Four charts to look at from Akamai's browser metrics platform. First, global desktop browsers. There're a couple of pretty obvious inferences to make from the weekly pattern here: IE is used a lot at work, and people do more mobile browsing at the weekends. Also, the two main mobile browsers are now getting on for a quarter of total use.

The thing that needs more thought, though, is this set: mobile browsing across all networks, on cellular only and on wifi only.

There are a bunch of moving parts here. First (to get it out of the way) Akamai data is not perfect and mostly excludes China. But even so, there are probably 3x more Android than iOS devices on earth. So what's going on?

On cellular, Android is perhaps 25-50% bigger than iOS (depending on whether you include Opera Mini and 'Others' in Android, which is an argument in itself). But on Wifi iOS is much bigger. There are a bunch of possible reasons for that - it's easier to connect to wifi, iOS users are more likely to have wifi, or both. But the interesting thing is that the wifi traffic is big enough to make iOS take the lead in the first chart as well. Akamai doesn't break this out, but it's a pretty obvious piece of algebra to do the calculation.

Finally, why would Chrome be such a small share of Android browsing? A flaw in the data, or is no-one using it?

Sunday Morning Charts

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