
U.S. desktop internet browsers market share 2015-2020
A web browser is a software application for visualizing websites, documents and data. The most popular current browsers are Microsoft Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Apple’s Safari. Historically one of the large players in the segment, Internet Explorer, seems to have lost its tight grip on the web browser market.
As shown by the graph at hand, Google Chrome has been the most popular browser in the United States since December 2013. In other countries, Google Chrome has also taken up a dominating role. In the European browser market, Chrome and Firefox have established strong market positions with about 41.5 and 25 percent, respectively. The Canadian browser market, however, presents a slight variation, as Internet Explorer remained the second strongest force behind Chrome as of December 2014. On a worldwide scale, Chrome provided a share of over 46 percent in the global web browser market as of May 2014.
As a result of numerous plug-ins and other customization features, browser gaming has emerged as a segment of browser usage. Popular social network platforms utilize embedded gaming features on their web pages to enhance traffic. As of October 2014, one of the most successful browser games on Facebook was Candy Crush Saga with over 11 million daily active users. In China, a country with high growth potentials for online market segments, the revenue of browser games was estimated to reach 13 billion yuan by 2016, an amount equal to roughly two billion U.S. dollars.