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No matter how ubiquitous native applications have become for shopping online, accessing social media, getting news or accomplishing a task across mobile and desktop devices, one thing remains constant: the web browser is the gateway to online access and still one of the primary ways that users access information.
In the last decade, we’ve seen a significant growth in the number of users who are accessing the web on mobile devices as opposed to desktop. In fact, between 2015 and 2020 alone, the percentage of internet users who were on mobile rose dramatically; starting at just 31.36% in the first quarter of 2015 to 50.81% in the last quarter of 2020.
But how does this pertain to testing? Simply put - the more insight we have into where and how users are accessing the web, the more informed we can be when making decisions on which browsers to include in our test coverage. This way, we don’t waste valuable time and resources testing on browsers that your users don’t prefer or are no longer supported by modern web standards.
With that in mind, let’s explore how browser and platform usage changed in 2024 and talk about what that means for testing in 2025.
Platform OS Version Market Share Worldwide
Before we take a look at last year’s browser usage statistics, it’s important to understand the context behind how the usage is distributed. We can accomplish this by reviewing statistics for desktop and mobile platforms first, as this helps paint a picture of what devices users are actually accessing the web from worldwide.
In 2024, Android remained the most popular platform for users. Even at its lowest point in January 2024, Google’s platform still maintained 41.63% of the worldwide market share and eventually peaked at a whopping 47.21% in December 2024. After that, we have Windows, which held relatively steady throughout the year, averaging between 25-29% and showing that desktop platforms still are a viable place to access the web. As for the Apple platforms iOS and macOS, these fell behind; averaging around 18% and 5% respectively.
What does this data tell us?
Despite the perceived dominance of iOS devices in the West, the Android platform is and, will likely continue to be, the most popular platform for computing devices for the foreseeable future. This will be important to keep in mind as we start to analyze usage statistics for each browser type.
Overall Browser Version Market Share Worldwide
Now that we have a clearer picture of how the platforms where users are accessing the web from compare against one another, we can take a closer look at which browsers have the highest amount of usage and, therefore, should be prioritized for testing.
Year over year, Google Chrome remains the top browser in the world - commanding at its peak in December 2024 a staggering 68.34% of the total worldwide market share. When we frame this with the knowledge of Android and Windows platform’s market dominance, it makes even more sense that the results would be as high as they are. That is not to say that the only platforms contributing to Chrome’s success are Android and Windows, as the browser is also available on iOS and macOS devices and is quite popular there as well.
Speaking of iOS and macOS, Safari is the next most popular browser worldwide for accessing the web. In August 2024, Safari’s usage peaked at 18.57% of the total worldwide market share which demonstrates that despite Chrome’s popularity, the integration and ease of access to the browser on Apple platforms make it a worthy second choice for users.
Following at a distant third place or below are browsers like Microsoft Edge, Firefox, Opera, and Samsung Browser; each arriving at or below 5% of the total worldwide market share consistently throughout 2024.
What can we learn from this?
Across desktop and mobile, Chrome is the #1 browser to prioritize for testing so test managers should plan to cover it on at least one of each device type. In some cases, you may also want to test Chrome on less popular devices (which we will cover in the following section) like iPhone and iPad. However, the priority for iOS/macOS testing should always be Safari since it is expected that a significant number of users will be using that browser on those platforms.
Top Browsers by Device Type
Where things start to get a little more interesting is when we examine how worldwide browser usage differs based on the type of device. For this, we’ll examine desktop, mobile, and tablet:
Desktop
On desktop, Chrome maintains its hefty lead by a significant amount with 66.83%of the total worldwide market share at its peak in December 2024. This could be attributed to the popularity of Windows that we saw in our review of last year’s operating system market share statistics or just the general popularity of the browser across desktop platforms.
Microsoft Edge holds the second place slot but browsers like Safari, Firefox, and Opera are all within similar enough margins of one another that it’s safe to assume their viability as tertiary browsers to prioritize for testing would be similar. If testing includes macOS devices then Safari would likely be prioritized because of its default nature and tight integration.
Mobile
On mobile, we have a similar picture to Desktop - a distant lead by Chrome with a peak market share percentage of 69.75% in December 2024 and the other browser offerings far below. However, on mobile the difference is that we see a greater market share percentage for Safari; averaging between 22-25% throughout the year. This is likely due in large part to the popularity of the iPhone and, just like macOS, it’s deep integration within the iOS experience.
Chrome’s dominance is also likely due to the significant market share that the Android platform holds worldwide. Most, if not all, Android devices come pre-installed with Chrome and its integration with popular Google apps and services make it the ideal browser to use on Android. This can also be observed with Samsung Internet’s third place position: Samsung phones are some of the most popular devices sold worldwide and Samsung Internet does come pre-installed which means it gets a sizable amount of use.
Tablet
Here on tablet devices is where things start to look a little more proportionally distributed. Chrome is once again in the lead with a peak market share percentage of 50.83% in December 2024 but this time, Safari is a close second; only around 14 percentage points behind (36.27% at its peak.) This shows just how widely adopted the iPad is and why testing on Safari for tablets is equally as important as testing on Chrome is — even if it isn’t the leading browser type.
Behind that we have the Android browser which occupied only 18.52% of the worldwide market share in March of 2024. Similar to our findings for Samsung Internet on mobile, this is likely due to its nature as a default browser for non-Samsung or Google Android tablet devices which are quite popular for budget-minded consumers or children.
Why is Cross-Browser Testing So Important?
Although we’ve demonstrated in this post that Google Chrome occupies a significant amount of the total worldwide browser market share, there is still a large percentage of users accessing the web on non-Chrome browsers. This is especially true on mobile and tablet, which for many, are the primary devices they choose to use to access the internet.
Cross-browser testing (or cross-browser compatibility) is the method of testing how a website or application appears and functions across more than just one browser type. Each browser may appear to function identically but underneath the hood, you’ll find that there are differences that must be accounted for in order to maintain a consistent user experience.
One common example of this is how each browser might interpret and render styled content (referred to as CSS.) Each browser utilizes unique attributes when applying certain styles that, when missing, could cause that element to appear completely different than it does on another browser instance. During cross-browser testing, testers will evaluate a website across multiple browsers to check for these types of issues as well as any performance or feature incompatibility that might degrade the user experience of site visitors. This is why cross-browser testing is so important — and why we always test across more than just one browser for each website testing project we tackle.
Conclusion
With this data in mind, we hope that you feel more confident on which browsers to prioritize for testing in 2025. If you’d like to learn more about our browser usage stats from previous years, consider checking out our blogs from 2023 or 2022.