This week I ran an eight-question survey of media query use, responsive web design fundamentals, and one viewport question. 1251 web developers reacted. This entry presents the results.

Most important conclusions:

• Nearly 50% of web developers (occasionally) use device-width and expect it to work the same as width. It doesn’t right now, but it will in the future.
• Many web developers are not aware that a cross-browser resolution check needs both the -webkit-device-pixel-ratio and the resolution media query.
• The most popular resolution query is “larger than 1.5;” a very welcome bit of sanity.
• ems in media queries are not used all that often — only 31% use it in more than 50% of their projects.
• 16% use more than five breakpoints in their responsive design.

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It’s instructive to take a good look at some local mobile browser market stats, as always by StatCounter. Today we treat Brazil.

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It’s instructive to take a good look at some local mobile browser market stats, as always by StatCounter. Today we treat Egypt.

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Yesterday I tested screen.width/height and related properties in the mobile browsers. The conclusion is that screen.width/height is completely unreliable.

There are two competing definitions of what screen.width/height actually means. In addition, a lot of browsers either ignore both definitions or have bugs in their implementation.

Thus, when analytics packages proudly present screen resolution stats, they don’t know what they’re talking about and you’d do best to ignore them. The package has no clue what kind of measurements it gets, but pastes the result into the database anyway and pretends it means something profound.

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Thursday was an unusual day. I thought I’d describe it, so that you know what one of my unusual-but-not-ultra-weird days looks like.

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Today, quite by coincidence, I found out that the Samsung Galaxy S3 and S4, as well as the LG L5, have Chrome pre-installed next to their default browsers. I have no clue what’s going on and would like a clarification from the Chrome team.

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I published my research on the orientationchange and resize events on mobile. If you’re expecting plenty of browser incompatibility fun you won’t be disappointed.

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Last week Luke Wroblewski published an important article in which he said that web developers practising responsive design rely too much on a device’s screen size to determine which device it is.

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It’s instructive to take a good look at some local mobile browser market stats, as always by StatCounter. Today we treat Mexico.

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