10 Web Predictions for 2014: The Results!

Originally published at: http://www.sitepoint.com/10-web-predictions-2014-results/
At the beginning of 2013 I published 10 Web Predictions for 2013. I played it safe and scored a Nostradamus-like seven out of ten. My 10 Web Predictions for 2014 were a little more adventurous — let’s see how they fared…

1. 2014 is the year of the smart phone

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.

Cumulative score: 1 out of 1. A strong start!
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Where did you get your browser stats from? I have seen two and neither of them have IE above FireFox

Normally from StatCounter, as mentioned in Craig’s regular browser stats update: http://www.sitepoint.com/browser-trends-december-2014-safari-survival/

If IE12 is just named something else while remaining the browser succeeding the IE line, your prediction 4 is not quite wrong.

Great prediction! I guess W3C standards and Schema Markups will go extreme and rule the web in the near future!!

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!

I think it should have started with:

  1. We’ll stop calling it a smartphone and we’ll instead use the more appropriate “mobile device” or “hand-held device” or even “hard-held touch device.”

In short, it’s not a phone any more. Is it? :slight_smile:

Ha! Good point. It may have telephony abilities but that’s a small part of the overall functionality and few people use it!

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?!? :smile: And of course, a tablet is not a phone, usually.

There’s a reason What’s App went for big bucks, eh.

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