More and more of the companies/groups that I'm working with are moving away from desktop applications to providing a web-based portfolio of applications for drug discovery. Most seem to use a combination of commercial tools with a selection of in house apps. Whilst this has many advantages it does raise the question about which web browser should they support? Whilst NetMarketshare still has Internet Explorer at 44% this is probably not a good metric to measure browser usage in the Drug Discovery Sector.

So for the last couple of months I've been monitoring the web browsers used to access the Drug Discovery Resources since it is unlikely that anyone not interested in drug discovery would spend much time browsing these pages. The results are interesting.

The ranking since 1 Jan 2016 to date is

1. Chrome 56%
2. Safari 20%
3. Firefox 16%
4. Internet Explorer 4%

Looking at operating systems

1. Windows 57%
2. Macintosh 23%
3. iOS 11%
4. Android 8%

So the lack users of Internet Explorer is not due to the absence of Windows users. This must have implications for all developers, the users appeared to have moved to the more modern web browsers.

Update

A number of readers/companies have contacted me since I published with broadly similar results, I hope to compile and publish the anonymised results next week.