Internet: These two browsers dominate the competition in 2022


The browser market is swimming in a culture of secrecy. Historically, it has always been difficult to obtain concrete data on the traffic figures and volumes of use of each browser. While many companies have tried to make these figures public, like NetMarketShare and StatCounter, their results have often been criticized.

The US federal government’s Digital Analytics Program (DAP), however, allows us to have a complete reading of the last 90 days of visits to US government websites and, from there, to extrapolate the figures of browsers across the Atlantic – where the uses are quite similar to what is practiced on the Old Continent.

According to the DAP, of the 5.65 billion visits made in the last 90 days, the most used web browser is Google Chrome, with 48%. This is a slight drop for the Chrome browser, which last year had a usage rate of 48.3%. This drop, however, is not due to a sudden growth of Edge or any other alternative browser. It’s a fact: Chrome reigns supreme on the web. No, the big change comes above all from the evolution of our digital uses.

Over the past 12 months, we’ve seen a huge leap forward in smartphones over PCs for web use. In 2022, 54% of the web browsing market belongs to smartphones compared to PCs. In 2019 and 2020, smartphones gained ground over desktop computers, rising from 46.9% to 50%. Today, smartphones rule the roost. Something to send a clear alert to website designers: if you do not develop sites for smartphones, you are making a serious mistake. As for tablets, their market is only estimated at 1.8%.

Firefox in bad shape

On the smartphone market, Safari dominates. Macs are a bit more popular, now accounting for 10.4% of the PC market since 2021. But with a 35% market share, iPhones dominate both the smartphone market and the smartphone browser market. . Indeed, the iPhone’s iOS operating system is now the most popular operating system among end users. As for Android? Google’s mobile operating system only recorded an internet browsing market share of 20.7% at the start of 2022.

The only other browsers that rely on smartphones, besides Safari and Chrome, are Samsung Internet, built into the Korean giant’s devices, with a tiny 1.1% share, and the generic Android Webview.

When it comes to desktop web browsers, Chrome is even bigger than it might seem at first glance. Its open-source foundation, Chromium, is also used by Microsoft Edge. Edge, with 6.7% of the user base, is now the third web browser. With the exception of Mozilla Firefox, all other major web browsers like Opera, Vivaldi, and Brave run on Chromium.

Firefox for its part comes in fourth position and is doing poorly. Over the past 12 months, Firefox has dropped to 2.6% from 2.7% last year. In 2015, when I started using DAP’s numbers, Firefox had an 11% market share. In 2016, Firefox had fallen to 8.2%. It experienced a slight upward rebound in 2018, to 9%. Despite its advertising agreements with Google, Mozilla has laid off more employees.

Note that, for its part, the very moribund Internet Explorer (IE) has completely disappeared from the list. It has fallen from 2.2% in 2021 to 1.9%, which places it at the bottom of the list of browsers used to go to the web. In short, today’s internet belongs to Chrome on desktops and Safari on smartphones. Nothing else really matters.

Source: ZDNet.com





Source link -97