| Safari 7.0 | 7.29% | 7.25% | -0.04 |
| Safari 7.1 | 0% | 3.12% | 3.12 |
| Safari 8.0 | 0% | 10.10% | 10.10 |
| Firefox 22.0 | 1.62% | 0% | -1.62 |
| Firefox 24.0 | 5.50% | 0% | -5.50 |
| Firefox 25.0 | 6.46% | 0% | -6.46 |
| Firefox 26.0 | 1.90% | 0% | -1.90 |
| Firefox 32.0 | 0% | 4.92% | 4.92 |
| Firefox 33.0 | 0% | 7.10% | 7.10 |
| Firefox 34.0 | 0% | 3.52% | 3.52 |
| MSIE 8.0 | 3.69% | 1.00% | -2.69 |
| MSIE 9.0 | 3.04% | 1.22% | -1.82 |
| MSIE 10.0 | 5.94% | 0% | -5.94 |
| MSIE 11.0 | 0% | 6.69% | 6.69 |
| Generic WebKit 4.0* | 3.18% | 2.46% | -0.72 |
| Mozilla 5.0* | 3.18% | 4.80% | 1.62 |
| Opera 9.80 | 1.46% | 0% | -1.46 |
* These are catch-all versions of Mozilla-based and Webkit-based browsers that aren’t themselves Firefox, Safari, or Chrome.
A word on methodology
These numbers were anonymously collected using Yahoo’s in-house metrics libraries. The numbers here are aggregated over the course of three months each, making these numbers lagging indicators. This is why the latest releases, like Android 5.0 and iOS 8.1, are under-represented – they hadn’t yet enjoyed one full quarter when 2014 came to a close.
Further reading
There are a number of excellent sites out there watching similar browser statistics on a continuing basis. A few of them are:
- Ars Technica – on a monthly basis they analyze raw data from Net Market Share with insightful commentary.
- Net Market Share – while Ars does a bang-up job, it’s helpful to sift the data yourself to find the answers to your questions.
- Peter-Paul Koch – No one shines a sharper light on the state of browsers than PPK, with just one example being his attention to disambiguating the various versions of Chromium out there (part two).
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