Mobile devices now make up more global website traffic than desktop computers for the first time according to newly-published figures. But traditional computers still make up the majority of traffic in the US.

The figures come from StatCounter, which measures traffic on around three million sites for which it provides analysis services. One note of caution is that it’s possible the type of sites which use such services aren’t necessarily representative of the web as a whole.

StatCounter’s totals for October this year show 51.3 percent of visits to the tracked sites came from phones and tablets, with 48.7 percent from desktops. It’s the culmination of a rapid trend: as recently as the start of 2012, the company was measuring just 10 percent of traffic as being from mobile devices.

As well as smartphones and tablets becoming more popular, the trend is also driven by developing nations where many users get online with phones because they don’t have a computer. Desktop use is still the majority in many Western nations, with the US figure being at 58 percent.