14 DAY TRIAL // We’ve known for a while that Google Chrome is the preferred browser for desktop users, and new data released by NetMarketShare shows that things are getting worse for Microsoft Edge.
Chrome’s market share keeps growing every month, while Microsoft Edge, despite being offered as the default browser in Windows 10, struggles at a pretty huge distance.
Last month, for instance, Google Chrome improved its market share from 62.77 percent to 64.47 percent and Microsoft Edge actually declined from 4.25 percent to 4.21 percent.
Mozilla Firefox continues to be the runner-up choice in the browser world with a share of 9.68 percent last month, while Internet Explorer is obviously on a decline, dropping to 8.86 percent in July.
Internet Explorer no longer receives feature updates, and is currently in maintenance mode, meaning that it gets security updates on Patch Tuesday. Other than that, Microsoft’s full focus is Microsoft Edge, which is also offered as the default option in Windows 10, but not on older Windows versions. On Windows 7 and 8.1, the default browser continues to be Internet Explorer 11.
The Microsoft Edge push
Microsoft has been pushing hard to make Microsoft Edge a more widely-adopted browser, but as these figures seem to indicate, all these efforts have until now been pretty useless.
In many cases, Microsoft turned to questionable tactics to convince users to stick with Edge, and many complained that the company became too aggressive in this attempt, especially when it started pushing pop-ups, often described as ads, to users’ desktop.
In the meantime, Microsoft Edge itself keeps evolving, with every new Windows 10 feature update bringing new improvements that are supposed to make it a powerful alternative to Google Chrome.
It remains to be seen if anything is going to change in this regard given the approaching debut of the Redstone 5 update, but as things are right now, it may take years until Microsoft Edge becomes a true rival to Google Chrome.