Your guide to the best web browsers to use for PCs, phones and tablets.
When you first turn on a new Windows 10 PC or laptop the only route you’ll initially have to the internet is via Microsoft’s Edge web browser or Internet Explorer.
It’s the same with an iPhone or Android device, although here the defaults are usually Safari on iOS and Google Chrome on Android. Both have a number of decent alternatives available, which you’ll find outlined in great detail if you read our separate guide to the best mobile browsers (You can also try a different search engine too).
The good news is that you can download as many browsers as you like, either using the one on your PC or laptop already, or the app store on your phone or tablet. Find out how to change your default browser.
And thanks to W3Counter’s browser stats for April 2019, you can see which are currently the most popular:
Google Chrome, then, is by far the most used browser, accounting for well over half of all web traffic, followed by Safari in a distant second place. The combined IE & Edge comes in third, with Firefox in fourth. Opera is fifth with about 3 percent of global web traffic.
Google has steadily increased its lead over the past year, which may have something to do with the changes introduced back in February 2018 that saw Google by default blocking ads that violate the Coalition for Better Ads standards. That means without your input full-page and countdown ads, as well as those that autoplay sound and video, are removed. This makes for a better overall user experience and speeds up loading time.
Firefox has lost its lead over IE and Edge, taking back its usual fourth place following. You can read more about it in our Chrome vs Firefox comparison.
Here’s how it breaks down into the Top 10 browsers, showing the versions used. Note that Microsoft Edge and Opera don’t even make the list.
This could change in the months ahead, as Microsoft has announced that it is rebuilding its Edge browser using Chromium (the open source version of Google’s Chrome browser) which should see an increase in the amount of extensions, themes, and generally useful tools that it includes. But for now it remains a largely neglected browser.
You can’t always believe statistics, and not all surveys agree. StatCounter, for example, puts the rather unusual Chinese browser UC in fourth place, however, all agree that Chrome is by far the most popular.
