The usage share of web browsers is the portion, often expressed as a percentage, of visitors to a group of web sites that use a particular web browser. There have been corporate battles to gain market share, and sometime a single browser or browser engine dominates the market. Once a browser drops below a certain market share, web developers may no longer put in effort to support it or ensure compatibility with their websites.
Accuracy Measuring browser usage in the number of requests (page hits) made by each user agent can be misleading.
Overestimation Not all requests are generated by a user, as a user agent can make requests at regular time intervals without user input. In this case, the user's activity might be overestimated. Some examples:
Certain anti-virus products fake their user agent string to appear to be popular browsers. This is done to trick attack sites that might display clean content to the scanner, but not to the browser. The Register reported in June 2008 that traffic from AVG Linkscanner, using an IE6 user agent string, outstripped human link clicks by nearly 10 to 1. A user who revisits a site shortly after changing or upgrading browsers may be double-counted under some methods; overall numbers at the time of a new version's release may be skewed. Occasionally websites are written in such a way that they effectively block certain browsers. One common reason for this is that the website has been tested to work with only a limited number of browsers, and so the site owners enforce that only tested browsers are allowed to view the content, while all other browsers are sent a "failure" message, and instruction to use another browser.A better option for the webmaster is to validate the HTML code against prevailing standards . Many of the untested browsers may still be otherwise capable of rendering the content. Sophisticated users who are aware of this may then "spoof" the user agent string in order to gain access to the site. Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera will, under some circumstances, fetch resources before they need to render them, so that the resources can be used faster if they are needed. This technique, prerendering or pre-loading, may inflate the statistics for the browsers using it because of pre-loading of resources which are not used in the end.
Underestimation It is also possible to underestimate the usage share by using the number of requests, for example:
Firefox 1.5 (and other Gecko-based browsers) and later versions use fast Document Object Model (DOM) caching. JavaScript is executed on page load only from net or disk cache, but not if it is loaded from DOM cache. This can affect JavaScript-based tracking of browser statistics. While most browsers generate additional page hits by refreshing web pages when the user navigates back through page history, some browsers (such as Opera) reuse cached content without resending requests to the server. Generally, the more faithfully a browser implements HTTP's cache specifications, the more it will be under-reported relative to browsers that implement those specifications poorly. Browser users may run site, cookie and JavaScript blockers which cause those users to be under-counted. For example, common AdBlock blocklists such as EasyBlock include sites such as StatCounter in their privacy lists, and NoScript blocks all JavaScript by default. The Firefox Add-ons website reports 15.0 million users of AdBlock variants and 2.2 million users of NoScript. Users behind a caching proxy (e.g. Squid) may have repeat requests for certain pages served to the browser from the cache, rather than retrieving it again via the Internet.
User agent spoofing Websites often include code to detect the browser version to adjust the page design sent according to the user agent string received. This may mean that less popular browsers are not sent complex content (even though they might be able to deal with it correctly) or, in extreme cases, refused all content.Burstein complaining "...I've been rejected until I come back with Netscape" . 11 January 2011 Thus, various browsers have a feature to cloak or spoof their identification to force certain server-side content.
Default user agent strings of most browsers have pieces of strings from one or more other browsers, so that if the browser is unknown to a website, it can be identified as one of those. For example, Safari has not only "Mozilla/5.0", but also "KHTML" (from which Safari's WebKit was forked) and "Gecko" (the engine of Firefox). Some Linux browsers such as GNOME Web identify themselves as Safari in order to aid compatibility.
Differences in measurement Net Applications, a web analytics firm, in their NetMarketShare report, uses unique visitors to measure web usage. The effect is that users visiting a site ten times will only be counted once by these sources, while they are counted ten times by statistics companies that measure page hits. The statistics released by the company routinely place operating systems sold by Microsoft (Windows) and Apple (Mac OS X) with a high market share in the desktop computer category (through 2013). Vincent Vizzaccaro (EVP – Marketing and Strategic Alliances, Net Applications, 2002–present) has stated that Microsoft and Apple are among the company's clients. The company has also admitted that their statistics are skewed.
Net Applications uses country-level weighting as well. The goal of weighting countries based on their usage is to mitigate selection area based sampling bias. This bias is caused by the differences in the percentage of tracked hits in the sample, and the percentage of global usage tracked by third party sources. This difference is caused by the heavier levels of market usage.
Statistics from the United States government's Digital Analytics Program (DAP) do not represent world-wide usage patterns. DAP uses raw data from a unified Google Analytics account.
Summary tables The following tables summarize the usage share of all browsers for the indicated months.
+ Usage share of all browsers Browser StatCounterSeptember 2026 WikimediaJuly 2026CloudflareJuly 2026 Chrome 65.6% 53.9%68% Safari 18.7% 25.1%19% Edge 6.3% 3.89%6.7% Firefox 2.92% 6.2%3.7% Samsung Internet 2.45% 2.0% 1.8% Opera 1.56% 0.83% 1.3% Others 2.47%
+Usage share of desktop browsers Browser W3CounterJune 2026 StatCounterSeptember 2026 WikimediaJuly 2026 Chrome 79.9% 65.72% 56% Safari 7.4% 7.68% 12% Edge 2.4% 14.55% 9.6% Firefox 1.4% 6.01% 13% Opera 0.3% 2.06% 2.1% Others 3.98%
+ Usage share of mobile browsersBrowserStatCounterSeptember 2026 WikimediaJune 2026 Chrome 66.01% 43% Safari 26.33% 33% Samsung Internet 3.58% 3.2% Opera 1.21% 0.6% Firefox 0.76% 1.7% UC 0.75% Others 1.36%
+ Usage share of tablet browsers Browser StatcounterSeptember 2026 Chrome 51.25% Safari 31.74% AOSP 12.91%Samsung Internet1.47%Edge1.03% Others 1.6%
Crossover to smartphones having majority share
According to StatCounter web use statistics (a proxy for all use), in the week from 7–13 November 2016, "mobile" (meaning smartphones) alone (without tablets) overtook desktop for the first time and by the end of the year smartphones were in the majority. Since 27 October, the desktop has not shown a majority, even on weekdays.
Previously, according to StatCounter press release, the world has become desktop-minority; , there was about 49% of desktop usage for that month. The two biggest continents, Asia and Africa, have been mobile-majority for a while, and Australia is by now desktop-minority too. A few countries in Europe and South America have also followed this trend of being mobile-majority.
In March 2015, for the first time in the US the number of mobile-only adult internet users exceeded the number of desktop-only internet users with 11.6% of the digital population only using mobile compared to 10.6% only using desktop; this also means the majority, 78%, use both desktop and mobile to access the internet.Number of Mobile-Only Internet Users Now Exceeds Desktop-Only in the U.S. . Retrieved 5 May 2015.
Older reports (2000–2019)
StatCounter (Jan 2009 to October 2019)
StatCounter statistics are directly derived from hits (not unique visitors) from 3 million sites using StatCounter totaling more than 15 billion hits per month. No weightings are used.
+Global Desktop stats from StatCounter (Top 5 browsers) Date Chrome Firefox Safari InternetExplorer EdgeLegacy Other Mobile October 2019 68.91% 9.25% 8.68% 4.45% 4.51% 4.20% 54.07% September 2019 69.08% 9.54% 7.41% 4.99% 4.71% 4.27% 53.75% August 2019 71.15% 9.52% 5.80% 4.40% 4.71% 4.43% 53.66% July 2019 71.05% 9.52% 5.41% 5.00% 4.60% 4.41% 53.08% June 2019 70.71% 9.76% 5.64% 5.03% 4.50% 4.36% 52.69% May 2019 69.09% 10.01% 7.25% 5.14% 4.32% 4.21% 49.40% April 2019 69.55% 9.78% 6.91% 5.16% 4.37% 4.23% 50.27% March 2019 69.52% 9.58% 6.46% 5.44% 4.56% 4.44% 51.01% February 2019 71.58% 8.72% 5.77% 5.34% 4.34% 4.24% 49.87% January 2019 70.88% 9.50% 5.15% 5.74% 4.41% 4.32% 51.09% December 2018 70.95% 10.05% 5.06% 5.40% 4.17% 4.38% 50.97% November 2018 72.38% 9.10% 5.06% 5.38% 4.00% 4.07% 45.91% October 2018 69.64% 10.14% 5.61% 6.01% 4.21% 4.38% 50.22% September 2018 67.88% 10.94% 5.58% 6.45% 4.36% 4.78% 53.95% August 2018 67.66% 10.96% 5.13% 6.97% 4.24% 5.03% 54.80% July 2018 67.60% 11.23% 5.01% 6.97% 4.19% 5.00% 55.12% June 2018 66.87% 11.44% 5.38% 7.13% 4.16% 5.02% 54.62% May 2018 66.93% 11.55% 5.48% 6.97% 4.15% 4.92% 54.11% April 2018 66.17% 11.78% 5.48% 7.17% 4.26% 5.14% 53.42% March 2018 66.93% 11.60% 5.37% 7.02% 4.18% 4.90% 53.80% February 2018 67.49% 11.54% 5.42% 6.91% 4.04% 4.60% 54.02% January 2018 65.98% 11.87% 5.87% 7.28% 4.11% 4.88% 54.20% December 2017 64.72% 12.21% 6.29% 7.71% 4.18% 4.88% 54.81% November 2017 64.02% 12.55% 6.08% 8.47% 4.29% 4.59% 52.27% October 2017 63.60% 13.04% 5.89% 8.34% 4.43% 4.69% 53.19% September 2017 63.98% 13.60% 5.46% 8.21% 4.30% 4.46% 54.71% August 2017 63.58% 13.73% 5.51% 8.61% 3.95% 4.61% 55.18% July 2017 63.48% 13.82% 5.04% 9.03% 3.95% 4.68% 56.70% June 2017 63.23% 13.98% 5.15% 9.28% 3.89% 4.47% 55.69% May 2017 63.36% 14.17% 5.25% 9.20% 3.74% 4.28% 54.25% April 2017 63.45% 14.53% 5.20% 9.00% 3.71% 4.11% 54.58% March 2017 62.81% 14.97% 5.28% 9.39% 3.64% 3.92% 53.36% February 2017 62.95% 14.81% 5.34% 9.62% 3.68% 3.60% 52.37% January 2017 62.09% 14.85% 5.28% 10.49% 3.58% 3.71% 52.28% July 2016 62.38% 15.43% 4.59% 10.67% 3.04% 3.85% 47.18%
Date Chrome InternetExplorer Firefox Safari Opera Other Mobile January 2016 57.75% 16.00% 15.95% 4.60% 2.03% 3.68% 41.04% July 2015 55.39% 18.86% 17.24% 4.70% 1.91% 1.90% 39.46% January 2015 51.72% 21.16% 18.70% 4.94% 1.67% 1.81% 33.24% July 2014 48.69% 22.52% 19.25% 4.89% 1.45% 2.19% 29.48% January 2014 46.60% 24.65% 20.39% 5.09% 1.32% 1.96% 23.77% July 2013 45.40% 26.50% 21.31% 4.80% 1.11% 1.32% 17.35% January 2013 38.08% 32.25% 22.47% 5.12% 1.22% 0.86% 14.13% July 2012 33.81% 32.04% 23.73% 7.12% 1.72% 1.58% 11.09% January 2012 28.40% 37.45% 24.78% 6.62% 1.95% 0.79% 8.49% July 2011 22.14% 42.45% 27.95% 5.14% 1.66% 0.63% 7.02% January 2011 15.68% 46.00% 30.68% 5.09% 2.00% 0.55% 4.30% July 2010 9.88% 52.68% 30.69% 4.09% 1.91% 0.74% 2.86% January 2010 6.04% 55.25% 31.64% 3.76% 2.00% 1.31% 1.56% July 2009 3.01% 60.11% 30.50% 3.02% 2.64% 0.72% 1.05% January 2009 1.38% 65.41% 27.03% 2.57% 2.92% 0.70% 0.67%
W3Counter (May 2007 to December 2022) This site counts the last 15,000 page views from each of approximately 80,000 websites. This limits the influence of sites with more than 15,000 monthly visitors on the usage statistics. W3Counter is not affiliated with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).