Comment by fractionalhare | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fractionalhare | Hacker News Reader

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> Are there statistics on the browser usage on HN? Just for a good laugh.

Here is a screenshot of my Cloudfront dashboard showing the breakdown of user agents into particular browsers when an article of mine reached the top of HN about two months ago:

https://imgur.com/a/gQ2mxOM

Looking at the number of distinct IP addresses in Athena for that day, about 20,200 of those hits were distinct viewers:

https://imgur.com/a/aEtU7AB

This is not definitive, but it's something I guess. Here are a few observations based on that data:

1. On the desktop, it looks like Chrome and Firefox are at about parity for HN users. I kind of doubt this actually, and think it's more likely that Chrome still beats Firefox by a sizable margin. But even if this is off, it looks like HN users actually do use Firefox significantly more than the general population, which means the evangelization here isn't just a vocal minority among HN users.

2. On desktop Safari is a distant third. It would appear more people browse HN in any mobile category than browse HN on desktop using Safari.

3. On mobile, mobile Safari dominates. Then mobile Chrome has about half as many users as mobile Safari, and mobile Firefox again half as many as mobile Chrome.

EDIT: I pulled an Athena report of the referrer breakdown as well, if anyone's curious:

https://imgur.com/a/1dworVj

I wonder if mobile Safari domination is partly because iOS apps themselves use "Safari" when displaying webpages. If I tap an article using the Octal HN app, it opens in an internal "browser view" that is just an instance of Safari.

Even Chrome on iOS uses safari(webkit). There is no competition allowed on iOS, and that really sucks considering how terrible Safari is.

(as a web developer)

As a user Safari is fantastic and basically the whole reason I even own an iPhone. It’s just stupidly faster than Chrome on any Android flagship.

A world where there’s “choice” of browsers on every platform in practice just cements Chrome as the web because if you didn’t have to develop for Safari nobody would. On every other platform it’s “have bug-for-bug compatibility with Chrome or die.”

Safari on iOS is seriously the most buggy browser ever. You can mostly write something and it will work on Firefox and Chrome without issues.

Not only is safari full of bugs, the bugs won't be fixed, and if they do, it will take years.

Current serious bugs: 1. Add a site to the home screen, go to another app for 20 seconds and then switch back: congratulations, it's frozen. 2. You can't even stop scrolling on the body element, so tens of thousands of developers resorts to ugly hacks like eg. https://github.com/willmcpo/body-scroll-lock that kinda works in some situations. 3. The lack of features. Who doesn't as a developer feel bad for the person who spends forever trying every single browser in apples app store in an attempt to find a browser that supports push notifications. Of course none of them do, it's all Apple's shit.

You really can't have much experience with web development if you don't know how terrible iOS is for web as a result of Safari.

Heck, Safari isn't even behaving close to Safari. You have safari on desktop, safari on iOS and safari standalone on iOS. All of them behaves completely different and has different bugs and feature support.

“Lack of features” is a huge plus for me as a Safari user.

I'm not sure where people get this idea. Chrome on my old Note 8 is as fast as Safari on my newer iPad, and doesn't need to reload tabs as I switch between them nearly as often. On top of that, the Safari interface is completely unintuitive ("I have to hold which button to access that? I can't just tap it?").

I wouldn't even bother owning an iOS device if it weren't for the third-party app selection (specifically for art production). Which is the most infuriating part: devs could do all of this stuff on Android, they just refuse to.

>devs could do all of this stuff on Android, they just refuse to.

That's not fair. There are good reasons Android doesn't have art production apps. The biggest is that Android users don't pay for apps like that and devs like eating, but iOS has several other advantages like the Pencil, the better graphics APIs, the better graphics performance, etc.

It is wholly fair. Developers have treated Android users like second-class citizens from Day 1. Android apps come out months after their iOS counterparts, with hobbled features that never reach parity. Customers have responded with second-class compensation (favoring advertising). Additionally, what you rationalize as "better" is better thought of as a result of expertise lock-in, as developers with more (exclusive?) experience developing for iOS favor that platform. Android is fundamentally more open as a platform, and Android apps would benefit if companies actually bothered to hire and incentivize Android developers as a priority. An especially damning example: the rapid development of ARKit-based technologies after YEARS of Google making its Project Tango resources available. ARCore still lags behind ARKit even though its underlying architecture had BEEN there for developers to explore and iterate on. They simply wrote off the very concept of SLAM-based interaction until Apple said, "Let's do this." It's embarrassing.

> Customers have responded with second-class compensation (favoring advertising).

This is more the result of Android being the budget option.

You make it sound as though developers have some grand scheme against Android. Devs do prioritize iOS, but if you want it to change you (and Google) should understand the reasons for it. ARKit vs ARCore is a great example.

Tango launched on a single phone that no one bought, it required specialized hardware, and it had serious performance issues. Google forged ahead with the hardware requirements for years, in which the market for Tango apps was zero. They gave it limited support and it was clearly not a priority. It was only after Apple launched ARKit all at once for every modern iDevice, in a big presentation to make it clear this would be a major iOS going forward, that Google killed off Tango and screwed over all the devs who had bought in (with a tweet, for the extra insult to injury). They launched ARCore instead, which still didn't run on the majority of Android phones and still didn't track as well as ARKit.

ARCore isn't the only time Google has behaved this way, it happens with nearly all of their efforts. Do you see why developers don't engage with these kinds of practices?

>You make it sound as though developers have some grand scheme against Android.

No, it's simply the same sort of tribalism that drives so much of American culture. The black-and-white, good-vs-evil format warring is nothing new; as always, it's driven by a kernel of legitimate difference and a whole lot of snowballing bias. What needs to happen is for developers to pull their heads out of their asses, realize just how enormous the Android market is, and supply experiences that justify paying for software (especially in a climate where most users don't see anywhere near the value they give in personal data returned in software utility).

>Tango launched on a single phone that no one bought

That doesn't matter. Tango was the cutting edge of mobile XR, which is a space that still won't be mature and profitable for years from now. The point would have been to get a jumpstart on developing port-able technologies and UX norms. Can you imagine how much more solid app development would have been if someone had showed up in 2003 and said, "In 10 years, multi-touch display smartphones will become the norm. Here's a dev kit that approximates what will be possible."? That's Tango. I don't know how you can argue that opportunities weren't missed or pushed back years because of this platform bias. Now the space is even contracting somewhat because Apple marketed ARKit (and forced Google to market ARCore) as a consumer-ready platform, and companies are realizing that it isn't (control isn't figured out, UX isn't figured out, applications aren't figured out; we're JUST getting the basic technology layer above ARKit/Core figured out). If we'd taken Tango seriously, we'd be so much farther ahead.

This goes for so much in the iOS/Android dynamic. It's dumb.

That's a really good point. Though on the other hand, any of the browsers on iOS are actually just the mobile Safari engine under the hood anyway, regardless of what the user agent says. To be rigorous, these statistics would need further decomposition.

Is the Android webview using WebKit or blink now? I wonder how that would show up.

That depends on the app, and if Firefox is installed and is the default browser.

Those are the highest figures I've seen for Firefox Android anywhere. I'm shocked, but proud.

My FF mobile addons: uBlock Origin, I don't care about cookies, ViolentMonkey (it can sync scripts), ClearURLs (with etag and generic filtering disabled!) and Cookiebro.

I really like addons and that's why I don't use chrome on mobile.

Surprisingly I also started using Firefox Focus. At first it looked like nonsense to me, no addons. But then I found out it sometimes makes sense to start from scratch, focus on some topic and delete all tabs with one tap when done. And if I find what I searched for or want to read it later, I share the page to Saved messages on my Telegram. This workflow works surprisingly well for me.

it's the easiest way to get adblock on mobile!

HN is not a typical user base.

Of course it isn't, but we're talking specifically about HN users...these statistics are in response to someone asking about browser share of HN readers, not browser share of the general population.

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