What is the most popular browser?

There is a funny joke about the Internet Explorer:

— Why do you need Internet Explorer?
— To download Chrome!

This joke is true in over 60% of the cases as that is a share of the Chrome among all internet browsers that are used today.
In one of our previous articles, we stated that Microsoft is trying to change this situation, and we decided to look closer at the current statistics. So let’s go through September browsers TOP-5:

1. Google Chrome — 64%

Google Chrome released at the end of 2008 took over 10% of the internet browsers market whining just a year. Every other year Chrome was more and more popular adding 10% yearly. In February of 2012, Google Chrome has overtaken Firefox and kept its share growing. At the end of 2014, in 6 years after the release, Chrome’s share was already over 60% of the internet browsers.

According to http://www.w3schools.com/ In Septemeber 2015 this value has already grown up to 64%.

That allows us to call Google Chrome the most popular internet browser!

2. Firefox — 21.2%

As mentioned previously, on February 2012 Chrome has taken over the lead from the Firefox; that was a most popular browser for past 3 years.

Firefox’s history started in 2003 and was called Mozilla. Similar to Google Chrome, Firefox was growing fast in the internet browsers market as a great alternative to Internet Explorer.

In January 2009, Firefox and Internet Explorer were holding 45% of the browsers usage each. Rest 10% of the browsers used were divided between recently released Chrome, Safari, and Opera.

In October 2009, Firefox hit its highest rate of 47.5%. However, since that moment Chrome started taking away not only Internet Explorer users, so Firefox started slowly lose its position.

3. Internet Explorer – 6.6%

For a very long time Internet Explorer was a monopolist on the market of the internet browsers. In 2000-2004 Intenet Explorer was used by over 80% of users. At some moments, this rate was growing up to 90%. However, with the release of the new Internet browsers like Firefox and Chrome, IE started losing its users very fast. Even though Internet Explorer was preinstalled on every PC running Windows, users were downloading different browser right after getting a new computer or having system reinstalled.

In 2014, less than 10% of the users were using Internet Explorer and on September 2015 only 6.6%.

With the release of Windows 10 (read more about Windows 10), Microsoft decided to “kill” Internet Explorer and replace it with EDGE (read more about EDGE). According to the http://www.w3schools.com/ statistics, EDGE as a default Windows browser is being treated the same way as its ancestor. At the end of the August 2015 Windows 10 was installed on 3.5% of PCs, but the rate of EDGE, at the same moment, was only 0.3%. This means that only ONE OF TEN Windows 10 users sticks to the new Microsoft browser, others installed something else.

Honorable mentions:

Opera — though Opera developers have announced that they are not going to release a new version of the browser, Opera is still being used by the same amount of the users as 10 years ago. It was always holding 2-3% of the users. Looks like this browser’s fans will never let it go: )

Safari — on September 2015 Safari is used by 5.5% percent of the users, and this value has not changed for past few years.