html5 test for mac,HTML5test - How well does your browser support HTML5?

or why Apple’s browser marketshare is inflated

The data for this article was collected during spring of 2012. Despite based on older data, the conclusions of this article are still very much valid. So I decided to publish this article as is.

After implementing a new reporting backend for html5test.com, I noticed something strange. It seemed like there were an unusually high number of visits from browsers that claimed to be Safari but did have scores that were different from my own devices. It looked like there were quite a lot of visits from browsers that were lying about their identity.

Each visit to html5test.com is logged and is used for generating reports. You can see those reports on the html5test website by going to the “Other browsers” or “Compare” tabs. Creating the reports isn’t fully automatic – I still have to go over the logged data manually, but by using some smart queries I can get the data I want quite easily from the database. The hardest part of writing the new reporting backend wasn’t actually the reporting: it was identifying the name and version of the browser that is used. If you do not accurately recognise the browser, you can’t say anything useful about how well each browser supports HTML5. Properly identifying the source of the recorded score is vital to reliable reports about HTML5 support.

If you ever needed to identify browsers you’ll probably know that every browser has a user agent string that basically tells you the name and version of the browser and rendering engine. Well… kind of. There are many problems you will run into, but for all intents and purposes it is possible to reliably detect the identity of the browser using the user agent string. The script I wrote was pretty good and over the course of a couple of months and a couple of million real world user agent strings it became quite accurate.