It's been a while since I did one of my needlessly long and elaborate posts. This changes now. I have been in the ggplot documentation and found this site to get some csv files to play with like dolls. Today we are talking about internet company monopolies with data visualisations. I've never been so Admiral Crow.
We begin with web browsers.
Using the Oct 2025 data, although using a different month wouldn't do much other than wiggle the numbers after the decimal point a little, I can show you a very simple chart: (everything is percentages)
Over 70% of the global web browser share is chrome. Not chromium. Google branded full fat chrome. That's a lot a lot. What about everything that isn't chrome?
This is zooming in and rescaling, so the percentages here are of the 26.83% that is not chrome, bear that in mind. Half of not chrome is safari. Between them, the chrome-safari-edge triumvirate have over 90% market share. It's only when we zoom in on the other wedge of the other wedge that some diversity appears:
This data is across all platforms, which explains why samsung internet gets its own wedge. We finally have Firefox appearing, with an absolute share of 2.2%. I'm not entirely clear what "Android" includes, probably mobile companies redecorating chromium to run on their version of android. UC is big in the mobile market in India and Indonesia. "Other" here includes sogou (China); whale (Korea); yandex (Russia) a 0.09% absolute share for internet explorer, and a column just called "Mozilla" that I assume covers Zen, Waterfox, LibreWolf, Icecat, etc; although Pale Moon gets its own entry.
If you thought google was monopolising browsing, wait until you see the search engines!
90% share for google search. The fact that google pays apple huge amounts of money to keep google as the default engine for safari is no doubt doing a lot of heavy lifting for this statistic. Please take a minute with this before we move on.
Bing comes second, not a surprise given the dominance of windows, which ships with edge/bing as the default combo. However, remember this is zoomed in, and this represents a 4.31% absolute share.
We then have yandex, yahoo!, and DuckDuckGo at around 1% absolute share each. Yandex is Russia's in-house one-stop-shop for internet things in the same way you can do all your internet without ever leaving the google software ecosystem in the west - and from these data, lots of people do. I'll be honest, it was a surprise to see yahoo! still hanging on to such a relatively large share.
Baidu is Chinese; naver Korean. Ecosia comes in with a 0.15% absolute share. Other here includes sogou again, as well as hausou & shenma also out of China. Czechia makes an entry with seznam. Petal search looks to be a huawei front end for the bing api for android. A Vietnamese browser/search engine combo called Coc Coc (with apologies for the missing diacritics) has 0.06% of browser share and 0.11% of search. More anglocentrically, AOL joins yahoo in the "You're still here?" club with a 0.02% share of search, and my weapon of choice, Qwant, has a 0.03% market share of the search engine space.
Google is fucking massive, for one thing. We all knew that, but those big red wedges really hammer it home. I learned some things about making pie charts in the process of doing this, and it was really interesting to have a peek outside my English-speaking bubble - I'd never heard of UC before doing this, and some browers that seem relatively big in my mind like vivaldi and Zen are relegated to the "other" column with percentages of percentages.
Thank you for reading my deeply nerdy ramble.
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