Samuel Axon
Apple’s Safari web browser has more than 1 billion users, according to an estimate from Atlas VPN. Only one other browser has more than a billion users, and that is Google’s Chrome. But with nearly $ 3.4 billion, Chrome still leaves Safari in the dust.
It is important to note that these figures include mobile users, not just desktop users. Safari’s status as the default browser for both iPhone and iPad probably plays a much bigger role than Mac usage.
Still, it’s impressive, as Safari is the only major web browser not available on Android, which is the world’s most popular mobile operating system, or Windows, the most popular desktop operating system.
Atlas VPN wrote this on his blog to explain how it came to the number:
The statistics are based on the GlobalStats browser’s market share percentage, which was then converted to numbers using the Internet World Stats internet user metric to retrieve the exact numbers.
According to the data, Chrome has approximately 3,378,967,819 users, while Safari has 1,006,232,879. In a very distant third place is Microsoft’s Edge with 212,695,363. Firefox is hot on Edge’s tails in fourth place with 179,084,244.
The blog post claims that Edge only just overtook Firefox to third place in the past year.
Meanwhile, Chrome has been dominant for a long time after it supplanted Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. If the news was just that Chrome is the biggest browser, it would not even be worth reporting – these days, Chrome is the Internet, to some extent. And it’s worth noting that the latest versions of the third-place browser, Edge, are built on Google’s Chromium.
Apple used to have broader ambitions with Safari, as there was once a Windows version of the browser. But Apple stopped developing that version in June 2010. You could technically still run Safari on Windows 10 or 11, but that would not be the best idea in terms of security.
And while Safari is the default web browser on iOS, it is possible to install and use third-party browsers on iPhone and iPad. Since 2020, it has been possible to set something other than Safari as your default browser.
That said, the difference between Safari and a third-party browser on the iPhone is deep. Alternative browsers like Chrome or Firefox still use Safari’s core technologies under the hood; they simply allow users to use bookmarks and other extra features found in these browsers on other platforms.