2021: We recommend Edge, Chrome and Safari

Brave has added more and more features that make browsing sites like the New York Times faster, and minimizes the 'tricks' sites like that use to make you accidentally click on ads (by bouncing things around while they load.)

Sadly, those do not BREAK our software, but because it finds nothing to improve, it wastes a lot of time 'checking' everything we ask for (then approving it.)

The result is – it works, but runs our software 2 to 8x's slower based on recent benchmarks. (It runs 10x faster on sites like NYTimes)

2020: Not much has changed.

Chromium (Brave, Edge and Chrome) still own about 66% of the market. Safari is sitting around 14% FireFox aroud 4% All the rest fight for the remaining 16% of the pie.

Desktop 2018

68% Chrome & Chromium¹ 11% Firefox² 7% IE

5% Safari (Mac)³ 4% Edge⁴ 2.5% Opera

Mobile 2017

53% Chrome

23% Safari

9% UC

6% Samsung Internet (Likely older Samsung phones that can't run modern Chrome)

5% Opera

1.7% Android (Likely older Android phones that can't run modern Chrome)

1% KaOS

1% IEMobile

I have to editorialize first – STOP using IE – it has known security flaws that will never be fixed.

WHY are so many people still using IE in a way that the stats programs can see them when it has known security flaws. I understand using IE for internal applications that are so old and not updated that no other browser will work. But using it on the internet (where the stats programs can see them and count them) is just dumb and dangerous. IE is not being updated. It has known (to MS and hackers) flaws that can never be fixed because it would break those old outdated applications – and IE only exists (from MS's perspective) to allow companies time to rewrite or retire their old apps written at the beginning of the century. (Yes it came out in 2013 but its purpose was to support decade old applications)

STOP using it for MRO. Switch to Chrome or Edge.

STOP using it on the internet generally. Switch to Chrome or Edge or Brave or Firefox or Opera any of many great quality modern browsers, whether on the list above or not.

OK, now some comments on the popularity of the browsers

Obviously Chromium (Edge, Brave and Chrome) has the largest market, mostly on Windows computers and tablets and Android cell phones. Basically, Chromium is King on all platforms except 'really old Android' devices and iOS.

Note that Apple refuses to allow any browser other than their own on iOS. (Yes they allow skins on top of their browser, but these will not necessarily be counted as anything other than Safari by the stats games.)

On Apple devices, Safari is obviously Kings.

On desktop computers we have a few anomalies:

• Opera goes up and down between 1 and 2%. This seems unlikely that they change that much quarter to quarter, so it likely shows more about the accuracy of the reporting than it does anything else, which makes me think that really, over the past year, we can't conclude anything about the also-ran browsers, they are all over the past year sitting within the 1% margin of error. But … if I am wrong, here is what the statistics show:
• Firefox continues to lose about 1% marketshare per year. I suspect this is due to lack of quality control that occurred after they more or less forced their founder out and he created Brave and many of the top developers jumped ship to Brave.
• IE has held steady for the past year, prior to that it was dropping steadily. There must still be some really old applications that continue to only run on this old browser.
• Edge goes up and down a tiny bit each quarter, always hovering around 4%. Legacy Edge has gone down in 2020 while the new Chromium Edge has probably gone up – but stats are lumped in under 'Chrome', because it 'appears' to be Chrome to the sites that are collecting the stats.

On the mobile market, the UC browser shows huge movement in the past year from 15.5% down to 8.85%. The trend may flatten out, but this browser is not going anywhere fast and it has dropped in 2018 from being the #3 browser worldwide to the #4 browser after Chrome, Safari and Firefox.

Other browsers numbers are likely due to having no other options on specific old hardware.and are all in the range of 0-1% which means the stats are all within the margin of error so don't take too much if anything from these numbers for the bottom 3.