Google Chrome has for years ruled the web, but corporate antipromotion campaigns, privacy concerns and the rise of new, AI-powered competitors may be shaking what has until now been a nearly unchallenged dominance.
Since the beta version was first released in 2008, Chrome has grown into the dominant force in the browser market, and usage statistics show it boasting a commanding lead over any that could legitimately be viewed as a rival. The company held 72 percent of the market share as of September, according to StatCounter.com, the next closest being Safari at a comparatively measly 14 percent.
But competitors are attempting to unseat Chrome, or at least shake this dominance, and capitalizing on recent concerns over privacy and safety to urge users to migrate to their in-home browsers.
The Tech Giant 'Browser Wars'
“Browse securely now,” Microsoft has begun warning Windows users attempting to install Chrome. “Microsoft Edge runs on the same technology as Chrome, with the added Trust of Microsoft.” Mac and iPhone users have this year been targeted with similar warnings, Apple boasting that “unlike Chrome, Safari truly helps protect your privacy.”
This follows Google’s confirmation early this year that it would be canceling previous plans to drop third-party cookies, which Shaoor Munir of UC Davis described as “a significant retreat from privacy-enhancing promises.”
However, Munir, a computer scientist specializing in privacy and machine learning, said any prospective rivals would “face a steep uphill battle” in trying to dethrone the browser.
“Google maintains deep control over the open-source Chromium project, which many competing browsers—including Microsoft and OpenAI—use as their underlying engine,” he told Newsweek. “This gives Google both technical and strategic advantages that can help them retain users in the emerging browser wars among tech giants.”
But even absent any corporate pressure to defect, privacy concerns themselves may be enough to chip away at Chrome’s dominance.
"For years, Google Chrome has failed to provide key privacy protections that other browsers offer,” said Lena Cohen, staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit focused on issues of online privacy and corporate transparency.
“Increasing awareness of the prevalence and dangers of online tracking has led many consumers to switch to privacy-focused browsers, like Firefox and DuckDuckGo,” Cohen told Newsweek.
Newsweek contacted Google for comment on Wednesday.
The New AI-Powered Competitors
Chrome's current grip on the search engine market may be further tested by the new generation of AI-leveraging competitors.
In October, ChatGPT-maker OpenAI unveiled its own search engine, ChatGPT Atlas, a desktop web browser powered with the world’s most widely used chatbot—800 million weekly active users per CEO Sam Altman’s recent estimate.
OpenAI may be able to capitalize on its established position in the AI market and its expanding popularity—evidenced in the LLM becoming shorthand for basic queries—“ask ChatGPT”—like the perhaps soon-to-be antiquated “Google it.”
“There has long been a trend towards users using social media as an alternative to search engines, especially younger users,” said Konrad Kollnig, assistant professor at the Law & Tech Lab of Maastricht University’s Law Faculty. “This is compounded by the increased use of AI tools to find information on the web."
“Google’s advertising revenues are so far not yet hit but the way that people use the internet seems to be changing fast, with potential outcomes for Chrome’s dominance,” he added.
ChatGPT Atlas is not the only new AI-powered player in this new space—Perplexity's Comet or Microsoft Copilot being others—but as Kislaya Prasad, research professor at the University of Maryland, notes, Google fitting Chrome with its own Gemini AI assistant means “it’s not really defenseless.”
These new threats may have even benefited Chrome this year, he told Newsweek. In September, a U.S. judge ruled that Google would not need to sell off either Chrome or its Android operating system in a landmark case over long-running antitrust concerns.
In his ruling, Judge Amit Mehta said that artificial intelligence "changed the course of this case, and as Prasad told Newsweek the decision “was based in part on the new competition from the AI-based browsers,” citing the interest OpenAI had expressed in purchasing Chrome if Google was forced to sell.
“OpenAI's Atlas currently appears to target a niche of ChatGPT power users. This is demonstrated by the fact it requires log-in to use,” said Dr. Junade Ali, fellow at the Institution of Engineering and Technology. “It therefore remains to be seen as to whether OpenAI will decide to venture into the mass market.”
“OpenAI's Atlas launch and other AI browsers like Perplexity's Comet pose a threat, but a likely outcome is that Google will use these competitors as AI-browser guinea pigs before upgrading with similar features,” tech market analyst Jacob Bourne told Newsweek. “Because Google already has such a massive user advantage, it has an opportunity to solidify this advantage by adopting what works and dropping what doesn't.”
For all the fervor surrounding data protection, Munir told Newsweek that “mainstream adoption patterns suggest convenience continues to trump privacy considerations for most users.” And despite new threats, the fact remains that Chrome’s grip on the browser market, and its integration into the wider Google Suite, means users will have a tough time migrating to rivals, AI-powered or not.
Read Newsweek’s full conversation with technologist Konrad Kollnig below:
How serious are privacy/data concerns when it comes to Google Chrome and could this lead to a widespread user exodus?
Chrome has long been known as being very data hungry. For example, according to Google's privacy policy, the company can use Chrome users’ entire browsing history in order to show them personalized ads. This has long been Google’s policy and I therefore don’t see that privacy concerns would lead to a widespread exodus.
To my knowledge, there are no examples of a mass exodus ever to have happened due to privacy concerns away from a large established platform; the Cambridge Analytica scandal on Facebook is the best example of this.
Will tech companies pushing their own versions weaken its internet dominance?
The ongoing court case in the U.S. on Google’s dominance in search shows that defaults matter—to an extent. On Apple products, users commonly stay with the default browser, Safari. A similar thing is true for the mobile operating system Android, which is mainly developed by Google and where Chrome is usually the default browser. Interestingly, on Windows, many users change away from Edge to Chrome, even though Edge is the pre-installed browser.
Another factor that makes people change the browser on Windows is that Google shows near constant reminders across its widely used products to change to Chrome, when they use alternative browsers (see our article "Google's Chrome Antitrust Paradox”). This shows that companies that develop a good alternative browser—and are in the position to advertise this alternative—may well motivate users to change. Otherwise, control to the access points—like iOS / Android—still matters, as I also discuss in detail in my forthcoming book The App Economy: Making Sense of Platform Power in the Age of AI.
How significant a threat might the launch of new [AI] browsers be to this?
The market in AI is changing very fast, so it’s difficult to anticipate where it’ll end up. While tech companies seem to want to make us believe AI will replicate the platform economy, this is far from set in stone. There is a reasonable scenario where users will be able to run their own models on their own computers, and not rely on companies like OpenAI or Google at all anymore to find information on the internet fast.
What matters are, however, the standards that we decide on now. Google has demonstrated this again and again by trying to undermine web standards towards less privacy-preserving alternatives, as I discussed with my colleagues in our paper "Google's Chrome Antitrust Paradox." These are aspects that I try to explore in my research.
Are there any signs this dominance is weakening already?
There has long been a trend towards users using social media as an alternative to search engines, especially younger users. This is compounded by the increased use of AI tools to find information on the web. Google’s advertising revenues are so far not yet hit but the way that people use the internet seems to be changing fast, with potential outcomes for Chrome’s dominance.
