Safari has 1 billion users but still can’t touch Chrome

AtlasVPN estimates that Apple’s Safari web browser has over 1 billion users. Only one other browser has over a billion users, and that is Google Chrome. But with almost 3.4 billion, Chrome still leaves Safari far behind.

It is important to note that these figures include mobile device users, not just computer users. Probably, Safari’s status as the default browser for iPhone and iPad plays a much bigger role than its use on Mac.

Still, it’s impressive considering Safari is the only major web browser not available for Android, the world’s most popular mobile operating system, or Windows, the most popular desktop OS.

atlasVPN wrote this on his blog to explain how he got to this number:

The statistics are based on the GlobalStats browser market share percentage, which was then converted to numbers using Internet World Stats to get 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 Edge with 212,695,363. Firefox is trailing Edge in fourth place with 179,084,244.

The blog post claims that Edge just overtook Firefox for third place last year.

Meanwhile, Chrome dominated for a long time after supplanting Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. If the news was just that Chrome is the biggest browser, it wouldn’t even be worth reporting—Chrome is, to a certain extent, the Internet these days. And it’s worth noting that the latest versions of the third-place Edge browser are built on Google Chromium.

Apple used to have wider ambitions for Safari since there was once a version of the browser for Windows. But Apple stopped developing this version in June 2010. Technically, you can still run Safari on Windows 10 or 11, but that’s not the best idea from a security point of view.

While Safari is the default web browser on iOS, third-party browsers can be installed and used on iPhone and iPad. Since 2020, it has become possible to set anything other than Safari as the default browser.

However, the difference between Safari and a third-party browser on the iPhone is clear. Alternative browsers like Chrome or Firefox still use Safari’s core technologies; they simply allow users to use the benchmarks and other advanced features found in those browsers on other platforms.