Use of Ionic as desktop web application with HTML5

Ionic is an HTML5 Mobile App Development Framework targeted at building hybrid mobile apps. Think of Ionic as the front-end UI framework that handles all the look and feel and UI interactions your app needs to be compelling. Kind of like "Bootstrap for Native", but with the support for a broad range of common native mobile components, slick animations and a beautiful design. 

Ionic framework needs native wrapper to be able to run on mobile devicesIonic is built and tested for mobile only. Internet Explorer does not support all the features of Ionic. Use separate applications for desktop and mobile.

 However, you can still use Ionic for a mobile website, but without using Cordova's full platform integration. 

There are a lot of ways to detect if a visitor is coming from a desktop or mobile device. Use http://detectmobilebrowsers.com/ for some common example to learn how to implement mobile detection on a server or in a programming language.