14 DAY TRIAL // It’s not a secret that Microsoft’s Edge is yet to gain traction, with most users still considering it “the best browser to download Google Chrome,” but new statistics provided by StatCounter for the month of June 2017 shows the app has bigger problems than initially thought.
First of all, the market shares. StatCounter says Google Chrome was running on 62.23 percent of the desktop computers out there last month, followed by Firefox way behind with 13.98 percent.
The dying Internet Explorer is third with 9.28 percent, but its market share is expected to keep going down, not only because Microsoft is pushing hard for Windows 10 users to stick with Edge, but also because no new features are planned.
Safari has bigger market share than Edge
And here comes the interesting part. Apple’s Safari, which is only available on macOS, with no Windows version currently being maintained, is running on 5.15 percent of the PCs worldwide, while Microsoft’s own Edge is next with just 3.89 percent.
This is despite the aggressive Windows 10 push that included popups and toast notifications displayed on Windows 10 systems to stick with Edge and, what’s more, despite the “accidental” upgrades to the new operating system that happened in the first 12 months after launch.
The numbers are even more surprising when looking at the market shares of the systems these browsers are running on. Windows currently has a market share of 84.32 percent, while Apple’s OS X is said to be running on 11.59 percent of the computers across the globe. So Safari having bigger market share than Edge is definitely unexpected.
On the other hand, this somewhat makes sense, as the majority of Apple users stick with Safari for browsing, while on Windows, most adopters switch to Chrome or Firefox. This is because Apple’s browser offers good performance on Mac systems, so only few users feel the need for a third-party app. Microsoft has failed to do this until now, but the company keeps promising that Edge would get better with future updates.