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The State of Web Development 2010

The State of Web Development 2010

Welcome to this detailed report from our sec­ond “State of Web Development” sur­vey of pro­fes­sional web design­ers and devel­op­ers. It includes details and analy­sis of all the responses to over 50 ques­tions cov­er­ing tech­nolo­gies, tech­niques, philoso­phies and prac­tices that today’s web pro­fes­sion­als employ.

You can down­load the com­plete (anonymized) set of responses in CSV for­mat, our PDF info­graphic overview see just the results to all the ques­tions or read on to dive into our detailed analysis.

The State of Web Development” sur­vey is brought to you by Web Directions con­fer­ences, and Scroll Magazine, and con­ducted by John Allsopp

State of Web Design overview

Table of Contents

About the survey

Keeping track of cur­rent web design and devel­op­ment prac­tice is far from straight­for­ward. We can make some con­jec­tures as to the gen­eral con­sen­sus about best prac­tices from arti­cles pub­lished at rec­og­nized sites and forums devoted to web devel­op­ment, but just what devel­op­ers are actu­ally doing when they develop for the web is much harder to deter­mine. Objective projects like Opera Software’s MAMA can give us a sense of the use of par­tic­u­lar tech­nolo­gies, but it’s more dif­fi­cult to deter­mine when par­tic­u­lar sites were devel­oped (and so to deter­mine how prac­tices change over time), and it’s also dif­fi­cult to con­clude from these objec­tive data the under­ly­ing prac­tices, philoso­phies and approaches adopted by devel­op­ers (for exam­ple, how impor­tant is it to them that pages look as nearly the same as pos­si­ble across all browsers).

The goal of this “state of web devel­op­ment” sur­vey is to try and look behind the sta­tis­tics, and get a sense of the philoso­phies and tech­niques, as well as the tech­nolo­gies, that web design­ers and devel­op­ers are using today. Over time, hope­fully we’ll be able to track changes in how web pro­fes­sion­als design and develop for the web.

As noted, this is a sub­jec­tive sur­vey, and those who took it are self select­ing. So, it cer­tainly won’t be rep­re­sen­ta­tive of all web design­ers and devel­op­ers. It’s def­i­nitely skewed toward early adopters and self edu­ca­tors, peo­ple who keep abreast of devel­op­ments in these fields by attend­ing con­fer­ences, read­ing pop­u­lar blogs and sites focussed on these issues and so on.

A sneak peek at some results

In short, what did the sur­vey find? Some quite sur­pris­ing results include

  • 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 3rd, 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.

When it comes to web devel­op­ment tech­nolo­gies, the big sto­ries are CSS3, web fonts and HTML5.

  • 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

There’s a great deal more in the sur­vey, includ­ing respon­dents’ use of server-​​side tech­nolo­gies (lan­guages, frame­works and data­base sys­tems), cloud com­put­ing resources, JavaScript libraries, and rich media, video and audio technologies.

A year is indeed a long time in terms of web tech­nolo­gies and prac­tices, and we’ve saw some quite notable changes in the many areas in the 13 months between the two sur­veys, as you’ll see in this report.

If you’d like to dig around with the data, we’ve also made avail­able all the results from the survey in CSV format. There's all kinds of correlations that readers might be interested in investigating. For example it might be interesting to compare use of HTML5 in government versus large corporations, or in the United States as opposed to Europe. If you are interested, please grab the files and explore them, and let us know anything interesting you might find.

And we wrote our own quick and dirty JavaScript to automatically generate the HTML and CSS based graphs that accompany the data tables. We plan to open source this project as soon as practicable, as we feel it made the process of analyzing and creating this report much simpler than last year. The sortable tables are courtesy of Stuart Langridge's fantastic "Sorttable” project.

Thanks to those who took the time to do the sur­vey, and for tak­ing a look. Now, sit back and read on for a sense of the state of the web devel­op­ment in February 2010.

License

Creative Commons License

State of Web Development 2010 by Web Directions is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-​​Share Alike 3.0 United States License.