[NewsPoster]

Apple's Safari browser is now the second most popular browser in the U.S., according to the federal government's Digital Analytics Program (DAP). capturing a 21.9 percent share. It moves ahead of Microsoft's once dominant Internet Explorer, which now drops to third place with a 20.1 percent share. The leading browser is Google's Chrome, which retains the number one spot with a 43.1 percent share.


The respective percentages are derived from the number of visits to government websites in the past 90 days. The program does not distinguish between mobile and desktop browsers, and with Apple shipping over one billion iOS devices in addition to its Mac user base, it has now achieved something that not many would have foreseen -- topping the once ubiquitous Microsoft Internet Explorer. Google's Chrome gets the top spot not only thanks to over 1.5 billion mobile users, but also because Chrome is also relatively popular with desktop users.

Firefox continues its decline with an 8.2 percent share thanks to falling numbers of both desktop users and mobile users. Trailing Firefox, with 2.5 percent is Microsoft's new Edge browser, which ships as the default browser on Windows 10 devices.

[Makosuke]

I remember when my own site logs showed something like 95% IE and rounding errors of other browsers.

Back in those days, you sort of had two designs--the clean, compliant, pretty, hack-free one you wished you could use if IE6 (or 5) didn't suck so horribly, and the compromised kludge you actually created so that 95% of your audience actually saw something reasonable.

For me I was seeing more iOS traffic than any other browser, period, years ago. IE is practically down to a rounding error at this point.