July, 2012 Mobile Market Share: Safari, Android Browser – Up; Symbian, Opera Mini – Down

By | August 6, 2012 | 15 Comments


With the rise of handheld devices and rising competition, we are starting a new section, which will focus on the mobile web browsers only. Let’s get going.

Currently in the lead, Apple’s Safari web browser has climbed up by 0.43 point, up from 66.22% to 65.79%.

Growing at the slower pace but still growing nonetheless, Android Browser has increased its market share by 0.24 point, up from 19.17% to 19.41%.

Opera Mini continues to grind lower and has now slipped below the 10% mark, down from 10.45% to 9.32% (1.13 point decrease).

With the reaper behind its back, Symbian’s market share has fell from 0.86% to 0.80% (0.06 point decrease).

That’s all for now, folks.


About (Author Profile)


Vygantas is a former web designer whose projects are used by companies such as AMD, NVIDIA and departed Westood Studios. Being passionate about software, Vygantas began his journalism carrier back in 2007 when he founded FavBrowser.com. Having said that, he is also an adrenaline junkie who enjoys good books, fitness activities and Forex trading.

  • Tiago Sá

    I’m using Firefox and I’m extremely happy with it. It’s tremendously functional and the UI is great.

    • Saex_Conroy

       Firefox tends to slow down, freeze on shitty scripts and stuff like that, I try different browsers, but I always end up using Firefox again. I hope by version 20 it’s a different thing.

  • Sirnh1

    “a new section, which will focus on the mobile web browsers only”
    Just wondering, but where is ‘opera mobile’ and ‘firefox mobile’?

    • http://twitter.com/Andylee_Sato Andylee_Sato

      Opera Mobile has 17 million users, Firefox mobile probably even less. They don’t show up in statistics.

  • http://hector-macias.blogspot.com Hector Macias Ayala
    • Grrblt

      Yeah, that looks way more believable. I mean, more android devices have been sold than Iphones and Ipads, so how the hell could Safari be used by 60% of mobile web users? Not to mention all those dumbphones that have to use Opera mini, they can HARDLY be only 10% when there are entire countries doing almost all their internet usage via mini.

    • Dante

      No, no… StatCounter numbers are wrong because they don`t use geo-weighting. They only post all collected hits from region or world without weights.
      Statistics from NetApplications use geo-weight of countries and his statistics are more accurate.
      BUT Opera Mini have one problem for both statistics because use Opera servers in few countries. Try localize your Opera Mini browser via IP or try start Opera Turbo on your browser.

      • Sirnh1

        “StatCounter numbers are wrong because they don`t use geo-weighting.”
        I consider statcounters number more correct.
        1) StatCounter claims it gets its data based on a pool of three million web sites compared with just 40,000 for Net Applications.
        2) StatCounter tracks both javascript and non-javascript browsers while Net Applications excludes non-javascript browsers from its data.
        3) StatCounter counts third party browsers Maxthon and Lunascape as separate programs while Net Applications bundled both in their IE data.
        4) If you do use geo-weighting you have to solve some issues before you can consider using it. If you have a country that makes up for 15% of the internet, but only 4% of it’s users are online in your stats, you need to make sure that those 4% are from all over the country and from a different social status. You can’t expect that multiplying some numbers automaticly give ‘good’ values.

        “BUT Opera Mini have one problem for both statistics because use Opera servers in few countries. Try localize your Opera Mini browser via IP or try start Opera
        Turbo on your browser.”

        That shouldn’t be a problem as both opera turbo and opera mini send a header to the requested website called  ‘X-Forwarded-For’ that contains your real ip-adres. When any website checks an ip-adres they should first check if this ‘forwarded for’ header is present.
        See: http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/opera-mini-web-content-authoring-guidelines/#detect-real-source and http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/opera-mini-request-headers/

        • Dante

          Try compare two countries – United Kingdom and Germany.
          StatCounter say that from United Kingdom receive 817 millions hits and from Germany only 485 millions hits. That`s mean weight of market share in UK is two time higher then weight of market share in Germany.
          Now, compare market share in both countries. Firefox 19% in UK and 48% in Germany but in reality Germany have 67 millions users and UK 52 millions (source: InternetWorldStats). This is that big place for problem of relevance. 

          • Sirnh1

            Taken from: http://marketshare.hitslink.com/faq.aspx#Country
            “For example, if our global data shows that Brazil represents 2% of our traffic, and the CIA table shows Brazil to represent 4% of global Internet traffic, we will count each unique visitor from Brazil twice.”
            So in this example they take some data and multiply it with 2 (to compensate for the traffic that they didn’t track). Problem being they have no idea what the people (that they didn’t track) used for a browser. So if the people (who were tracked in the example) ALL used internet explorer, but the users not  tracked ALL use firefox then you have seriously screwed up some stats.

            (Note: that I’m not saying that statcounter would show these stats correctly, I’m just saying that in the end I prefer to see real world numbers like total views and total amount of (unique) users and not a bunch of numbers that a company multiplied and/or divided by country and/or region)

        • Dante

          Few notes:
          Maxthon 3 use WebKit as default engine. When you switch to Trident it use only fork for Internet Explorer engine and NetApplications detect it as Internet Explorer – Maxton edition
          You describe the problem about OperaMini and Opera Turbo correct but could you explain me the major difference of mobile market share in countries like Poland, Ukraine or Russia and other countries? My Opera Mini browser sometime identify that I am in Poland and sometime in Norway. 

          • Sirnh1

            “Maxthon 3 use WebKit as default engine. When you switch to Trident it use only fork for Internet Explorer engine and NetApplications detect it as Internet Explorer – Maxton edition”
            I could be wrong there (as I don’t follow any maxthon development) and my source is a few months old.

            “You describe the problem about OperaMini and Opera Turbo correct but could you explain me…”
            That might be because website use your ip-adres to determine what country you are from. But when using operaMini (or opera Turbo) opera requests a webpage and tells them it’s own ip-adres and also that it is requesting the page for somebody else (this is because operaMini is acting like a proxy) and most website seem to ignore the part where it says that the actual request is for somebody else. 

            Website can check who the request is actually for by reading the ‘x-forwarded-for’ header that operaMini is sending them, but just don’t seem to do that.

            Note that this this is how most proxy’s (and load balancers) work and is not something that opera invented)

  • Cousin333

    I guess these numbers represent the USA only. Or else, they are extremely biased towards it.

    • Dante

      No, these numbers are global but client-server browsers like Opera Mini have problem with IP identification when they use geo-weighting like NetApplications or they count all hits like StatCounter

  • freeminiwares

    good post 
    Symbian free Zone
    (free mobile apps)

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