State of Web Dev Survey Results

Scroll Magazine, John Allsopp and Web Directions conferences all got together and ran the State of Web Development 2010 survey to gather information from developers on what technologies, techniques, philosophies and practices they use. The survey results gather the answers to 50+ questions and present them in a few different ways. They provide the com­plete (anonymized) set of responses in CSV for­mat for download, a PDF info­graphic overview (see the big image above), just the results to all the ques­tions (often compared to 2008) or their own detailed analysis.

As you read through the results, you may notice that what web developers use as their browser and platform does not correspond to the bulk of users. For example, 51% of respondents use Mac OSX, and 54% use Firefox as their primary platform. This does not correspond to general users who range from 8% to 15% on Mac OSX and 16% to 45% on Firefox. Granted, all stats are relative to the site reporting them, but from my own experience with our clients, the numbers for web developers are not the same as for the general public.

I do find it odd that web developers tend to eschew the very browsers and platforms that the general public uses (such as IE on Windows) and reserve them only for testing. I'd feel better if these developers were as familiar with what users actually use on a day-to-day basis than only testing on them for projects. This lack of familiarity with how the web is experienced through the same lens as the user can be both jarring and cause developers to fail to take advantage of, or code around, browser features/issues that are known to regular users.

You may find that statements about HTML5 and CSS3 adoption really require more context than the answers can provide. The same is true for certain technologies and how they are applied (I may use CSS rounded corners on a personal project, for example, but not on a client site). Here is a quick overview of some of the results (emphasis theirs):

• Few respon­dents use any form of Internet Explorer for their day to day web use, but IE8 is the num­ber one browser devel­op­ers test their sites in.
• Google Chrome has jumped dra­mat­i­cally as the browser of choice for devel­op­ers, to rank 3^rd, at 17% just behind Safari at 20%. Firefox remains the num­ber one choice by some way, but respon­dents were split between 3.5 and 3.6 at the time of our sur­vey. Firefox 3.6 was released only a week before the sur­vey began.
• Over half of respon­dents now use Mac OS X as their pri­mary oper­at­ing system.
• Nearly a third of respon­dents (up from 16%) use Mobile Safari, while Android use is at around 4%.
• JQuery has become even more dom­i­nant, with nearly 80% of all respon­dents using the library, up from 63% last year.
• Desktop-​​like appli­ca­tion frame­works, such as Cappuccino and SproutCore show lit­tle sign of wide­spread adop­tion by devel­op­ers. Perhaps the day of desktop-​​like web apps is yet to come, or per­haps devel­op­ers really aren't look­ing to build webapps which mimic the desktop.
• More respon­dents (45%) than not (44%) use CSS3 and exper­i­men­tal CSS, up dra­mat­i­cally from last year (only 22% then were using CSS3 and nearly 70% not)
• Last sur­vey, only 4% were using font link­ing using @font-face. This sur­vey that's climbed to 23%
• HTML5 is now used to some extent by around 30% of respon­dents, up from under 10% last survey