This post was updated on November 8, 2016.
In an effort to provide more transparency and a better experience for all of our users, we’re formalizing the list of browsers AddThis officially supports. We get over 1.9 billion users every day from 15 million websites around the globe. Therefore, we get a pretty good idea of what browsers people use. This means we have to think hard about what browsers we support and how we support them.
Deciding Which Browsers to Support
This is a decision we take very seriously. We need to balance the cost to support a browser against the effects of not supporting it. As such, we have divided the browsers we support into three tiers.
Our first tier includes the browsers we test our website and dashboard against. This is the most limited list and covers only the most recent versions of Chrome, Internet Explorer, Edge, Firefox, Safari and the most recent standard Android and iOS browsers.
Our second tier includes browsers in which our client tools will fully function. We test all our tools in these during a Quality Assurance (QA) cycle. These include the browsers in Tier 1 as well as the following:
- Chrome 52
- Firefox 48
- Internet Explorer 10
- Safari 9
- Mobile Safari 7
- Android Browser 4
Our third tier is browsers that we don’t perform QA on. However, we will fix features if they break the user experience. These include the following:
- Internet Explorer 8 & 9
- Firefox ESR
- Internet Explorer Mobile
Any other browsers not listed aren’t officially supported by AddThis. Limiting the browsers we support allows us to focus on releasing new advanced features, while also providing a good user experience for as many people as possible.
The Browsers We See
On any given day we see almost 2,400 different browser versions. More than 650 of these have less than ten views a piece. However, they represent many different rendering engines and feature sets. Here are the ten most popular desktop browsers we see most days, in the order we typically see them:
- Chrome Version 53
- Chrome Version 52
- Internet Explorer 11
- Firefox 48
- Firefox 49
- Chrome 49
- Safari 9
- Edge 13
- Edge 14
- Safari 10
These are the most popular mobile browsers we see:
- Mobile Safari 9
- Chrome Mobile 53
- Chrome Mobile 52
- Android Browser 4
- Mobile Safari 10
One of the more obscure browsers we see are Yandex 14 (22 million views per day), which is from the Russian search engine Yandex and is based on Chromium. We also see Amazon Silk (8 million views per day), the browser Amazon installs on their Fire devices to optimize web page load times. In addition, we see many versions of Opera Mini and even the Playstation 4 browser.
How You Can Help
In order for us to provide you with the best user experience possible, we need your assistance with encouraging your users to use the latest web browsers. Educate your users that they can upgrade their browsers quickly and easily. Lobby within your organization to install and support the latest browsers. Develop well written sites using modern web standards, which goes a long way in encouraging upgrades. Together we can make sure everyone sees the web the way it’s meant to be seen.