Usage share of web browsers

Measuring browser usage in the number of requests (page hits) made by each user agent can be misleading.

Net Applications, in their NetMarketShare report, uses unique visitors to measure web usage.

[13] Statistics from the United States government's Digital Analytics Program (DAP) do not represent world-wide usage patterns.

Previously, according to StatCounter press release, the world has become desktop-minority;[26] as of October 2016[update], there was about 49% of desktop usage for that month.

Net Applications bases its usage share on statistics from 40,000 websites having around 160 million unique visitors per month.

had a large percentage of unrecognised browsers, previously counted as Firefox, that are now assumed to be Internet Explorer 11 fixed in the February 2014 and later numbers.

TheCounter.com is a defunct a web counter service, and identifies sixteen versions of six browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Netscape, and Konqueror).

Other browsers are categorised as either "Netscape compatible" (including Google Chrome, which may also be categorized as "Safari" because of its "Webkit" subtag) or "unknown".

Usage share of web browsers according to StatCounter from 2008-07 to 2019-05.
Usage in Wikimedia during 2012
Market share for several browsers between 1995 and 2010, illustrating the First Browser War ( NN vs IE ). Firefox was originally named " Phoenix ", a name which implied that it would rise like a Phoenix after Netscape was killed off by Microsoft.