Tag: stats

State of the Internet Browser 2012 – consumer browser usage will decrease

Over the next two years I see consumer browser usage decreasing and people will increasingly spend more time using native mobile applications. This has a number of interesting implications.

The facts. As a web application developer I pay close attention to browser and browser-related technology usage statistics and trends. Like most people, I judge statistics based on my own experience and the experience of my co-workers, family and peers.  Here are some trends which I’ve been keeping an eye on:

  • Smartphones are rapidly replacing non-smart phones around the world.
  • The number of specialized smartphone applications is continuing to expand.*
  • The number of games for smartphones continues to grow rapidly.**
  • The amount of time people spend on their smartphone, whether it’s playing games or using specialized applications, is increasing.

Also based on my personal experience are the following additional observations that further tilt the balance in favor of native applications:

  • Performance. Native smartphone applications, when built correctly, almost always outperform web applications: I’m referring to actions such as page refresh, general drawing capabilities and to a lesser degree but still a factor is the look-and-feel. This is a general fact of application technology: compiled applications perform faster than interpreted applications. For the most part, once I’ve used a native application, such as Southwest Airlines check-in app, I loathe having to use their web page. It just seems so clunky and slow in comparison.
  • Games. Ah yes, we can’t forget game performance as well as their look-and-feel. Why would I want a mobile browser-based game? What’s the point of building a high-performance, beautiful user interface game in a browser? See my previous bullet’s comment about compiled application performance. Yes, yes, yes I know that HTML 5 is making big strides, but we are talking mobile applications and the technology as it exist today. You can’t tell your customers that they’ll have to wait another year for better game performance, because by then your favorite browser will have such and such HTML 5 functionality figured out. Your competitors would jump right in, tweak their native app and leave you in the dust!

A Corollary. If you generally agree with my bullets above, the perhaps you’ll agree that the corollary is this trend:

  • Consumers are spending less time on desktop and laptop machines “browsing the web” and more time using their smart phones.

In addition to the reasons I already listed, there are many reasons for this. I suspect the top reasons are because it’s so easy to use your smartphone, and it’s right by your side all the time even when you aren’t home. You most likely have seen people with their heads down playing with their smartphones during business meetings, while eating, while standing in line, while watching TV and even during sports events.

What about the Browser Vendors? These trends have interesting implications for browser vendors. They have to be aware of what’s going on. It’s possible that this is one of the many factors behind their massive push to add HTML 5 capabilities in an attempt to stave off what I’m going to call “user erosion”, as consumers spend less time using web browsers.

But, there are some facts to consider related to building applications that run in the browser:

  • Still functionality problems between different browsers. While the latest generation of browsers are the closest they have ever been to parity, in terms of JavaScript and HTML functionality, web developers are still hacking code to make certain things work equally across all browsers. These “hacks” cost extra time and money to code and maintain and the functionality differences between browsers cause customer frustration when things look different or don’t work as expected. This is especially true in large, retail-type consumer apps were you have little control over what browser your customers choose to use.
  • Faster but fast enough? Today’s browsers have the fastest parsers ever, but it’s a fact that they still aren’t as fast as native code, and they never will be. For the geeks reading this, browsers incur a CPU cost associated with parsing and then executing interpreted code. Smart engineers are going to continue to close the gap, but compiled code will always be faster and more powerful than code running in a browser. Period.
  • Memory usage. Browsers tend to be what we call “leaky”. The longer you use one without restarting it the more memory it will consume. I believe this is less of a problem in mobile browsers where windows get closed a lot more frequently than desktop/laptop browsers. However, it’s still an important consider this in mobile phones where more memory usage equals less battery life. Native apps can definitely leak memory, but they are also starting from a smaller initial footprint, and there are much better tools available for finding native app memory leaks. For browser apps, you also have the browser’s memory usage in addition to your application’s memory usage.
  • Security. Security is getting better for web browsers. But…it’s still easier to build a highly secure native app today than it is to build a secure web app. Also, for better or for worse, I suggest that many consumers perceive native apps to be more secure than web apps. Do you want to do your mobile banking over a web app or a native app? And whether a perception is right or wrong sometimes is irrelevant because it always strongly affects people’s behavior.

Concluding Remarks

Consumer-based companies are going to make important strategic choices based on information similar to what I’ve written above. My guess is that the most successful businesses will be the ones that adapt to what their customers want and if your customers are spending less time “on the web” then you should seriously consider adapting. Just to be clear, I’m definitely not saying that browsers are going away. No one has as crystal ball, and new technology is being created all the time. However, the momentum and sheer size of these trends, with hundreds of millions of people buying and using smart phones worldwide, makes it well worth studying its potential impact on your business.

References:

Mobile Apps Put the Web in Their Rear View Mirror
Mobile Apps vs. the Web – Which is Better For Business?
Gartner Report on Smart Phone Sales in 3rd Quarter 2011

* Companies are building specialized apps that essentially replace the need for customers to visit their web site. However, these apps offer much more control and typically provide a more consistent user experience that the web. Southwest Airlines, for example offers three types of mobile apps in addition to a mobile web site: https://www.southwest.com/html/air/products/mobile.html.

** Books and games, respectively have consistently been the top two categories for the most popular apps, for example: https://www.gottabemobile.com/2011/07/06/ipad-app-store-breakdown-top-apps-categories-chart/

A whole new world for app developers – it’s raining cats and browsers!

Holy smokes – how do we support all these different browser types and versions? I’ve been thinking about this for a while, but after attending the AdobeMAX conference this week I got to talk with other developers facing the same issues.  The web app world used to fairly simple: develop for the one or two major browsers running on desktop computers and you were done. We still grumbled a lot and had cross-browser problems that at the time were really annoying. And now we have to deal with not only desktop computers and laptops, but there are also dozens of different mobile browsers and hundreds of new tablet style devices. To make things even more interesting the pace at which new versions of browsers and mobile operating systems are being released is at an unprecedented (and perhaps unsustainable) rate.

What to do, what to do, what to do?  Well if we step back and look at this holistically, there are a few things to consider that can help lay the ground work for building apps in these crazy times. That will help you make better technical business decisions.

For web apps:

  1. What browsers and browser versions your customers are using? How often do you analyze this? If you don’t use a monitoring/analytics tool for this you can always download a free tool to analyze your web server logs. I’ve used Google Analytics in past, but there are plenty of other choices.
  2. What percentages of your visitors are using a particular browser version? Break down your stats again by the browser version. If you still have a large percentage of customers using IE 6 then you might want to consider continuing to support it.
  3. What percentage of your customers use mobile versus non-mobile?
  4. What percentage of customers are from your country? If most of your customers from outside your country then you’ll also have to include localization code.
  5. What type of device is each web site visitor using? Mobile devices can have vastly different screen resolutions and sizes.
  6. Which browsers represent visitors/customers that make you the most money? This is a very important number to know and getting this information can be a bit more involved than the other questions. If you mess up support for these group(s) you’ll really cause yourself business problems.

For native apps:

  1. Have you reviewed your marketplace stats page? One example is the Android Market offers application stats such as platform versions, devices, countries of origin, languages, etc.

What if you haven’t launched your app or website yet? If this is the case, then check out some of public tracking sites for hints. Some good places to start looking are: w3schools and Wikipedia which lets you drill down into different browser versions.  For mobile apps, most IDEs let you set up various layout scenarios that relate to rough categories of dpi (dots per inch). For example, here is an article from Adobe on Flex mobile development and handling different mobile device screen resolutions.

How do I interpret this information? In general, you want to have support for browsers and operating systems that the majority of your customers use. One example is in the retail/consumer industry you absolutely have to support what your customers use. If the vast majority of your customers use Internet Explorer then you will need to support IE or you will lose customers and money. If the vast majority of your visitors use Android, but your biggest spenders use iPhones then take that into your development considerations. If your website or application performs poorly for a small percentage of very high-spending customers then it could cost you your business. If you are lucky enough to have commercial customers consuming an internal-only application, or if you have an ultra-niche audience that only uses a single browser or smart phone operating system then you already have your answer. You build to suit their needs.

Any further advice? Test, test, test and then test some more on real devices and different versions of browsers. Emulators and simulators are not an adequate substitute for real-world checking. If you are a small shop, enlist family, friends and neighbors to test. Have them check out our app or website for a few minutes while they relax in the evening. You can also buy after market handsets on eBay and other places, just be careful that if a deal is too good to be true you probably shouldn’t purchase it. The reality is there are so many devices nowadays that you simply can’t test them all. So, pay special attention to feedback in your market place listing or on your forums.