Chrome Increases Its Overwhelming Market Share, Now Over 70% (neowin.net)
- Reference: 0178980488
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/09/02/204241/chrome-increases-its-overwhelming-market-share-now-over-70
- Source link: https://www.neowin.net/news/chrome-increases-its-overwhelming-market-share-now-over-70/
> According to [Statcounter], in August 2025, Chrome kept on increasing its overwhelming market share, which is now above the 70% mark (70.25%, to be precise) in the desktop browser market. The gap between Chrome and its closest competitor, Microsoft Edge, is immense, with Edge holding just 11.8% (+0.01 points over the previous month). Apple's Safari is third with 6.34% (+1.04 points); Firefox has 4.94% (-0.36 points); and Opera is fifth with a modest 2.06% market share (-0.13 points).
>
> Things look similar on the mobile side of the market, with Google Chrome having 69.15% (+1.92 points) and Safari being second with 20.32% (-2.2 points). Samsung Internet is third with 3.33% (-0.17 points). As for Microsoft Edge, its mobile share is only 0.59% (+0.06 points).
The findings can be found [2]here .
[1] https://www.neowin.net/news/chrome-increases-its-overwhelming-market-share-now-over-70/
[2] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-202408-202508
Surprised Firefox is not higher (Score:2)
I knew that Firefox was in the just-below 5% mark but I have it as my default with no complaints. Unlike Chrome, it works with uBlock Origin (the non-lite version). Any insight as to why they are so low in the standings?
Re: Surprised Firefox is not higher (Score:2)
Firefox uses twice the ram, and pages loads slower. Now with AI.
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So what? Not seeing ads more than makes up for any increase in ram use or rendering slowness.
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Adblocking is easy with or without Firefox.
Settling for worse performance because you are fine with it does not mean others are obliged to be.
Browsers are tools. Firefox earned mass adoption because it was better in all ways. It's largely abandoned in 2025 because Mozilla refuse to totally focus their work and funding on the browser, as befits an individually profitable "non-profit".
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> Firefox uses twice the ram, and pages loads slower.
It's worth the RAM usage. Do yourself (and every fucking developer of front-end code) a favor and ditch Chrome. It's the IE of our era.
I'm also not noticing a difference in page load on my machine. Granted, it's high-end.
> Now with AI.
[1]Ya, cause Chrome would never add Gemini to it.... [google.com]
[1] https://www.google.com/chrome/ai-innovations/
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They added some bullshit now where you long click a link and it pops up an AI summary preview.
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I haven't noticed that it uses more RAM than other browsers and the benefits are great since it's allowing me to run uBlock origin with its full power.
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For me, it's pulled punches. If Brave can build such a good ad blocker, so could FireFox. Even with uBlock Origin, FireFox consistently shows me those pesky "log in with Google" popups all over the web. And their "no auto play video" setting doesn't fully work. If they fixed those two things, I'd use FireFox *all* the time. And I like their New Tab page (used to be Pocket).
Re: Surprised Firefox is not higher (Score:2)
As you point out, one of the previous best reasons to use Firefox was good ad blocking support. But with the EULA change, shameless simping for Google and even ads being thrust onto the start page, Mozilla has made it clear this is not the best choice for ad haters or privacy conscious people. At the point you have to start digging through settings to find all the ad check boxes to turn off, it's just easier to use something else. That crowd has gone to Librewolf or Brave or whatever, and rightly so -- F
Why? (Score:3)
Why would people install Chrome while Brave blocks ads natively?
Re: Why? (Score:2)
Comes by default on their phone?
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No, they were specifically measuring desktop usage.
It's a legitimate question- what in the fuck marketing is so successful that I must be blanking out of my mind whenever I encounter it?
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Brave's e2ee sync chains are even more of a killer feature than adblocking, IMO.
I know so many Brave users that I suspect it's not being reported separately in their headline number.
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Because some people don't care, and for others ublock lite does the job. Honestly that's where I am right now. I was force switched from ublock origin to ublock lite the other day. But... I ... I can't tell the difference. I thought this would drive me back to Firefox, but turns out it didn't.
look at it this way (Score:1)
4% of whats left is 40% which kinda were it was before chrome. 4% of 5.4 billion is not bad
Re: (Score:2)
It's funny that you got modded down because probably about 50 percent of users here are using Chrome because it works and isn't Microsoft, and Google search because it is getting worse slower than DDG or Bing.
Switching browsers is so easy, and switching search engines is even easier. People are refusing to use the obviously worse products and blaming Google for the failures of their competition.
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They didn't get modded down. Their karma is trying to squeeze in bed between Trump and Satan.
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And I can see why
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> Chrome is open source
No, it is not.
Chromium is. Yes, there is a difference.
> the place where new web standard are prototypes
And where existing standards go to be tread upon with Google righteously claiming they're justified in their breaking behavior because "We know what our customer's really want."
> Even if I am using Linux or a Mac, I don't need to worry about not being able to open my bank's page.
You'll have the same luck with Firefox or any WebKit based browser that aren't controlled by organizations that are fucking behave like shit.
> While I use Firefox as my primary browser
And it wasn't due to a choice not to use Chrome?
> I don't know if there is a use case for different browsing engines like there used to be.
Except who controls them, and how they're going to use that control to move the web in dire
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> Chrome is open source
Nope. Try Chromium which is not the same thing.
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Firefox let's you use a proper ad blocker. So there's that.
Vivaldi (Score:2)
Your analytics wouldn't tell you this, but I am using Vivaldi. Some vears ago, they gave up trying to get websites to recognize that they were yet another Chromium based browser and just set the user agent to identify as Chrome. So you have no idea what their market share is - though I would guess somewhere below 5%. I mean, honestly, they don't even know. Not going to make a huge change in Chrome's numbers that some of those aren't actually Chrome, but worth mention anyway.
Re: (Score:2)
We know what the market share is. Your incredibly rare example doesn't move the percentages even by a fraction. And if you think what you did was normal behaviour then I have some bad news for you about Slashdotters vs the rest of the world.
Mozilla choose to be irrelevant (Score:2)
Mozilla have plenty of money but insult the FOSS community by failure to use that money solely to improve Firefox and Thunderbird.
Nothing else Mozilla do is other than the usual "profitable non-profit grift", for Mozilla need not exist except for Firefox and T-bird.
The old FOSS community remains quiet since Chrome is "good enough" while the decreasing Firefox browser share is generally ignored. Firefox is just good enough to divert resources from competing browsers, which is obviously by design.
Re: Mozilla choose to be irrelevant (Score:2)
I think Rust and Servo were a nice thing though.
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> but insult the FOSS community
The FOSS community is irrelevant in the market share of the world PCs. You can appease them all you want it wouldn't change this story.
Plus Edge is Chrome controlled by MS (Score:2)
Not a better alternative by any means.
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Chrome is not WebKit.
It might be (Score:2)
the year of the Edge browser!
BraveThoriumChromiumChromeOperaGXEdgeVivaldi (Score:2)
Performance tested Jan 2024. Any of the alternatives are fast enough and so is DDG search. Most users don't know or don't care, that is why you get the numbers you see - by predestination of preinstalled software.
Does anyone even read the headline anymore? (Score:3)
Lots of comments mentioning that "Chrome is open source and on mobile phones" when even the little blurb shared on the Slashdot article mentions explicitly that they measured desktop browser usage AND not even mentioning that the "open source" part of Chrome is the Chromium project, which is *NOT* Chrome, and doesn't count here.
Brave, Vivaldi, Edge, and Opera are all Chromium-based browsers. Safari and Firefox are not. So the stats aren't skewed to Chrome because of the pervasiveness of Chromium usage. They're explicit stats to Google's Chrome browser.
Now, with that out of the way, there are many reasons that Chrome itself is the default, Part of that is Chrome drove much of the innovation in the browser space, not only on web standards, and driving everyone to Javascript instead of plugins; but also because of profiles, profile syncing, and deep integration into all things Google (SSO support for the browser and all Google apps, etc.)
But none of this was because of "Don't be evil", but a rather pure financially-driven effort on Google's part. From a developer perspective, it wrestled web development back out of the hands of designers/artists and back into the hands of programmers with deep javascript integration. Simultaneously, having provided the highest javascript performance on the client side, with the ease-of-use of Javascript over most other programming languages, and the extreme security issues of earlier approaches to dynamic code execution on the client side (untethered Java Plugins, Flash plugins, etc.), it did make a lot of sense to leverage that tool versus the other approaches that existed before.
One thing I do find funny from the earlier days is both Chrome and IE used a one-process-per-tab model and lots of early Firefox users (around the 3.6 era) constantly nitpicked over how many processes were spawned and Firefox was "cleaner" for having a single process in task manager. It turned out that the separate process model was significantly more secure and scalable.
At any rate, though, none of this was out of the goodness of Google's heart, contributing back to the open web, or whatever nonsense people filled their heads with back in those days. It was all a purpose-built, financial-driven effort to "light-touch" lock you into Google's services. "Hey look at all these shiny toys we are giving you in a web browser, don't you want them? You do don't you? Yeah look at this 1GB mailbox over the 25MB you used to get. Yeah you like that don't you?"
These days, the standardization part doesn't matter as much anymore. Javascript won the client side browser wars, even though we see as frequent if not more so Chrome security updates as we saw in Adobe Flash or Java back in the day (people hated monthly updates of both of these applications, and it was a massive driver to get off of them and into Chrome--only for Chrome to basically do the same thing but the only difference is it's generally [but not always, especially if you work in IT] more behind the scenes.) The security issues with Flash were so common that Microsoft ended up making Adobe Flash Player part of Windows Update just to get it out there more consistently.
Google has now cemented their monopoly position, however, because of instead of an open web, they've created a Google web. When Microsoft was trying to get the Windows Phone off the ground, Google explicitly and extremely purposefully did not make any software for the Windows Phone, and when Microsoft invested effort into building an in-house Youtube application, Google went through great lengths to prevent it from working. To be fair, this wasn't the only thing that killed Windows Phone, but it was a massive contributor by not giving people access to common applications at the time (Youtube, G-Mail, etc.) This act was deeply anti-competitive behavior and should have resulted in Chrome being split off from Google proper and into a separate entity (and to be honest, splitting up of all of these projects).
Google is effectively more evil today
[1]Read the rest of this comment...
[1] https://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=23785190&cid=65634720
How many browsers do you use and why? (Score:2)
I know we are not representative of the average browsers user, but how many different browsers do you use? I’d wager most tech savvy people segregate their use to two or more different browsers for similar reasons people have more than one email address.
I use Chrome for work and the primary on my VR headset.
Safari for most personal use; and on my phone and tablet.
Firefox for work when I need a separately cached browser.
Dia occasionally to play around with its AI forward nature.
Wolvin on my VR he
So, then (Score:3)
it’s a confirmed monopoly. Check.
Re: (Score:2)
> it’s a confirmed monopoly. Check.
It's a confirmed winner . It literally dethroned a monopoly of Internet Explorer being preinstalled on approximately everybody's computer and pushed in their face by the operating system. (Heck, you still have to go download it.)
I prefer Firefox myself, but I can't argue that Chrome hasn't got it's current position fair and square.
Re: (Score:3)
Pretending that Chrome its position fair and square is so absolutely insane it borders on lunacy.
Google used to pay freeware installers (Adobe Flash, Shockwave, Java, CCleaner, etc.) and the like up to $1 per install. If you didn't uncheck the box while installing these programs, then Chrome installed as the default browser importing all the important bits (passwords history etc). If you didn't install Chrome in that way, Google Search, YouTube, etc. all heavily promoted Chrome installations.
You can a
The domination of the personal device (Score:2)
It might be more of a sign of how few people use desktop computers anymore. Most connected people are using smart phones now, and that affects the statistics. A lot of those phones are Android and people will use Chrome because of that. This might be the core reason why Edge isn't making a dent, even as Windows tries to fend of Chrome at every turn and recommend Edge for everything. Consumers have abandoned the "personal computer" for the "personal device".
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Microsoft recommends Edge, then continues to annoy people trying to use it with a horribly long chain of totally stupid and unnecessary questions that nobody wants ending with a horrible MSN page instead of just opening a blank page right away.
Things shall just work, don't be annoying to the users with unnecessary pop-ups trying to inform users about the next flashy feature and so on while they are trying to do real work.
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Getting there fair and square, doesn't make it not a monopoly. Every company that grows into a monopoly with a slogan "Don't be evil" eventually becomes...evil.
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> Getting there fair and square
Oh my sweet summer child. Google have just been banned from paying Apple and browser companies to make Google the default search engine.
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When you're small and growing, there's nothing illegal or unethical about paying for placement of your product. It doesn't become illegal or unethical, *until* you are a monopoly, or at least, big enough to control a market.
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> it’s a confirmed monopoly. Check.
Yes and? Monopolies aren't inherently illegal. What has this revelation provide you?
Certain actions are regulated against companies with market power (and you don't need a monopoly for that, Chrome has fallen under this category for well over a decade). You need to identify the actions before we can even begin discussing anything we can do about it, and at that point I ask you why not a decade ago.
Re: (Score:2)
WHERE IS MY LAWSUIT TROLL?!?