Chrome's Dominance Isn't the Whole Story

Intro

If you had to rank the browsers your application’s users are most likely to use, what would your list look like? Chrome would almost certainly be first. You might even assume Safari comes second because of the number of iPhone users you see every day. What about the rest of the list?

Chrome’s dominance often misleads us. We think that most users are on Chrome and Edge is Chromium anyway and Safari covers Apple users and so on. Absolute coping mechanism. We convince ourselves that testing Chrome and Safari is enough. In reality, this strategy might surprise us in some scenarios.

Before discussing which browsers deserve attention, it’s worth asking another question: do browser differences still matter today?

Do browser differences still matter?

You might have heard about the browser inconsistencies in the early years of web development, many of which have been addressed and resolved through modern web standards. Developers used to rewrite the same styles and even parts of their JavaScript to make websites behave consistently across browsers.

But what about now? Aren’t web browsers standard right now? Well, there are some areas where browsers might behave differently:

• Some new features are partially supported across different browsers
• Some minor rendering inconsistencies exist for even long-supported features (try mixing nested grids, complex layouts, and position: sticky)
• Different support level for some Web APIs is a common thing

So, yes, browser differences still matter.

But why should we care about providing the same UX for all users? A better UX for all users means better conversion for the business. Supporting 90% of users by testing only the major browsers is a good start. But what if a few small modifications could increase that to 95%?

Different Regions, Different Market Shares

“My web application works fine on Chrome, Firefox, and Safari so I’m safe.” you might say. But are Chrome, Firefox, and Safari always the top three browsers that your target audience uses? In the image below you can see stats for the worldwide browser market share that I have taken from gs.statcounter.com.

And also the market share for Iran.‍

You can see that Samsung Internet Browser holds the fourth position. I bet many developers (including me before seeing this) didn’t test their web application against this browser because it went unnoticed.

Although Samsung Internet is based on the open source project of Chromium, it has its own browser-specific features, and occasional behavioral differences. Assuming it behaves exactly like Chrome can still lead to unexpected bugs.

These stats are different for every country, region, and even business domain. So depending on the scope of your web application you should check what browsers you should support fully. In my case for an application that is for national users, I would test for Chrome, Samsung Internet, Firefox, and Safari if it is not too much work. You should decide depending on your situation.

Tricky In-app Browsers

Some applications like Instagram, Telegram, or Facebook open the links using an embedded browser (such as Android WebView or iOS WKWebView). Although these are based on the same rendering engines as Chrome or Safari, they might behave differently.

You should support these browsers as well if you have a social media account that sends a lot of direct traffic to the web application. You don’t want your users to leave the source application’s comfortable and pleasing user experience to your half-rendered glitchy web application. Your users would simply lose interest and leave the web application. So you have to test those scenarios as well.

Conclusion

Every project has different users. Some might have users who mainly use Chrome (like an internal ERP where the organization forces everyone to use a specific browser), and some applications might have worldwide scopes in which their users use all kinds of browsers.

Browser support isn’t about supporting the major browsers that take most of the global market share. It’s about understanding your users and providing support for the browsers that your users actually use.