⚡ Browser APIs in South Africa

Browser APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) are a set of functions that allow web developers to interact with the browser and system resources, providing features such as data storage, network requests, performance monitoring, graphics rendering, background tasks, and camera and microphone access.

South Africa is an African country with a population of over 60 million people.

According to our data, browser APIs are detected on 36.8% of websites from South Africa.

Statistics based on 18K+ analyzed websites. About this data

⭐ Most Popular in 2026

The following chart shows the top browser APIs in South Africa in 2026, based on market share.

The most popular is Web Storage, which dominates the market with an overwhelming 92.1% share.
It is followed by XMLHttpRequest with 13.2% and Fetch with 12.4%.

Web Storage 92.1%
XMLHttpRequest 13.2%
Fetch 12.4%
Beacon API 11%
Navigation Timing 10.3%
PerformanceObserver 1.6%
WebSocket 1.3%
Interest-Based Advertising Opt-Out 0.8%
WebGL 0.8%
Geolocation API 0.7%
Speech Recognition API 0.08%
Notifications API 0.06%
Screen Orientation API 0.05%
Origin Trials 0.02%
WebRTC 0.02%

🚀 Highlights

Here is a list of the top APIs that are more popular in South Africa than worldwide.
Differences between global and country rankings are shown in parentheses.

4. Beacon API ^(-1)
11. Speech Recognition API ^(-6)
13. Screen Orientation API ^(-1)
14. Origin Trials ^(-1)

✨ Best Browser APIs

Below is a more detailed list of 16 browser APIs used on sites from South Africa, ranked by their market share.

Rank	Name	Market share
1	Web Storage Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States A browser API and client-side key-value database that allows websites to store persistent data on users' devices.	92.1%
2	XMLHttpRequest Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States A JavaScript API to create HTTP requests.	13.2%
3	Fetch Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States A modern XMLHttpRequest alternative for fetching network resources.	12.4%
4	Beacon API Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States Used to send asynchronous and non-blocking requests to a web server.	11%
5	Navigation Timing Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States A part of the Performance API that provides metrics related to navigation from one page to another.	10.3%
6	PerformanceObserver Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States A part of the Performance API that is used to monitor performance measurement events.	1.6%
7	WebSocket Fremont, California, United States A communication protocol that enables persistent, full-duplex data exchange between a client and a server over a single TCP connection.	1.3%
8	Interest-Based Advertising Opt-Out Allowed sites to exclude themselves from Federated Learning of Cohorts cohort calculations using the "interest-cohort=()" permission policy.	0.8%
9	WebGL A cross-platform, royalty-free open web standard for a low-level 3D graphics API based on OpenGL.	0.8%
10	Geolocation API Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States Allows web applications to retrieve the user's location, including latitude and longitude.	0.7%
11	Speech Recognition API A part of the Web Speech API that controls the speech recognition service.	0.08%
12	Notifications API Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States Used to configure and display desktop notifications to the user.	0.06%
13	Screen Orientation API Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States Exposes the current type and angle of the device's screen orientation, and dispatches events when it changes.	0.05%
14	Origin Trials Mountain View, California, United States A way for developers to test and use experimental web platform features.	0.02%
15	WebRTC A set of protocols and APIs that enable real-time communication natively from web browsers and and mobile applications.	0.02%
16	IndexedDB Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States A transactional NoSQL database system for the persistent storage of structured data inside a user's browser. Free	0.02%

👉 See Also

🌎 Browser APIs in other countries

🗃️ About This Data

We evaluate the popularity of technologies based on the number of websites where we detect their usage.
Technologies without a detectable web footprint, and those we do not track, are not reflected in the calculated market share.
This report is based on the analysis of 18,099 websites from South Africa.
We currently track the presence of 17 browser APIs across the web.
Of these, 16 were detected on websites from South Africa.
Statistics were last calculated on April 7, 2026.
For more details, see our methodology and disclaimer.