You may have had a iPhone since 2007 but few others did outside the tech community. Smart phones only overtook feature phone sales in mid-2013 and they’ve had a considerable impact in emerging markets where the PC revolution never occurred.
It’s long been predicted that mobile web use would eventually overtake desktops. I was initially skeptical and it’s taken longer than expected, but mobile web access increased from 20% in November 2013 to 34% in November 2014. It surpassed my expectations.
It kinds of depends on how you look at things. If you go on browser versions alone, then IE is actually the #1 browser (as this article ridiculously points out).
But if you look at things realistically, combining all versions, IE is indeed ahead of Firefox:
But again, some might not think that’s realistic either, so they might prefer to combine Chrome and Firefox, but not IE:
There’s no perfect way to determine “most popular browser” but I think it’s safest to say the most popular, in order, are Chrome, IE, then Firefox.
As RalphM mentioned, it is StatCounter. There are plenty of other options and the results are endlessly debated, but StatCounter collects usage information from three million websites across the world. Few others go that far.
The keyword is “usage” - it’s not installations or other factors. IE almost certainly has more installations than Firefox because it’s provided with Windows. But it doesn’t follow that people use it more often.
The news about Spartan arrived a little after the publication of this post - and it’s still unconfirmed. Even so, I still expected to see IE12 so can’t really claim a point!
For more and more people - especially outside the First World and/or the under 30 First World crowd - it’s their primary internet access device. Maybe some SMS, maybe. Voice? What’s that?!? And of course, a tablet is not a phone, usually.
There’s a reason What’s App went for big bucks, eh.