14 DAY TRIAL // Google Chrome is currently the world’s number one desktop browser, but even though it’s the preferred choice for the majority of users, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the leader spot is set in stone right now.
And the living proof is the browser’s performance in August 2017, as Google Chrome declined for the very first time in many months, dropping from 59.57 percent the month before to 59.38 percent.
The drop doesn’t seem that substantial at first, but it does stop Google Chrome from reaching the record 60 percent share, which it seemed set to achieve given the rapid growth since last year. In October 2016, for instance, Google Chrome was running on 54.99 percent of the desktop computers out there, so 2017 brought a substantial increase of Google’s browser.
But Chrome wasn’t the only browser that declined last month, as all its rivals had similar performance, including Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge.
Safari posts surprising increase
Firefox lost 0.04 percent market share last month to 12.28 percent, the first time the browser goes down since February this year. At the same time, Microsoft’s Edge browser, which is exclusively available in Windows 10, managed to increase its share by only 0.01 percent to eventually reach 5.66 percent, as the application still has a hard time convincing users not to switch to Google’s browser.
So if both Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox declined the last month and Edge posted such a small increase, where do all these users go when looking for a different browser?
By the looks of things, Safari is the browser that experienced the biggest growth last month, going up from 3.66 percent to 3.87 percent. This means that the switching trend from Windows to macOS accelerates, with many users deciding to stick with Apple’s browsers that’s offered by default on its desktop OS.
It remains to be seen if this trend is maintained in the next months, but if it does, Microsoft itself has serious reasons to be concerned since users switch to Apple despite the arrival of new Windows 10 versions.
