The EU's Browser Choice Screen, Two and a Half Years In: Did It Actually Change Default-Browser Share?

When the Digital Markets Act’s compliance deadline arrived on March 7, 2024, Apple and Google — both designated “gatekeepers” under the law — had to stop quietly defaulting EU users to Safari and Chrome. iPhone and Android setup flows in the EU now present a randomized screen of alternative browsers before a user ever opens Safari or Chrome for the first time. The theory was straightforward: defaults are sticky mostly because nobody is ever asked to choose, so remove the silent default and the market should start looking more like actual preference. Two and a half years on, there’s enough data to check whether that theory held, and the honest answer splits by platform in a way the original framing didn’t anticipate.

What the Choice Screen Actually Requires

The DMA’s gatekeeper obligations apply to a short list of companies — Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft — and the browser-specific rule targets two of them directly: Apple’s iOS Safari default and Google’s Android Chrome default. Both had to implement a screen, shown at device setup and reinforceable later, that lists competing browsers in randomized order rather than pre-selecting the vendor’s own product. Crucially, the obligation is a one-time (or occasionally-repeated) prompt, not a standing UI element — once a user picks a browser or dismisses the screen, the chosen default behaves exactly like any other default until the user changes it manually in settings.

The Immediate Burst

The first months after the March 2024 rollout produced genuinely large percentage swings for smaller browsers, because their baseline numbers were so small that any real attention moved the needle hard. Mozilla’s own reporting, a year into the rollout, put Firefox’s daily active users in Germany up 99% and its iOS daily active users in France up 111% since the March 2024 launch — numbers Mozilla is careful to note reflect both the choice screen and concurrent product improvements, but that the company says show “a clear” regulatory effect. Smaller independent browsers reported similar or larger relative jumps in downloads immediately after rollout, which is the expected shape of a novelty effect: a screen that most users had never seen before produces a burst of experimentation.

The open question was always whether that burst would compound into a durable share shift, or decay back toward the pre-DMA equilibrium once the novelty wore off.

What Actually Moved: iOS, Specifically

Looking at StatCounter’s browser-share panel for Europe as of August 2026, Safari holds 17.8% of all-platform browser share across the region — a number that is, in practice, almost entirely an iOS number, since Safari does not run on Android, Windows, or ChromeOS. On mobile devices specifically, Safari sits at 29.63% against Chrome’s 61.27%. That gap is the clearest evidence the choice screen has done something real: Safari’s iOS installed base in the EU is large, and a mobile share in the high-20s against a mobile-market leader with roughly triple that share represents genuine erosion of what used to be a near-total default lock on Apple hardware. Mozilla’s DAU figures point at the same mechanism from a different angle — growth concentrated specifically among iOS users in the two countries it called out, which is exactly where the choice screen intervenes.

What Didn’t Move: The Overall Structure

Zoom out to Europe’s full browser-share picture and the story gets less dramatic. Chrome holds 62.66% of all browser sessions across Europe, Edge sits at 6.66%, Firefox at 4.61%, Samsung Internet at 3.45%, and Opera at 2.17% — a distribution that, Windows-and-Android-driven as it is, looks close to what it would have looked like without a choice screen at all, because the choice screen has no jurisdiction over Windows’ Edge default or Android OEM skins outside the specific gatekeeper flow. Firefox’s EU share sitting under 5% two and a half years after a regulatory intervention explicitly designed to help browsers like it — despite the underlying engine differences our Chromium vs. Chrome vs. Edge coverage lays out — is the plainest evidence that a choice screen, on its own, is a weak tool against an entrenched default. Chrome’s dominance on Android was never squarely in the DMA’s crosshairs the way Safari’s iOS default was, and it shows.

Why a Prompt Loses to a Default

The mechanism explaining both halves of this result is the same one browser vendors have argued for years: a one-time choice competes against a default that gets re-presented to the user every single time a device boots, every time an app opens a link, every time a new phone is set up from a backup that just restores the old default without re-triggering the screen. Safari’s erosion is real because Apple’s ecosystem concentrates enough attention and enough regulatory pressure on a single, well-defined default point that a meaningful fraction of prompted users actually switch and stay switched — Mozilla’s retention claims suggest people who pick Firefox through the screen keep using it. But that mechanism doesn’t exist nearly as strongly in the more fragmented Windows-and-Android world, where the default that matters to most users was set by an OEM, an IT department, or simple inertia long before any choice screen fires.

The practical takeaway for anyone reading DMA browser-market coverage skeptically: “did the choice screen work” is not a single yes-or-no question. On the narrow, well-defined battleground it was built for — Apple’s iOS default — it produced a measurable, multi-year shift in Safari’s grip. On the much larger and more fragmented desktop-and-Android landscape, a single prompt at setup time was never going to out-compete a default reasserted at every boot, and the aggregate numbers two and a half years later confirm exactly that limit.