There can’t be much doubt that the mobile web is exploding in popularity. From the first mobile web access offered commercially with the Nokia 9000 Communicator phone in Finland in 1996, things have moved fast.

Today we’re seeing increased sales in smartphones and tablets, faster mobile data connections, apps, and more. Basically, we’re accessing Internet services more and more from something that is not a PC.

We’ve put together some numbers to attempt to show a picture of what the mobile web was like so far in 2011, how it is has developed, and perhaps take a peek into the future as well.

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In just a couple of years, Google Chrome has firmly established itself as a web browser to be reckoned with. Where once you spoke of Internet Explorer and Firefox as the two big ones, these days the duo has become a trio. The browser wars are back. Chrome has started to edge out Firefox in some countries, and as you will see in this article, there are actually countries where it’s already become number one.

This is where South America comes into the picture. Nowhere is Chrome more successful than in that part of the world.

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Although the growth of Firefox has stagnated a bit lately due to the increasing competition from rival browsers, it’s still one of the biggest success stories in the history of the Internet and has the second-largest user base of any web browser.

Firefox has a widespread global user base, but we wanted to find out where it is most common, or another way of looking at it: how are the Firefox users distributed?

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The World Wide Web has promised a lot over the years. Thus far, some of those promises have been fulfilled, but there have also been disappointments. One area that I feel has been consistently disappointing in recent years is the promise of newer, more powerful, and more useful file formats. I’ll take a look at three of these: SVG, JPEG 2000, and MNG, below.

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