Usage share of web browsers
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.
Accuracy
Measuring browser usage in the number of requests 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. 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
- Firefox 1.5 and later versions use fast Document Object Model 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 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 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
- 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" and "Gecko".
- Some Linux browsers such as GNOME Web identify themselves as Safari in order to aid compatibility.
Differences in measurement
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 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.| Browser | NetMarketShare October 2024 | StatCounter August 2025 | Wikimedia May 2025 | Cloudflare May 2025 |
| Chrome | 66.64% | 69.26% | 56.2% | 68% |
| Safari | 13.92% | 14.98% | 24.1% | 20% |
| Edge | 4.55% | 4.99% | 5.11% | 5.7% |
| Firefox | 2.18% | 2.26% | 5.83% | 3.6% |
| Samsung Internet | 3.04% | 1.97% | 1.9% | 1.8% |
| Opera | 3.02% | 1.85% | 0.92% | 1.5% |
| Others | 4.69% |
| Browser | W3Counter October 2024 | NetMarketShare October 2024 | StatCounter October 2024 | Wikimedia October 2024 |
| Chrome | 68.6% | 79.44% | 65.24% | 56.1% |
| Safari | 15.2% | 3.31% | 9.06% | 9.4% |
| Edge | 3.7% | 12.19% | 13.56% | 11.6% |
| Firefox | 2.8% | 3.27% | 6.39% | 15.3% |
| Opera | 1.1% | 0.67% | 3.2% | 2.4% |
| Others | 2.55% |
| Browser | NetMarketShare October 2024 | StatCounter October 2024 | Wikimedia October 2024 |
| Chrome | 55.78% | 68% | 51.4% |
| Safari | 33.11% | 23.01% | 31.9% |
| Samsung Internet | 2.70% | 3.62% | 3.5% |
| UC | 0.13% | 1.37% | 0.1% |
| Opera | 0.49% | 1.64% | 0.6% |
| Firefox | 0.37% | 0.51% | 1.6% |
| Others | 0.68% |
| Browser | NetMarketShare October 2024 | Statcounter October 2024 |
| Chrome | 14.90% | 50.56% |
| Safari | 84.83% | 33.4% |
| AOSP | 13.3% | |
| Edge | 0.95% | |
| Opera | 0.78% | |
| Others | 1.02% |
Crossover to smartphones having majority share
According to StatCounter web use statistics, in the week from 7–13 November 2016, "mobile" alone 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; as of 2016, 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.
Older reports (2000–2019)
StatCounter (Jan 2009 to October 2019)
statistics are directly derived from hits from 3 million sites using StatCounter totaling more than 15 billion hits per month. No weightings are used.| Date | Chrome | Firefox | Safari | Internet Explorer | Edge Legacy | Other | Mobile |
| 68.91% | 9.25% | 8.68% | 4.45% | 4.51% | 4.20% | ||
| 69.08% | 9.54% | 7.41% | 4.99% | 4.71% | 4.27% | ||
| 71.15% | 9.52% | 5.80% | 4.40% | 4.71% | 4.43% | ||
| 71.05% | 9.52% | 5.41% | 5.00% | 4.60% | 4.41% | ||
| 70.71% | 9.76% | 5.64% | 5.03% | 4.50% | 4.36% | ||
| 69.09% | 10.01% | 7.25% | 5.14% | 4.32% | 4.21% | ||
| 69.55% | 9.78% | 6.91% | 5.16% | 4.37% | 4.23% | ||
| 69.52% | 9.58% | 6.46% | 5.44% | 4.56% | 4.44% | ||
| 71.58% | 8.72% | 5.77% | 5.34% | 4.34% | 4.24% | ||
| 70.88% | 9.50% | 5.15% | 5.74% | 4.41% | 4.32% | ||
| 70.95% | 10.05% | 5.06% | 5.40% | 4.17% | 4.38% | ||
| 72.38% | 9.10% | 5.06% | 5.38% | 4.00% | 4.07% | ||
| 69.64% | 10.14% | 5.61% | 6.01% | 4.21% | 4.38% | ||
| 67.88% | 10.94% | 5.58% | 6.45% | 4.36% | 4.78% | ||
| 67.66% | 10.96% | 5.13% | 6.97% | 4.24% | 5.03% | ||
| 67.60% | 11.23% | 5.01% | 6.97% | 4.19% | 5.00% | ||
| 66.87% | 11.44% | 5.38% | 7.13% | 4.16% | 5.02% | ||
| 66.93% | 11.55% | 5.48% | 6.97% | 4.15% | 4.92% | ||
| 66.17% | 11.78% | 5.48% | 7.17% | 4.26% | 5.14% | ||
| 66.93% | 11.60% | 5.37% | 7.02% | 4.18% | 4.90% | ||
| 67.49% | 11.54% | 5.42% | 6.91% | 4.04% | 4.60% | ||
| 65.98% | 11.87% | 5.87% | 7.28% | 4.11% | 4.88% | ||
| 64.72% | 12.21% | 6.29% | 7.71% | 4.18% | 4.88% | ||
| 64.02% | 12.55% | 6.08% | 8.47% | 4.29% | 4.59% | ||
| 63.60% | 13.04% | 5.89% | 8.34% | 4.43% | 4.69% | ||
| 63.98% | 13.60% | 5.46% | 8.21% | 4.30% | 4.46% | ||
| 63.58% | 13.73% | 5.51% | 8.61% | 3.95% | 4.61% | ||
| 63.48% | 13.82% | 5.04% | 9.03% | 3.95% | 4.68% | ||
| 63.23% | 13.98% | 5.15% | 9.28% | 3.89% | 4.47% | ||
| 63.36% | 14.17% | 5.25% | 9.20% | 3.74% | 4.28% | ||
| 63.45% | 14.53% | 5.20% | 9.00% | 3.71% | 4.11% | ||
| 62.81% | 14.97% | 5.28% | 9.39% | 3.64% | 3.92% | ||
| 62.95% | 14.81% | 5.34% | 9.62% | 3.68% | 3.60% | ||
| 62.09% | 14.85% | 5.28% | 10.49% | 3.58% | 3.71% | ||
| 62.38% | 15.43% | 4.59% | 10.67% | 3.04% | 3.85% |
| Date | Chrome | Internet Explorer | Firefox | Safari | Opera | Other | Mobile |
| 57.75% | 16.00% | 15.95% | 4.60% | 2.03% | 3.68% | ||
| 55.39% | 18.86% | 17.24% | 4.70% | 1.91% | 1.90% | ||
| 51.72% | 21.16% | 18.70% | 4.94% | 1.67% | 1.81% | ||
| 48.69% | 22.52% | 19.25% | 4.89% | 1.45% | 2.19% | ||
| 46.60% | 24.65% | 20.39% | 5.09% | 1.32% | 1.96% | ||
| 45.40% | 26.50% | 21.31% | 4.80% | 1.11% | 1.32% | ||
| 38.08% | 32.25% | 22.47% | 5.12% | 1.22% | 0.86% | ||
| 33.81% | 32.04% | 23.73% | 7.12% | 1.72% | 1.58% | ||
| 28.40% | 37.45% | 24.78% | 6.62% | 1.95% | 0.79% | ||
| 22.14% | 42.45% | 27.95% | 5.14% | 1.66% | 0.63% | ||
| 15.68% | 46.00% | 30.68% | 5.09% | 2.00% | 0.55% | ||
| 9.88% | 52.68% | 30.69% | 4.09% | 1.91% | 0.74% | ||
| 6.04% | 55.25% | 31.64% | 3.76% | 2.00% | 1.31% | ||
| 3.01% | 60.11% | 30.50% | 3.02% | 2.64% | 0.72% | ||
| 1.38% | 65.41% | 27.03% | 2.57% | 2.92% | 0.70% |