The browser and device landscape

A little over a decade ago, it was reasonable to build websites with fixed widths. The device landscape was a whole lot more limited, so the expectation was that all end users would get a fairly consistent experience. This fixed width (typically 960 px wide or thereabouts) wasn’t too wide for laptop screens, and users with large-resolution monitors merely had an abundance of space on either side.

But in 2007, Apple’s iPhone ushered in the first truly usable phone browsing experience, and the way people accessed and interacted with the web changed forever.

In the first edition of this book, published in early 2012, the following was noted about the percentage of total browser usage by device type recorded at gs.statcounter.com:

…in the 12 months from July 2010 to July 2011, global mobile browser use had risen from 2.86 to 7.02 percent…

By September 2019, writing the third edition, using StatCounter, mobile...