Research Firm Discovers that, Surprise, HTML5 Is Prevalent on Smartphones

Research firm Strategy Analytics estimates that there will be 336 million phones sold this year with HTML5 support. That number, it says, will surge to one billion phones by 2013.

That may sound impressive, but is not really surprising, or, at least, it shouldn't be. The reason is simple, the iPhone, the top selling smartphone, comes with the Safari browser.

Safari is based on the WebKit layout engine which supports HTML5. At the same time, the default browser in Android is also based on WebKit. Alternative browsers on both platforms either rely on the built in browser engine or use WebKit themselves. Opera, which doesn't use WebKit, supports HTML5 as well.

The latest Windows Phone 7 devices also come with a browser with HTML5 support. The vast majority of smartphones sold come with HTML5-capable browsers out of the box. Smartphone sales are still exploding so the number will only grow.