Google Chrome is the dominant power in the browser world, a fact of which we're all very aware - but you might be surprised to hear that Chrome recently lost a surprising chunk of its lead over the likes of Safari and Edge (its main two rivals) - albeit this month has seen a partial recovery.
Google Chrome is still the dominant force in the browser world, but appears to be slipping slightly (Image Credit: Google)
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This is going by recent stats on browser adoption from analytics firm Statcounter (so add a pinch of salt, naturally, as we can only read so much into info from a single source).
The market share stats for July 2023 show that Chrome has recovered just over 2% of its share, and is now up to 63.32% according to Statcounter.
Last month, Chrome witnessed a major fall from 65.88% to 61.16%, leaving Google looking at potentially dropping beneath the 60% mark. However, that hasn't happened, and Chrome has reversed its course, although whether this is a temporary blip, and adoption will be heading downwards again next month - well, we'll just have to see.
The lurch downward for the Chrome browser in June might have Google quite concerned, though.
The Edge browser, which is also Chromium-based, has been gaining some ground on Chrome, but doubtless not as much as Microsoft would like. Edge now stands at a market share of 10.75%, which is solid enough - and certainly more than a couple of years ago, but it hasn't made much progress in recent times.
It's Apple's browser, Safari, which has been the big winner of late, at least according to Statcounter. Safari now stands at 13.13%, up considerably from 9.33% at the start of 2023.
Of course, it's possible that some of this movement is due to the make-up of the desktop PCs surveyed by Statcounter to produce these figures, but that recent big fall for Chrome certainly stands out.
It'll be interesting to watch how Google's browser fares for the rest of the year, and indeed whether Microsoft can get Edge adoption moving again. Microsoft is trying pretty hard on that front, bringing in Bing AI to the Edge sidebar to help - although you can now get Bard in the Chrome side panel too (via its extension).
What about Firefox, you might be wondering? Mozilla's browser has been rather barged out of the way these days, and sits at a market share of 5.96%, not much more than half of Edge's userbase. Opera nestles behind Firefox on 4.51%, and that covers all the five big players in the desktop browser market.
While we're on the subject of browsers, don't forget this neat trick for Chrome that we were recently reminded of.
