Synthetic Monitoring

Simulate visitor interaction with your site to monitor the end user experience.

View Product Info

FEATURES

Simulate visitor interaction

Identify bottlenecks and speed up your website.

Learn More

Real User Monitoring

Enhance your site performance with data from actual site visitors

View Product Info

FEATURES

Real user insights in real time

Know how your site or web app is performing with real user insights

Learn More

Infrastructure Monitoring Powered by SolarWinds AppOptics

Instant visibility into servers, virtual hosts, and containerized environments

View Infrastructure Monitoring Info
Comprehensive set of turnkey infrastructure integrations

Including dozens of AWS and Azure services, container orchestrations like Docker and Kubernetes, and more 

Learn More

Application Performance Monitoring Powered by SolarWinds AppOptics

Comprehensive, full-stack visibility, and troubleshooting

View Application Performance Monitoring Info
Complete visibility into application issues

Pinpoint the root cause down to a poor-performing line of code

Learn More

Log Management and Analytics Powered by SolarWinds Loggly

Integrated, cost-effective, hosted, and scalable full-stack, multi-source log management

 View Log Management and Analytics Info
Collect, search, and analyze log data

Quickly jump into the relevant logs to accelerate troubleshooting

Learn More

Current status of the “Browser Wars”

web browsers

In this report we will examine the current status of what is often referred to as the “Browser Wars.” How popular are the various web browsers around the world right now? As you’ll see, there are significant regional differences in web browser usage.

We’ve done this on two levels. First, a quick overview, and below that we’ve gone into more detail about the current web browser usage in each world region, as well as the overall usage in the world. Plenty of charts, we promise!

The data is very recent, reflecting web usage the first 3 weeks of April (courtesy of StatCounter, based on visits to 3+ million websites). So this is very much the status right now.

Overview

The days when IE completely dominated the browser landscape are long gone. Microsoft’s browser still has a big chunk of the market, but much less so in some regions than others. It has lost its lead in Europe, Asia, Africa and South America, but remains dominant in North America and Oceania (consisting primarily of Australia).

top 3 browsers by continent

As you can see by this map, the “big three” are no doubt IE, Firefox and Chrome. Opera and Safari are both out of the top three in all world regions.

An interesting observation is that IE, Chrome and Firefox each top two regions.

One could also argue that open source has won the browser wars. Firefox and Chrome together make up a majority part in every region.

Now, let’s dig into this data in more detail…

Web browser usage in North America

North America is the only region where IE usage really dominates by a wide margin. It’s still well below the 50-percent line, though. This is also one of the strongest markets for Apple’s Safari, the other being Oceania.

browser-usage-north-america

top-browsers-north-america

Web browser usage in South America

South America loves Google. Not only is Brazil the main stronghold for Google’s first social network, Orkut, but overall browser usage in the region strongly favors Google’s browser. Chrome became the most common browser in South America back in October last year. The most recent version of Chrome is now used 3x as much as the second-most-used browser version, IE 8.

browser-usage-south-america

top-browsers-south-america

Web browser usage in Europe

Europe is the most even browser battlefield, with usage being almost equal between IE, Chrome and Firefox. Chrome and IE usage is neck and neck, and Firefox only leads by a thin margin.

browser-usage-europe

top-browsers-europe

Web browser usage in Africa

This is clearly a continent that has embraced Mozilla’s web browser more than any other part of the world. That said, if you look at individual browser versions, Chrome’s latest is in the lead (as it is everywhere but North America).

browser-usage-africa

top-browsers-africa

Web browser usage in Asia

IE only lost the crown in Asia very recently, as we reported a few weeks ago. Now Chrome is in the lead, and everything points to this lead increasing.

browser-usage-asia

top-browsers-asia

Web browser usage in Oceania / Australia

Oceania is the second world region where IE still is in the lead, but it’s not as dominant here as it is in North America. This is Safari’s strongest market, partly thanks to the iPad (see “A few additional observations” for more on that).

browser-usage-oceania

top-browsers-oceania

Web browser usage worldwide

If you’ve read this far, we suspect you’re also curious about the overall worldwide status. So here it is.

browser-usage-worldwide

top-browsers-worldwide

A few additional observations

  • Google has been very successful with keeping Chrome users up to date (thanks to automated, silent updates). This is a contributing factor to the latest official version of Chrome being the most widely used browser version in the world. This is great because it minimizes fragmentation, at least of the Chrome browser. Microsoft’s IE suffers from the exact opposite approach, showing a lot of fragmentation between its versions.
  • Also of note is that Safari for iPad has managed to cram itself into several of the top 10 lists of individual browser versions. (StatCounter doesn’t separate out tablet browsers from its statistics, although it does separate out mobile browsers and small-screen devices.) Apple’s tablet is not only selling in large quantities, people are most definitely using it. Based on this, the markets where the iPad has had the most impact would be Oceania, North America and Europe, in that order. Australians sure seem to love their iPads.
  • You may tear up reading this, but IE 6 is still around. On the plus side, it’s only in two of the top 10 lists, the one for Africa, where it came in last place, and the one for Asia, where it came in 7th place. (Correction: We originally overlooked Asia here, as a commenter pointed out.)

Conclusion

The glory days of IE may be over, and its market share may be diminishing by the day, but it’s still not something web designers can ignore. At least IE 6 is getting pretty rare these days.

How the lay of the land will look like a year from now is anyone’s guess, but judging by the current trends IE will continue to lose market share, and Chrome will gain significantly. Chrome is actually well on its way to becoming the most widely used web browser in the world. The projection for Firefox is less clear, but historically some of Chrome’s gains have come at its expense, so the outlook isn’t great for Mozilla’s browser unless they do something drastic to turn the trend.

We hope you enjoyed this “status update” of browser usage across the world. How is your favorite browser doing?

Webpages Are Getting Larger Every Year, and Here’s Why it Matters

Last updated: February 29, 2024 Average size of a webpage matters because it [...]

A Beginner’s Guide to Using CDNs

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Websites have become larger and more complex [...]

The Five Most Common HTTP Errors According to Google

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Sometimes when you try to visit a web page, [...]

Page Load Time vs. Response Time – What Is the Difference?

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Page load time and response time are key met [...]

Can gzip Compression Really Improve Web Performance?

Last updated: February 26, 2024 The size of the web is slowly growing. Over [...]

Monitor your website’s uptime and performance

With Pingdom's website monitoring you are always the first to know when your site is in trouble, and as a result you are making the Internet faster and more reliable. Nice, huh?

START YOUR FREE 30-DAY TRIAL

MONITOR YOUR WEB APPLICATION PERFORMANCE

Gain availability and performance insights with Pingdom – a comprehensive web application performance and digital experience monitoring tool.

START YOUR FREE 30-DAY TRIAL
Start monitoring for free