How to Test Your Astro Site
So you’ve just built your new Astro site. It’s got it all: Fancy 3D graphics with Three.js, GSAP animations, a modern color palette, and it’s using the latest and greatest the web has to offer. Now then, it’s time to follow the rule so many people forget - test it on at least three major browsers.
You (like two thirds of the world’s population) use Chrome, so it works there. Next up is Firefox. Sure, the performance might be a bit bumpy, but who uses Firefox in the first place. It’s basically a dead browser anyway. Now you’re only missing one major engine, Safari and WebKit, but you don’t have a Mac and any Phone even attempting to load your site automatically turns into a plastic explosive. Might just have to skip that one.
You know what, since we’re here, lets keep going. After all, you want as many people as possible to be able to visit and use your new site, right? Screw those Safari users, your site is too good for them anyway. They should’ve gotten a Windows PC and an Android phone, it’s their own fault.
How do people actually browse the web?
I’m sure you’ve asked yourself that question many times before. After all, Google Analytics tells you it’s 50% PC, 30% Android and the other 20% are made up of Tim Cook’s hivemind, however, Google might just be trying to sell you something. So lets investigate.
According to statscounter.com1, the next major browser after Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and the Compass who shall not be named is Samsung Internet, with 2.3% market share. Surprisingly, it is relatively up to date, running Chrome 121 under the hood in its latest version. As of the time of writing this, Chrome 134 released a few days ago, so that’s not too shabby! Your mediocre JavaScript should run in that browser just fine, so let’s move on.
Next on the list is Opera. Originally being released in 19952, which was 30 years ago by the way (feel old yet?), it’s still going strong to this day, having about 2.09% market share. Unfortunately, even though it used to run a proprietary engine called Presto, it now runs Chromium and still gets frequent updates to this day.
Time to get into the more whacky stuff. How many of you have ever heard of the “UC Browser”? To the one person who actually knows of it, have you ever used it? Neither have I! Turns out the UC Browser is an app developed by UCWeb3, a company owned by Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce giant. Mostly being used in India (before it was banned), Indonesia, Mali and China, it is actually reasonably up to date, having last been updated in 2023 on Windows and in 2024 on Android. Even the Chinese agree that Tim Apple’s hivemind does not exist. Regardless, you probably shouldn’t download the browser, lest the CCP steal your data. I am not kidding, out of all people, Edward Snowden in 2015 leaked that the browser collects data like your identity, Android ID, MAC Address, Geolocation and other Wi-Fi-related data. Since then, there’s been an investigation into the browser basically every other year, and each time something of note was found. For example, in 2021 it was discovered that the app records your data and sends your IP address to Alibaba servers. So unless you want the CCP to have your data, you probably want to stay away from this one. Then again, “没有共产党，我怎么知道什么是正确的！”.
The weird and the whacky
As we enter the range of browsers who have never surpassed 1% of global adoption, we start getting into some weirder facts. For example, apparently, 0.95% of web users use Android’s built-in web view to visit sites. I guess it makes sense, I just figured it would be less people. Then there’s some more browsers by questionable entities, such as the QQ Browser by Tencent4, the Yandex Browser (which is mainly used in Russia, so they won’t be able to access your site in the first place), and the “360 Safe Browser”, which, funny enough, was exposed in 2012 for having a secret backdoor and being able to download any file, including executables from a remote server without the user knowing. I’m sure it’s a very safe browser, China. You’re not getting my data today. The funny thing is that all of these browsers still have more market share than good old Internet Explorer, and since we still include polyfills for that, you probably should spin up a VM, download your favorite VPN and give them a shot. Who knows, maybe your site breaks on one of them? You could make some Chinese or Russians day when they (potentially) see your site and it works fine. Might as well include a banner based on their geolocation praising the relevant communist party.
Speaking of Internet Explorer, contrary to the other browsers mentioned, it has not been updated since around 2015, making it probably the most dead browser on this list. But you still need to optimize for it! Otherwise, you’ll drop support for Edge’s “IE Mode”, which is officially supported until at least 2029. Thanks for that, Microsoft.
We’ll do a quick round of browsers you’ve probably never head of so we can get to the truly whacky stuff:
- Whale Browser, 0.1% market share, developed by South Korean company Naver Corporation. Last updated in 2024. Better download this one, you never know.5
- Coc Coc (even though this is an April Fools post, I promise that name is real), 0.14% market share, a Vietnamese web browser that was last updated 16 months ago. Fresh enough, give it a shot on that VM of yours.6
- Mozilla, 0.06% market share. This is essentially a very old version of Firefox, meaning these people probably already have 20 different ransomwares on their devices. Want to join them?
That’s it, right?
After all that, you’d think we’ve covered good ground. After all, we’ve gone down to the 0.0x percentages. At some point, we’ve got to be done with all this, right?
WRONG!
The Sony PlayStation 4 web browser has consistently had 0.01% market share for the past few months, meaning it is just relevant enough not to slip into the “Other” category on StatsCounter. So lets go exploring a bit. We can’t ignore the gamers, can we? They’re probably part of your target audience after all! How is little Timmy going to buy your AI-powered product with his pocket money otherwise? How will you exploit the many children still playing Fortnite every day?
Well, it’s not going to be easy, but I know you can do it. You know this one’s going to be good, as not even Wikipedia has any information on it. The PS4 has had a browser since its launch in 2013, meaning it’s been around for a while. At launch and still up to this day, it does not support Flash (Rest in peace) and PDFs, but you sure can visit websites on it. Surprisingly, I was able to find a PDF titled “Web Content Guidelines for PlayStation®4”, which contains the specifications of the browser and also tells us how to make web content for it, so let’s get into it.
According to Sony, the engine used is actually WebKit7, the same engine that powers Safari, so I guess Tim Cook will have his will after all. The document claims that developers are able to use caniuse.com to check if their code will be compatible, and says that we should refer to the information about Safari 17, which was released in 2023, meaning the PS4 browser is more up to date than one of the most popular Chinese browsers! It supports the AVIF format, JPEG XL, Web Assembly and even boasts TLS 1.3. If you ever need to optimize for the PS4, the standard screen is 1540x754 pixels, while the full screen mode allows the PS4 to display a whopping Full HD version (1080p) of your site. Unfortunately, the browser does not support the onBeforeUnload event on the window object, so you’ll have to make due some other way.
You know what, while we’re on the topic of console browsers…
PlayStation does what Nintendon’t!
When the PS4 released in 2013, the Nintendo 3DS had been on the market for two years already. While not available at launch, in June 2011, the Internet Browser for Nintendo 3DS was added to all regions8. Because it uses open source technology, we actually know what it was built on based on Nintendo’s support articles. You can still download the ZIP file on Nintendo Japan’s OSS support site at the time of writing.
According to 3DBrew.org, the 3DS browser is “Netfront” v1.0, a mobile browser by the Access Company, which first released in 19959. It has quite the history of being used on game consoles, being included on the PlayStation 3, PS Vita, Nintendo 3DS, the Nintendo Switch and even the Sega Dreamcast. It also was used on the Kindle, Amazon’s e-reader.
While the Nintendo 3DS itself never supported HTML5, the New Nintendo 3DS, which launched in 2015 in America, actually featured video and HTML5 support thanks to the NetFront Browser NX v3.0. It’s amazing how well this browser is documented, which in part happened because it is famously used for jailbreaking the 3DS. Thanks to the hacking community, we can now optimize your 3D graphics to run at 2 FPS on a decade-old handheld console. I actually own one of these, so let me just open my own site on one of these. Can’t be too bad, since I don’t have any 3D graphics or fancy… oh.
You thought we were done?
Even though a decade old handheld console can’t display your site, don’t fret. There’s still lots of ways to reach your target audience. For example, what if your customer base primarily drives Tesla? Sure, half of them may or may not be fascists, but they’re still paying customers, so let’s optimize our website for some cars, shall we?
Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of information on what exactly the Tesla browser uses, but it runs Chromium, so we can probably assume that our site will work just fine. After all, the guy who bought Twitter promised we’d be able to play Cyberpunk on these cars. He also promised self-driving cars by 2015, no wait, ‘16, or was it ‘17? Wait, it’s 2025, do we have that yet?
Vivaldi actually offers a car-specific browser for certain automotive brands, even claiming that you are able to “play games” on it, just to then show a video of Rocket League by Psyonix. Do they know how video games work? Anyway, since the start of 2024, Chrome is (of course) also available on Android-powered cars, so if any of you actually use a browser on your four wheel drive, feel free to share your experience in the comments below.
While we’re on the topic of putting web browsers where they shouldn’t be, Sarah Rainsberger (who inspired me to write this article on the Astro Discord server) said that her treadmill actually runs Android and she’s able to browse the web with it! Maybe your next site could help people (not) fall off of treadmills during their workouts? I feel like there’s a site waiting to be made here.
There also was an article by The Verge talking about Samsung’s newest vacuum which went semi-viral because it connects to your phone and can alert you to texts and calls. Maybe in the year of our lord 2026 we can finally browse the web while spring-cleaning?
Happy April Fools!
For the unfortunate among us who have not yet realized, this is obviously an April Fools shitpost. For those who have, thanks for reading! I tried to keep it somewhat interesting, hope I managed to do that. If you have any other devices or crazy web browsers you want to share, feel free to put them in the comments down below. I’m really curious to hear just how many of you still boot up their Windows 95 machines with Netscape Navigator on them (or work in a hospital that utilizes Windows XP to this day).
That’s it for today though! I’ve got another article coming up very soon, it’s going to be design-oriented so I hope you look forward to that.
Until next time!
Footnotes
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