How Chrome took the browser crown

Imagine a leaderboard where the champion has 65 points and the newcomer has just one. That is roughly how the browser race looked at the start of 2009: Internet Explorer at 64.97%, Chrome at 1.37%.

These are shares of page views across Statcounter’s worldwide website network, covering computers, phones, tablets and consoles. They measure browsing activity, rather than the percentage of people who installed an app.

For anyone who remembers the blue “e” as the doorway to the internet, the starting position feels familiar. What makes the race worth watching is how thoroughly that position changes.

The lead changed by a fraction

Chrome did not leap straight from obscurity to dominance. Its first big milestone was a very narrow win.

In April 2012, Internet Explorer still led in this all-platform series: 30.80% against Chrome’s 28.24%. By May, the order had flipped. Chrome reached 29.15%; Internet Explorer slipped to 28.87%.

The gap was only 0.28 percentage points. A result that looks inevitable from the far end of the chart was barely a lead at the moment it happened.

Firefox was still a substantial competitor, at 22.98% that May. This was a race with several serious contenders, rather than a simple handover between two products.

Winning the race changed its shape

Fast-forward to September 2026. Chrome accounts for 66.45% of the measured activity, while Safari is second at 18.20%. Edge has 6.02%, Firefox 2.79%, Samsung Internet 2.31% and Opera 1.77%.

Internet Explorer is down to 0.01%. The name that dominated the opening frame has almost disappeared from the measured traffic.

The scale of the reversal is more revealing than a single month’s ranking. Chrome began as a small challenger in a market led by one browser. It ends this sequence with a share remarkably close to the old leader’s starting position.

The latest figures can still be revised by Statcounter. And this is a selection of seven brands: other browsers remain outside the picture, so the visible bars should not be read as a complete breakdown of the market.

A browser chart is a chart of habits

A person can use one browser at work, another on a phone, and a third occasionally. A page-view measure gives more weight to the browser they use most often. It cannot tell us how many people chose each one, or why they made that choice.

Nor does the race isolate product quality, defaults, marketing or changes in the devices people use. Those questions need evidence beyond the moving bars.

What the figures do show is striking enough: an everyday habit that once looked settled changed on a vast scale. The tiny challenger became the enormous leader. The next time a new browser seems too small to matter, the first frame of this race is worth remembering.