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News and Advice on the World's Latest Innovations | ZDNET

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/&gt;I'll give you a hint, it's not Microsoft's Internet Explorer. And Firefox is declining into irrelevance.For ages, it was almost impossible to get hard data on which were the most popular web browsers. Sure, many companies claimed to have good information, such as and , but their numbers were massaged. The US federal government's , however, gives us a . While it doesn't tell us about global web browser use, it's the best information we have about American web browser users. And so, in early March 2020, we know that the top web browser for the last three months -- with 4.02 billion visits counted -- was, drum-roll please, . While not as dominant as Internet Explorer (IE) once was -- in 2002 &nbsp;-- with 49.3% Chrome is well ahead of , with its 31.6% How does Safari rank so high, with Macs still pegged at about 10% - -9.3% to be exact, according to DAP -- of the PC market? Easy. These days just over half --50% to 46.9%-- of the web browsing market belongs to smartphones over PCs. The remainder, 3.1%, goes to tablets. Of smartphones, in the US, 29.5% are iPhones, while 23% are using Android-based smartphones. So, it's there on iPhones, and to some extent iPads, where most Safari users are coming from.&nbsp; In third place, and steadily declining, you'll find the once-mighty IE with 5.7%. Even though in favor of for over a year, some users are still sticking with the out-of-date browser. The most popular version is the still supported IE 11, with 5.1%. The antique IE 7, which hasn't been supported in over four years, is still hanging around with 0.5% of the market. Below that comes the newly transformed . The changeover hasn't helped its popularity much. Edge has only 4.2% market share. According to web metrics vendor NetApplications, however, . Edge's growth may also have been inhibited by and the use of Google Chrome extensions. &nbsp;The web browser that's really hurting the most, though, is . In this round-up, Firefox has only 3.6% of the market. In 2015, when I first turned to DAP's numbers, . By 2016, . . But now, Firefox has declined so much you really must begin to worry about its long-term future.&nbsp; While Firefox continued to draw praise for its privacy initiatives with and , its numbers keep trending downward. And, it's not just DAP's numbers. Other surveys, such as NetApplication's, show Firefox's numbers falling to 7.6%. Even more worrying, in mid-January, , Firefox's parent company, As for the other browsers, a mobile-only browser for Samsung smartphones, came in with 2.7%. , another Chromium-based browser, which has been getting some buzz, is buried in the noise of others.&nbsp;

/&gt;I'll give you a hint, it's not Microsoft's Internet Explorer. And Firefox is declining into irrelevance.For ages, it was almost impossible to get hard data on which were the most popular web browsers. Sure, many companies claimed to have good information, such as and , but their numbers were massaged. The US federal government's , however, gives us a . While it doesn't tell us about global web browser use, it's the best information we have about American web browser users. And so, in early March 2020, we know that the top web browser for the last three months -- with 4.02 billion...

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Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, aka sjvn, has been writing about technology and the business of technology since CP/M-80 was the cutting edge, PC operating system; 300bps was a fast Internet connection; WordStar was the state of the art word processor; and we liked it.His work has been published in everything from highly technical publications (IEEE Computer, ACM NetWorker, Byte) to business publications (eWEEK, InformationWeek, ZDNet) to popular technology (Computer Shopper, PC Magazine, PC World) to the mainstream press (Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, BusinessWeek).

https://www.zdnet.com/meet-the-team/us/steven-j-vaughan-nichols/

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

ZDNet is a business technology news website published by CBS Interactive, along with TechRepublic. The brand was founded on April 1, 1991, as a general interest technology portal from Ziff Davis and evolved into an enterprise IT-focused online publication owned by CNET Networks.

News and Advice on the World's Latest Innovations | ZDNET

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