15+ Browser Usage Statistics, Market Share & Trends in 2023

Updated · May 20, 2023

Did you know that 43% of the human population uses Google Chrome?

No, not 43% of internet users; we’re talking about the entire population of Earth. That’s right—almost every other person alive browses on Chrome.

Browsers first became popular in the 1990s as a form of a GUI that enabled (the then-rare) internet users to connect with each other. Initially, they only supported text; nowadays, you can even play video games in your browser.

So, yeah, believe it or not, browsers’ updates were actually noticeable once upon a time..

Today, we’ll look into key browser usage statistics and analyze them by various criteria such as region and platform.

Useful Browser Usage Stats (Editor’s Choice)

  • Microsoft Edge became the second most-used browser on desktops in April 2022.
  • Google Chrome has 3.3 billion users, which is three times the number of Safari users.
  • Chrome, Edge, and Firefox all released their “version 100” updates this spring—and nearly broke the internet.
  • The number of internet users increased by 178 million from July 2021 to July 2022.
  • Google updated Chrome’s logo in version 100 in 2022.
  • Chrome issues security updates every 15 days, nearly four times as often as Safari.
  • Over a third (37.77%) of businesses prefer to use Microsoft Edge.
  • 17% of US adults use their browser’s password manager.

Browser Usage Statistics for 2022

Another new year, another several hundred million new internet users. That generally also means several hundred million new browser users. Indeed, the top performers in the market already hit new highs in 2022, breaking milestones.

Read on to find out the details.

1. Google Chrome has 3.3 billion users.

(Source: Atlas VPN)

It’s a well-known fact that the most used browser in the world is none other than Google Chrome. But here’s one particularly striking way of visualizing just how popular it is:

As of April 2022, it has 3,378,967,819 users. That’s 3.37 billion.

In other words, about 43% of the Earth’s population uses Chrome. Not 43% of internet users but out of every living human on the planet. Now that’s a market share to be proud of!

2. Safari boasts one billion users.

(Source: Atlas VPN)

Now that we told you how many people use Chrome, all the other numbers in this article will no doubt look puny and insignificant.

Still, there’s one more figure higher than a billion—and that’s the number of Safari users. 

Apple’s web browser isn’t readily available on non-Apple operating systems, so it’s not as ubiquitous. Nevertheless, it ranks second in popularity, having recently hit 1,006,232,879 users. That’s the power of Apple fans for you.

3. 17% of US adults use their browser’s password manager.

(Source: YouGov)

Browser usage stats don’t have to be about how many people use what browser. They can also be about how people use their browser of choice. As it turns out, many entrust their browsers with crucial personal data—usernames and passwords. 

About 17% of people in the US say they save their login credentials in-browser. Moreover, 25% of young people and 26% of adults with a postgraduate education do. Older people are generally more distrustful of letting technology handle their passwords and prefer to write down their credentials on paper.

Luckily, all top web browsers in 2022 offer secure integrated password manager solutions. Some even have addons that provide mutual compatibility, such as Edge and Safari.

Fun fact: An internet user has 34 passwords on average. That’s way too many alphanumerical phrases to keep track of. Surprisingly, people prefer to either write them all down (unsafe) or reuse the same one for multiple accounts (super unsafe) rather than get a password manager.

Long story short: Google Chrome reigns supreme—globally and across all platforms overall. However, there are certain bits and pieces of the market where other browsers boast a higher usage share.

Find out what regions and platforms Google has yet to conquer and how close it is to the first spot.

4. Microsoft Edge became the second most used web browser on desktops in April 2022.

(Source: Ghacks)

Microsoft Edge, the successor of the once-king Internet Explorer, reclaimed second place in the list of the most popular browsers—albeit excluding mobile platforms.

It now has a desktop browser market share of 10.07%, ranking just above Safari (9.61%) and Mozilla Firefox (7.86%). It’s still a far cry from Chrome’s 66%, but it’s a win nonetheless.

Plus, let us remind you that back in 2004, Internet Explorer held 95% of the market. Even Chrome has never been able to go beyond 70% usage share, and it’s unlikely that it will break IE’s record any time soon. After all, Microsoft Edge numbers keep growing as Firefox and other smaller players struggle to keep their market share.

5. Safari has a desktop market share of 15.58% in the US.

(Source: Stat Counter)

Americans like Apple products more than people from other countries. That much is clear even on the software level, where the desktop version of Safari still holds onto second place in the US.

Apple’s browser’s market share in the US still edges Edge’s (pun intended), but Microsoft has narrowed the gap to about 2%. A year ago, Safari’s usage share (desktop only) stood at 18.57%, whereas Edge’s fell around 12%. In 2022, it’s 15.58% vs 13.47%.

The future looks promising for Microsoft.

6. Safari owns 35.61% of the overall domestic browser market.

(Source: Stat Counter)

Chrome’s market share of 50.18% makes it the clear winner in the US. However, Apple is no slouch, either.

While Safari owns just 18.61% of the worldwide market, it controls a cozy 35.61% of the overall browser market in the US (mobile and desktop included). In other words, it’s twice as popular at home as it is in the rest of the world.

Microsoft Edge is a distant third with just 6.14% in usage share.

7. Brave has 62.4 million monthly active users.

(Source: Brave)

Few people have heard of Brave—a three-year-old web browser with integrated cryptocurrency features.

Despite Brave’s perfectly respectable user numbers (after all, 62 million people is three times the Netherlands’ entire population), it’s nowhere near the market share a top web browser can achieve. As of June 2022, it has a usage share of roughly 1%, with only 19.2 million people using it daily.

It really puts into perspective just how massive tech giants like Google, Apple, and Microsoft are, doesn’t it?

Mobile Browser Market Share in 2022

Mobile is now bigger than desktop—not that that makes any difference to Google’s performance. Android is literally Google’s home turf, so the fact that Chrome is king on both platforms hardly comes as a surprise.

Still, let us amaze you with some mobile browser usage stats, just to drive Google’s utter market dominance home.

8. The number of internet users increased by 178 million from July 2021 to July 2022.

(Source: Data Reportal)

Even though the internet may seem a basic necessity to most of us, there are still many who don’t have access to it. Luckily, that is slowly changing.

Over the last year, from July 2021 to July 2022, 93 million people acquired phones.

What does that have to do with anything?

Well, in certain areas of the world, computers aren’t readily available for many people—smartphones, on the other hand, are more accessible. Globally, 59.7% of web traffic is mobile. In places such as Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia, though, it’s as much as 80%.

It’s these areas that are pushing mobile browser usage up even today.

9. Safari has a 24.09% market share of the mobile market.

(Source: Stat Counter)

Earlier, we talked about Safari’s recently-hit milestone of one billion users. What we didn’t mention is that most of those users are on mobile. Safari is the go-to browser option for iPhone owners—and there are about 900 million of them.

For comparison, over three billion people use Android devices, which explains Safari’s measly 24.09% market share. Still, that’s enough for it to qualify as the second most used mobile browser.

10. Google Chrome controls 65.88% of the mobile market.

(Source: Stat Counter)

Two decades ago, there were two major computer companies: Apple and Microsoft. Then Google showed up and successfully took over the mobile space. It completely removed Microsoft from the smartphone scene and reduced Apple to a comparatively modest market share.

The company’s mobile browser has a market share of 65.88%, which makes it nearly three times as popular as its main competitor, Apple’s Safari.

This figure is also identical to Chrome’s overall market share (mobile and desktop included), which is 65.87%. Safari, on the other hand, sits at 18.61% when counting desktop users, too.

11. Safari has a 36.63% tablet market share.

(Source: Stat Counter)

The most used browsers vary significantly by platform, and one particular outlier is the tablet market. While there are plenty of decent Android tablets, they can’t quite match the performance of Apple’s iPad line.

Don’t get us wrong—Chrome is still #1, taking a 48.68% share of the tablet browser market. The difference is that, in this case, Safari is actually fairly close on its heels, boasting a 36.63% share.

Those are global figures, but if we look at it regionally, things vary a bit. Take North America, for example, where 40.41% of tablet owners actually prefer Safari and just 36.09% use Google Chrome.

12. Mobile users only spend 7.5% of their time using browsers.

(Source: Statista)

Most popular web browsers have both desktop and mobile versions. Furthermore, since a larger share of people owns smartphones than personal computers nowadays, it follows that mobile browsers see more use. However, that doesn’t tell the whole story.

The primary way of connecting to the internet on a desktop is through a browser; on mobile platforms, it’s not. Almost every major company has an app. Think about it.

Your favorite airline?

It has an app that’s also integrated with your e-wallet.

Your online banking?

It’s an app with five layers of security.

Ordering food?

You do it through an app that lets you track your driver in real-time.

As such, mobile users spend 92.5% of their time online on apps and just 7.5% using browsers. Perhaps overall browser popularity will keep declining until other ways of staying online completely take over.

Fun fact: Online banking has been around since 1995. Mobile banking, though? That came about a decade later and only really took off until 2019.

Several browsers have dominated the market throughout history, including Netscape, Internet Explorer, and, most recently, Google Chrome. In other words, the current state of the market is far from set in stone, and changes can come at a moment’s notice.

Over the last few years, Microsoft’s new browser, Edge, has been gaining…edge (pun intended, again). Let’s see why.

13. 37.77% of businesses prefer to use Microsoft Edge.

(Source: TechRadar)

You thought Microsoft’s browser, whatever its name is nowadays, was dead? Think again! 

Recent browser usage statistics from the business world suggest that it’s far from the grave. As a matter of fact, it’s the browser that professionals in most industries prefer.

In 2022, 37.77% of employees say they use Microsoft Edge, while 33.01% use Chrome. Yes, this probably has a lot to do with the circumstance that Edge is the pre-installed, default browser on Windows. But the same thing is true for general users of the OS, and those often switch to alternatives.

14. Chrome, Edge, and Firefox all released their “version 100” updates in spring 2022—and nearly broke the internet.

(Source: The Verge)

The most popular browsers in the non-Apple world—Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Mozilla Firefox—recently reached their “version 100.” 

(Yes, all of them at once. And yes, it was on purpose.)

The problem with the number “100” is that it has three digits, and most web applications could only read two-digit browser versions until recently. So, the three giants worked with developers for months to help them update their code to recognize three-digit version numbers properly. They wanted to ensure a smooth rollout of new browser updates—and they succeeded.

Next, we’re looking forward to version 1,000…though it may take a few decades at this rate.

15. Google updated Chrome’s logo in version 100.

(Source: The Verge)

The world’s most common browser celebrated its 100th version patch with a new logo. It came out in February 2022 and made headlines. But let’s be honest—you probably didn’t even notice. In fact, we bet you looked at the icon just now and couldn’t tell if there was anything different about it at all.

That’s okay. Google’s graphic design team took the liberty of enlarging the blue circle in the middle ever so slightly and removing a couple of barely noticeable shadows. (Yeah, it makes us wonder, too.)

Anyway, this update is the first one the logo has had since 2014, and we may have to wait another eight years for the next iteration.

16. Chrome issues security updates nearly four times as often as Safari.

(Source: Finances Online)

Here’s a browser comparison those more tech-savvy and privacy-conscious will no doubt find intriguing. Like any other software product, browsers receive constant updates; however, some are updated more often than others.

For instance, Google issues security patches for Chrome every 15 days now, down from 33 days two years ago. Firefox gets the latest security patch once every four weeks (28 days), whereas Microsoft updates its browser every 30 days.

Finally, despite Safari’s market share making it the second biggest browser, it’s not second in terms of patch frequency—Apple only updates it once every 54 days. This is largely because Safari patches are usually bundled with new OS versions, and those are obviously rarer.

Wrap Up

No doubt you’ve  heard of the term “browser wars.” There’ve been a few of them over the past two decades, ever since Internet Explorer showed up and overthrew Netscape as the world’s preeminent browser.

Since then, things have changed, and neither Netscape nor IE exist in their original iterations anymore. As you’ve surely realized after reading this entire article, browser usage statistics tend to be rather dynamic, so we at Web Tribunal made sure that the figures we introduced today are as recent as possible.

If they were to your liking, make sure to hang around for more up-to-date stats!

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Jordan T. Prodanoff
Jordan T. Prodanoff

A wayfarer by heart, Jordan fancies journeying into foreign lands with a camera in hand almost as much as he enjoys roving the online world. He spends his time poking at letters and pixels, trying to transmogrify them into something cool.