I find it fas­ci­nat­ing to see the vari­ance in brows­er use in the diverse regions of the world, and nowhere is that vari­ance more appar­ent than in mobile web browsers. While in the West we may be used to Chrome and Safari being more or less the only game in town, else­where in the world the sto­ry is quite dif­fer­ent. In this arti­cle I’m going to take a look at a few charts which illus­trate that difference.

The stats used here are col­lect­ed from the 30 days pri­or to 25th August, tak­en from StatCounter.com. They come with the usu­al dis­claimer about the impos­si­bil­i­ty of get­ting com­plete­ly accu­rate data, and don’t always include fea­ture phone browsers, so should there­fore be treat­ed as indica­tive rather than con­clu­sive. With the caveats out of the way, let’s begin.

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I’ve spent a lot of time in my career writ­ing and talk­ing about future web fea­tures, from CSS3 to Web Com­po­nents. But I’ve recent­ly come to realise that, while I still think these fea­tures are impor­tant, I’ve been miss­ing out on the big­ger pic­ture: the sur­vival of the open web. That sounds hyper­bol­ic, I know, but so many arti­cles I’ve read, con­ver­sa­tions I’ve had, and behav­iours I’ve observed, have led me to the con­clu­sion that the open web, in the form we know it now, is under threat.

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Two things hap­pened last week: news leaked that Opera are plan­ning to launch a new brows­er based on WebKit; and the new dis­cus­sion tool, Branch, came out of pri­vate beta. As an exper­i­ment, I want to talk about the first on the sec­ond, so I invite you to read and par­tic­i­pate in my branch Opera Ice: New brows­er for Android and iPhone com­ing Feb­rua….

The Xbox 360 soft­ware update is due to roll out today, and among the many new fea­tures brings an Inter­net Explor­er app, let­ting you browse the web on your TV (if you’re an Xbox Live Gold mem­ber). I was part of the Beta test pro­gramme and have been using Xbox IE for a few months, so here fol­low some of my thoughts, in a kind of review. Apolo­gies in advance for the crap­py photos.

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This week­end I attend­ed the Lon­don Web Stan­dards group’s State of the Brows­er, a one-day event with rep­re­sen­ta­tives of many of the major brows­er mak­ers giv­ing us sta­tus reports on their prod­ucts. Chrome, Fire­fox, Opera and Black­ber­ry were all there; a mem­ber of the IE team was due to show but had to pull out for per­son­al rea­sons (he viewed the live stream and answered some ques­tions from home). The notable absence was Safari, whose com­mu­ni­ty engage­ment is real­ly not good enough.

There were long talks and short­er break­out ses­sions, as well as plen­ty of time to socialise; the LWS must real­ly be con­grat­u­lat­ed on organ­is­ing such a good event. There was plen­ty of news and talk­ing points through­out the day — far too much, real­ly, for me to write here, so I’ll just write up notes of what I found most inter­est­ing to me.

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I down­loaded the IE9 Beta last night, and while I haven’t had the chance to give it a prop­er once-over yet, I’m pret­ty impressed with its capa­bil­i­ties so far. The real star is the hard­ware accel­er­a­tion, which opens pages so fast it seems like mag­ic. The new HTML5 and CSS3 sup­port is very welcome.

You can read an in-depth review of it at ZDNet, except it seems to be writ­ten by some­one who does­n’t real­ly under­stand CSS very well.

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