Browser empires rise and fall fast: Internet Explorer once held over 95 percent
In the early 2000s nearly every web page on Earth was opened in Microsoft's Internet Explorer, whose share topped 95 percent. Barely a decade later it was being retired. The history of web browsers is a string of seemingly unbeatable champions toppled by newcomers, and today Google Chrome sits on the throne.
It started modestly. Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first browser, WorldWideWeb, in 1990, and Nicola Pellow followed with the Line Mode Browser for simple text terminals. The breakthrough was Mosaic, released in April 1993, whose graphical design made the Web approachable for ordinary people and helped ignite the internet boom. Its lead developers went on to found Netscape, and their Navigator, launched in 1994, quickly became the favourite.
Microsoft answered in 1995. By bundling Internet Explorer free with Windows, it overwhelmed Netscape within a few years. Netscape's counter-move in 1998 was to open its code, creating what became the Mozilla Foundation, whose Firefox appeared in 2004 and reached 32 percent of the market in 2010. Apple's Safari, arriving in 2003, came to rule Apple devices while making little headway anywhere else.
Google's Chrome, launched in 2008, steadily ate into Explorer and took first place by 2012. Microsoft replaced Explorer with Edge in 2015, then in 2020 rebuilt Edge on Chromium, Google's open-source code base. Chromium also underpins Samsung Internet and Opera, so a single project powers much of the field. Estimates for 2026 put Chrome near 69 percent, with Safari around 16 and Edge about 5.
The devices changed too. Desktops carried most web traffic until late 2016; by February 2025 phones accounted for 62 percent, desktops 36 and tablets 2. By 2023 roughly 5.4 billion people had opened one at some point. The newest twist, from the mid-2020s, is browsers with built-in AI assistants, such as Perplexity's Comet and ChatGPT Atlas, alongside chatbots added to Chrome and Edge.
Source: Web browser
