The only reason Safari has any market share is because it's the default on every iPhone.
4/5 top browsers by market share are there because they are preinstalled on millions of devices and none of them are terrible enough for an average person to look for an alternative.
Exactly right and I wish more people understood this as the key dynamic driving change in browser adoption. Just for one more example, what little toehold Edge and Bing have right now are from muscling those in front of people as defaults.
Which I think is important as it relates to Mozilla. Because a lot of the arguments back and forth about Mozilla assume that change in browser adoption was about what features they did or didn't add. But I think that completely ignores powerful actors leveraging monopoly positions to drive users to their browsers, which is more important by several orders or magnitude. Any explanation of that history which leaves that part out is revisionist history in my opinion.
I disagree wholeheartedly, the current state of browser market share has nothing to do with how good any of the browsers are, it's just monopolistic behavior. Device manufacturers should force you to pick one during setup, which is absolutely a reasonable policy decision away.
In fact, as of this year, Apple devices in the EU already have to ask you which browser you want to use during the setup process, while Android devices don't have to ask you which browser you want to use, but do have to ask you which search engine you want to use. It is a bit inconsistent and arbitrary, but it's a step in the right direction.
What do you mean? It is on many Androids and every Chromebook.
I just checked some website stats I have access to and ~78.6% of iOS users use Safari. On Android on the other hand, ~76% of them use Chrome, ~8.1% uses the Samsung Browser, and there's a marginal amount of people using other manufacturer-provided browsers like Huawei Browser and MIUI (Xiaomi's default). Of course I don't know the exact manufacturer of Android phones to be able to tell what percentage of say Samsung devices switched to Chrome, but I'd say the pattern's still pretty clear.
The only people likely to switch browsers are desktop users, but they total to <20% of the traffic. Funnily enough Chrome isn't even the top browser overall, it's Safari, but that tells you more about my clientele (richer than average for my target market).
4/5 top browsers by market share are there because they are preinstalled on millions of devices and none of them are terrible enough for an average person to look for an alternative.