A seismic shift occurred in the way the world browses the web in 2016: Google’s Chrome browser supplanted Microsoft’s Internet Explorer as the world market-share leader in desktop browsers. And that’s a genteel way of putting it. "Google crushed Microsoft as Chrome dominates the desktop browser field" gives a clearer picture of what happened.
Measuring browser market share is a tricky business. If you can’t gather data from every website on the Internet - and you can't - which websites do you track? Which countries do you monitor? Do you count page views or unique visitors? How do you handle sampling bias introduced by regional or user-community usage differences? What about the darknet?
The market share numbers reported in this article come from Net Applications’ Net Market Share Report which measures unique visitors from approximately 40,000 global websites. Net Applications weights their results using the CIA’s internet traffic by country data. This reduces distortions caused by differences in a country’s percentage of global internet use and the percentage of its users captured by the websites Net Applications monitors.
Different measurement methods can produce very different results but almost every method agreed on one thing: Internet Explorer (IE) dominated the global desktop browser market for over a decade. Using a methodology they’ve since abandoned, Net Applications gave IE about 91% market share in Q1, 2004. Using their current methodology, IE was holding a bit less than 78% market share in Q1, 2008.
The Net Market Share Report has IE holding more desktop market share than all of the other browsers combined through August 2015. That date is important because IE officially became a legacy browser a month earlier when Microsoft released Windows 10 with their new browser, Edge, in July.
IE remained the global market share leader until it fell into a virtual tie with Chrome in March 2016 when IE held 39.1% and Chrome had 39.09% market share. After that it’s been all Chrome. IE began 2016 with a 43.82% share and ended the year with 20.84%. In January, Chrome held a 35.05% share and it rose to 56.43% in December. The pattern continued in January of this year with IE falling to 19.71% share and Chrome rising to 57.94%. Game over.
Edge usage grew in 2016 but not nearly enough to offset IE’s loss. Edge began the year with 3.07% share and ended it at 5.33%. Almost all of the people who abandoned IE moved to Chrome.
The other browsers continued to be also-rans in 2016. Firefox was the best of the bunch beginning the year at 11.42% share and ending at 12.22%. Firefox’s usage pattern was different from the other browsers, however. Usage had declined to 7.69% in August when it began a consistent rise for the remainder of the year. Firefox isn’t close to challenging Chrome but it will be interesting to see if it continues to grow through 2017.
Apple’s Safari isn't a contender. It began the year with 4.64% share and finished with 3.47%. All the other browsers combined fell from a 2% share in January to a 1.7% share in December.
Nothing lasts forever and the day will come when Chrome no longer rules the desktop browser world. But today is not that day. Chrome has no serious competitors at the moment and the only question right now is, how high will Google's browser go before its market share levels out.
