What’s the Best Web Browser in 2026?
We've objectively tested Safari, Chrome, Firefox, and Edge to determine which offers the best:
⏱️ Speed,
🧩 Standards Compliance,
🖌️ Graphics performance,
⚡️ Energy efficiency and
🔐 Privacy.
In 2026, the browser landscape has continued to evolve. Key highlights in 2026, covering the most meaningful changes and trends include:
Chrome now equals Safari in web browsing speed tests, though Safari still delivers the best graphics performance
Edge and Chrome have significantly improved their energy efficiency. They now lead all other browsers in low energy use and battery consumption
Firefox continues to lag behind in performance, trailing all other browsers, while regressing in graphics performance during 2025. Firefox has also lost bragging rights to being the most energy efficient browser
Due to the their ‘free’ business models, lack of inbuilt privacy controls continues to be most browser’s achilles heel. Only Safari and Firefox meet the privacy protection standards expected by most users, yet they too could do so much better
Year on year, there’s been no changes in standards compliance rankings with Chrome continuing to lead, followed by Edge and then Safari. Firefox remains a distant fourth.
Browser competition is more intense than ever, with only a 2 point total score gap between the top three placings. In 2025, that spread was 6 points – demonstrating the impact that focused year-on-year improvements can make to a browser’s rankings
Read on to see what is the best web browser in 2026:
Replies
Nice! What about Arc and privacy-first browsers like Brave and Helium?
Magic Lasso Adblock
@fholec_ We haven't tested those ones specifically, but it is a good idea for us to include them in next years tests.
@mbickham Great, looking forward to that!
This matches my own experience pretty closely. Safari still feels smoother for graphics on my Mac but Chrome no longer feels slower like it used to. I do wish all browsers would step up their privacy game instead of making users rely on extensions.
I've been bouncing between browsers and this explains why none feels like a runaway winner. The small score gap really shows how competitive things are now. I still lean toward Safari for privacy but Chrom's impronvements are hard to ignore.
vibecoder.date
I don't care about the performance penalty. Firefox is my go to when I need to interact with things such as linked in.
For everything else I've been loving Waterfox. I also recommend Librewolf if you don't mind having to use a password manager such as bitwarden.
Ungoogled-Chromium is something I wish to highlight. it's there when performance matters.
Clueso
Would be nice to include Zen browser in the next round of tests!
Great work, just curious, will you be looking at other browsers, like Opera, Brave, Sigma, Orion or Arc?
Magic Lasso Adblock
@daria__andrea We could look into some of those for next year.
In general, we are testing browser performance and web standards compatibility – so try to not just test a lot of browsers that may use the same underlying web rendering engine – as it's likely they'll just come out with similar results.
minimalist phone: creating folders
Many of my friends are using Brave because of security. I tried also Tor a few years ago, but last couple of years.
For iPhone – Safari
For May – Chrome
Love Arc and Strawberry
SEMrush
Wow, I didn't even realize Firefox was still alive 😂 Chrome is my favorite, I often experience loading issues with Safari. Another advantage of Chrome is a wide range of cool plugins that connect with it. Never tried Edge, is it an alternative to DuckDuckGo?