Reel by Velocity Charts | Data

Velocity Charts | Data@velocitychartsyt

One browser owned 90% of the web. Then it died. In October 2002, nine out of ten people on the desktop web browsed with Internet Explorer. 90.1%. Microsoft had bundled it with Windows, won commercially, and then simply stopped developing it - IE6 sat almost untouched for five years. That gap killed it. Firefox rose out of Netscape's ashes and reached 32.2% by November 2009 - but IE was still on 56.6% and still winning. The browser that actually ended the monopoly launched that same year with a 1.4% share: Google Chrome. In May 2012 Chrome passed Internet Explorer for the first time, 32.4% to 32.1%. It never looked back. It peaked at 72.4% in November 2018 and sits at 66.6% today. So the monopoly didn't end. It changed owners. Two in three desktop browsers now belong to Google - and Edge, Opera and most of "Other" are built on Google's Chromium engine too. The web runs on fewer engines than it has since IE6. Internet Explorer, for the record, is still on 0.4%. Oct 2002: IE 90.1% - peak monopoly Nov 2009: Firefox 32.2%, IE 56.6% May 2012: Chrome overtakes IE Jun 2025: Chrome 66.6%, Edge 13.1%, Safari 7.3%, Firefox 5.8% Was Chrome winning good for the web, or did we just swap kings? Follow @velocitycharts for complex data made simple - money, power and tech at scale, one chart at a time. Data: Desktop browsing share worldwide. TheCounter.com (2000-2008) and StatCounter GlobalStats (2009-2025), reconciled on their 2009 overlap. Desktop only - mobile looks very different. StatCounter does not break out Brave or other Chromium browsers that report a Chrome user-agent, so their traffic sits inside Chrome's share. For educational purposes only. Music: Dependant - Cartoon [NCS Release] · Music provided by NoCopyrightSounds · https://ncs.io #internetexplorer #chrome #googlechrome #firefox #safari

Comments

A preview Instagram ships with the post — 2 of 2 public comments.

@leonardo_da_leona I use brave or ecosia

July 17, 2026

@aravindbachu The last remaining users of internet explorer are from the Indian Government.

July 15, 2026 · 2 likes