According to data published on the VPN Atlas blog, only two web browsers exceed one billion users: Google Chrome and Safari. The first surely hasn’t surprised anyone, but the second has. It is obvious that the company has not discriminated by the type of platform and has added the number of users that each application has both on desktop and mobile.
The data provided by Atlas is interesting because it focuses more on the number of users than on the share percentage. According to the company, the ubiquitous Google Chrome is the most used web browser in the world with nearly 3.4 billion users across all platforms, which are officially Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS.
At this point there is no need to explain the success of the application created by the search engine giant, which at first was a breath of fresh air in a sector that was not taking advantage of the capabilities of modern processors, then became the great promoter of HTML5 (far ahead of Firefox) and ended up consolidating itself through services, Android and Google’s powerful diffusion machinery.
Talking about Safari, which has just over 1,000 million users, comes pre-installed on macOS and iOSbut there is an important aspect to take into account here, and that is if the alternative browsers are identified as such in iOS or if they all use the Safari user agent, since in that system all the alternative browsers are forced to use the engine WebKit rendering implemented by default, even Firefox.
In Atlas they praise that Apple has implemented in Safari “several privacy features to ensure the safety of its users. The browser privacy report shows how many and which cross-site trackers Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) prevented access to your information”.
Number of users of the most popular web browsers according to data published on the VPN Atlas blog.
On browsers trying to catch up with Google Chrome and Safari, we see that Microsoft Edge takes third place with about 212 million users total. Taking data published by Atlas itself a year earlier, we see that the Redmond giant’s app has risen one place to overtake Mozilla Firefox, showing that the transition to Chromium has been a wise move if we just stick to the share and the number of users.
Fourth place is now occupied, as we have already mentioned, by Mozilla Firefox with approximately 179 million users. Despite its backtracking, Atlas says that the browser “It is aimed at users who are more concerned about privacy, since it offers many functions for its protection. Private browsing mode includes security against tracking, malware, phishing and pop-up blocking”. However, the Atlas data reinforces a trend that has been seen for a long time and reveals that the situation of the Mozilla product is delicate.
The fifth and sixth places are occupied by the browser of Samsung and Opera with 149 million and 108 million users respectively. Both of these products are based on Chromium, so Firefox is the only clear alternative because Blink, Chromium’s rendering engine, is a fork of WebKit.
As we can see, Google Chrome clearly dominates the web browser market and its main rival is the technology from which it derives. Microsoft Edge is gaining ground since its migration to Chromium and Firefox, despite having its faithful, does not stop losing users.
Image: Pixabay.
