Chrome popularity in Russia fell below 50% for the first time in six years – Kommersant

The share that the Google Chrome browser occupies in Russia at the end of November 2023 reached its lowest monthly value since January 2017, according to data from the Internet statistics portal StatCounter GlobalStats. The service estimated the share of Google Chrome in the Russian Federation at 49.6%. Statistics take into account the use of browsers on all platforms, without division into mobile devices and PCs. The second most popular, based on November results, is Yandex Browser (27.9%), the third is the Safari browser used on Apple devices (12.5%; the Safari engine is also used by all browsers for iOS and iPadOS).

StatCounter evaluates the popularity of browsers by the number of visits to sites on which its counter is installed—more than 1.5 million sites around the world, according to the service’s data. Yandex Radar works in a similar way: it takes into account the number of visits to sites on which the Yandex Metrica counter is located, without including visits to sites of Yandex itself. The company does not disclose the number of sites on which its counter is installed. According to W3Techs, the StatCounter counter is set to 0.5% of the total number of sites on the Internet, the Yandex Metrics counter is set to 4.5%. Google, whose counters cover the largest share of sites (54.2%), does not publish aggregate data.

The popularity of Chrome in Russia, according to StatCounter, reached its peak in May 2021: then the browser from Google occupied 66.5% of the Russian market. In October of that year, Chrome’s share dropped to 56% and hasn’t risen above that level since. For Yandex Browser, based on the data of this service, the current value is considered the peak. Yandex Radar provides other data according to which the share of Google Chrome in Russia, in principle, did not exceed 50%. According to the Russian service, the shares of Google Chrome and Yandex Browser in January 2016 were 40.4% and 15.5%, respectively, and in October 2023 – 43% and 29.6%. There is no data for November in Yandex Radar.

Yandex told Kommersant that they attribute the browser’s popularity indicators to the addition of neural network functions to it – in particular, the ability to retell videos and articles. According to the company, the video retelling launched in October was used about 12 million times, and the text retelling that appeared in July was used about 10 million times. In August, Google announced that in the future it would add the ability to retell texts using artificial intelligence (AI) in Chrome, but neural network functions are not available in Russia. The same is true with AI products from Microsoft, which in 2023 built a neural network chatbot into the Edge browser.

The share of another Russian browser, Atom from VK, is not taken into account in StatCounter; Yandex Radar estimates it at 0.11%. VK declined to comment.

Yuri Litvinenko