Serving tech enthusiasts for over 25 years.
TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust.
In brief: Pretty much everyone knows that Google's Chrome is and has been the dominant desktop web browser for years. Ask about second place, however, and the number of correct answers registered is likely to dip significantly.
According to the latest data from web traffic analysts StatCounter, Chrome still sits unchallenged at the front of the class with a market share of 64.73 percent. Microsoft's Edge – not Firefox or Safari as you might have guessed – is the second most popular desktop browser worldwide at 13.74 percent followed by Safari at 9.09 percent and Firefox at 6.64 percent.
Opera and 360 Safe rounded out the top five with market shares of 2.48 percent and 1.18 percent, respectively.
Looking at data over the past year (from July 2023 through July 2024), we see that Safari held second place until the November – December 2023 timeframe when Apple's browser suddenly dropped 4.34 percentage points – from a 13.3 percent share to an 8.96 percent share.
In that same period, Chrome usage grew by 3.17 percentage points, Edge grew by 0.67 percent, and Firefox's market share increased by 0.93 percent. StatCounter gave no explanation for the shakeup.
Similarweb's numbers, meanwhile, are… well, similar. According to the data aggregation company, Chrome held the top spot at the end of July with a 67.2 percent market share followed by Edge at 15.18 percent, Safari at 7.77 percent, and Firefox at 5.97 percent.
Edge has been slowly but surely gaining market share since March of this year. StatCounter's data reveals it's the only desktop browser in the top five that has consistently gained market share each and every month during that span. In fact, all have packed on additional market share since March except Chrome, which lost 1.05 percent of its share over the past several months. At the current rate, it'd take a very long time for Edge to rival Chrome's stranglehold on the market but Microsoft will no doubt accept positive growth over a loss any day of the week.