14 DAY TRIAL // Google Chrome continues to be the number one browser on the desktop, according to a fresh set of market share data, but somewhat surprising is the performance of Microsoft’s very own Edge.
First and foremost, Google Chrome experienced a small decline in February, NetMarketShare reveals, dropping to 66.89% share. Mozilla Firefox fell as well but only to 9.39%.
Microsoft Edge, on the other hand, went up in January, in spite of Microsoft’s announcement that it would be giving up on EdgeHTML and move to Chromium.
The native Windows 10 browser increased from 4.61% in January to 4.79% in February, most likely as a result of the drop registered by the other browsers.
Microsoft Edge moving to Chromium
The Redmond-based software giant revealed in late 2018 that it plans to embrace the Chromium engine for its browser, technically building another Google Chrome version that would be embedded in Windows 10.
The new Microsoft Edge will look and feel just like the current version, but by switching to Chromium, Microsoft can benefit from the large collection of extensions already available for Chrome. Furthermore, the company says it can contribute to Chromium and improve browsing for everyone, not just for its users.
Microsoft promised a preview version of the new Microsoft Edge browser in the first months of 2019, but there’s a big chance the company holds it back for the Build developer conference in May. There’s no ETA for the stable build of the Chromium-based Edge, but it should go live in a future OS update, possibly in the fall of this year.
The next major release of Windows 10, which is currently codenamed 19H1 and likely to launch as April 2019 Update, features the same version of Microsoft Edge as before that is based on the EdgeHTML engine.