14 DAY TRIAL // Everybody knows that Google Chrome is the leading browser on the market, but monthly statistics show that its share keeps increasing, no matter what the others are doing.
In January, for instance, Google Chrome managed to improve its market share from 67.18% to 67.29%, and while the increase isn’t overwhelming, it just shows how popular this browser has become.
And when looking at its competitors, everything becomes even more obvious. Firefox is currently the runner-up, and despite an increase in January, it remains very far behind leader Google Chrome. Mozilla Firefox is running on 9.92% of the world’s PCs, according to NetMarketShare.
Internet Explorer is third in the charts with 6.81%, followed by nobody else than Microsoft Edge with 4.61%.
The Microsoft Edge transition
Microsoft announced in late 2018 that it gives up on its own EdgeHTML engine for Microsoft Edge and instead ports the browser to Chromium, the same platform that powers Google Chrome. And just by looking at these figures it’s pretty clear that Microsoft understood that surrendering to Chrome is the only way to go despite the criticism that the company could be facing given this decision.
Microsoft Edge has never been considered a truly powerful rival to Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, and this market share shows that its adoption hasn’t even matched the one of Internet Explorer.
For context, Edge has already replaced Internet Explorer as the default browser in Windows. And what’s more, Internet Explorer is no longer receiving new features, but only security updates.
Microsoft is projected to release a preview of its Chromium-based Microsoft Edge browser sometime in early 2019, while the fully-featured version should land later this year or possibly in 2020.
For now, however, it just seems like the browsing world is all about Google Chrome, and Firefox continues to be the only one considered a capable alternative.