: What encoding do most users prefer to have? Is there any site, chart, or raw data that shows how much of user have used Unicode (UTF-8) or Western (ISO-8859-1) or Chinese and so. Or provide

@Rambettina238

As Osvaldo comments, it would be helpful to know just why you think you need to know this.

When a user visits a web page, the browser will parse the page using whatever encoding the server tells it to use (via the HTTP Content-Type header or the corresponding HTML <meta> tag).

The only time the browser default encoding matters is when the server doesn't specify the encoding (so that the browser has to guess), or possibly when the server specifies an oddball encoding that the browser doesn't understand (but that's pretty unusual, since browsers tend to know quite a few encodings).

For historical reasons, the default encoding is often ISO-8859-1, since that was the most commonly used encoding back in the very early days of the web, when authors were not so careful about specifying encodings.

Many browsers will also not default to any specific encoding, but will instead try to guess the correct encoding by heuristic analysis if none is explicitly specified. For example, my Firefox default encoding is set simply to "Auto-Detect / Universal"; there are also other auto-detect setting that prefer one encoding (or encodings common in one region / language) over others in ambiguous cases.

But for authors, there's really no reason not to just use UTF-8 these days. Every browser supports it, and, being a Unicode encoding, it contains essentially all characters found in every other encoding.

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@Cody1181609

What @Fiasco_Labs said as far as which to use. For statistics:


UTF-8 Growth on the Web at the W3C blog
UTF-8 Usage Trends from BuiltWith

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@Berumen354

Use UTF-8, with proper fonts installed on the client, it universally represents all character sets of all the languages on the planet. Chinese, Cyrillic, Kanji, Arabic, Latin variants, etc. Find the Character Map tool in Windows 7 or its analog in Ubuntu 10+ and have a look at all of them in the various fonts. You can find different fonts are localized to Southeast Asia, Central Europe, India, Western Latin, etc. Modern browsers are supposed to take advantage of this and properly display UTF-8 so you aren't stuck with the Character Set conundrum.

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