It took years, but Chrome is officially the king of web browsers

By Jon Martindale Published November 22, 2017

For a number of years now, most of the analysts that kept track of how popular certain browsers were, painted Chrome as the most popular of the bunch. There was one who disagreed however: NetMarketShare. For years, its combination of all versions of Internet Explorer trumped Chrome in its quarterly stats, but no more: Chrome is now the undisputed king.

In years gone past, this was far from the case. Internet Explorer dominated, with its latest version alone the most popular browser, while previous iterations had strong followings of their own, and Chrome and Firefox were small outliers. Now though, the landscape is far different.

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Although it will depend on who or which z you ask, the general consensus is that Chrome is by far the most popular platform. To use NetMarketShare’s latest statistics however, Chrome comes in with a 41.66 percent share of the market, while Internet Explorer (all versions + Edge) has 41.35 percent.

Apple’s Safari has just under 5 percent.

After that, there is a huge drop-off, with Firefox achieving just 9.76 percent of the market. No wonder it’s considering using elements of Chrome’s core for its next-generation of browsers.

If we instead use NetMarketShare’s data to split the browsers by version though, the stats change dramatically. Chrome 49.0 has a 21.79 percent of the pie, making it easily the most popular. Internet Explorer 11 comes in at 19.87 percent, with versions 10 and 9.0 having 5.44 and 5.49 percent, respectively.

Perhaps most interesting though is that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer replacement, Edge, doesn’t have the support you might expect, since it comes installed as default in Windows 10. Edge has just 3.85 percent of the browsing audience.

In reality though, all of these statistics aren’t representative of the vast majority of web users, since they only cover desktop usage. Most people these days use the web through their smartphones, another arena in which Google’s Chrome browser dominates.

There, Chrome pulls in just shy of 50 percent of all web users, while Apple’s Safari is much more impressive than on desktop, with 29.33 percent.

Which browser do you use? Statistically, it’s probably Chrome.

Former Evergreen writer

Jon Martindale covers how to guides, best-of lists, and explainers to help everyone understand the hottest new hardware and…

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