For the second month in a row, Microsoft Edge gained market share over Apple's Safari, cementing its position as the second most popular web browser, but still trailing far behind Google Chrome.
The new data comes from StatCounter, which tracks the market share of web browsers (among other things). In its latest report covering April, Edge was up from 9,65% in March to 10,07% in April, while Safari, which fell from second to third place in March, also rose slightly, from 9,56% to 9,62 .XNUMX%.
The biggest loser remains Mozilla Firefox, which fell from 9,47% in February to 7,57% in March, with a slight recovery to 7,87% in April. The behemoth shrugging, of course, is Google Chrome, which saw a solid jump from 64,91% in February to 67,29% in March, almost entirely at the expense of Firefox, before falling slightly in April. to 66,58%.
Microsoft's Edge browser has made great strides in recent years in growing its user base, especially after Microsoft rebuilt Edge around the Chromium framework, the same web engine that forms the basis of Google Chrome.
This allows many of Google Chrome's best features, such as extensions, to also run in Microsoft Edge, while the browser boasts a level of system integration that Google Chrome can only envy.
There is no doubt that this integration in Windows 11 definitely helps speed up user adoption. Changing your default browser isn't hard, but it's also something you have to actively do, and since Windows 11 ships with Edge already set as the default browser, users will likely let it work.
The adoption rate of Windows 11 has been slow, but it has been growing. As the adoption of Windows 11 steadily increases, Edge is likely to see basic growth in the future, regardless of what Microsoft does to promote it.
TechRadar has reached out to Google and Microsoft for comment and will update this story when we hear it.
Fighting for Google cookie crumbs
If Edge's achievements are very real, these two browsers are still being outperformed several times over by Google Chrome. In many ways, the web browser market is actually open to Google. It now has a commanding lead, but so does Intel after introducing its Core series processors. AMD had no answer for Intel Core processors, so its ever-growing market share suddenly jumped to around 15%, from a peak in the 1930s.
However, in 2017 AMD bounced back with their new Ryzen processors and things started to change very quickly. AMD currently competes with Intel for market share and has achieved some degree of parity in the desktop processor market.
There's no reason why the same thing can't happen with Google Chrome. Edge has some notable advantages over Chrome, namely that its memory management is simply better. We all know the consequences of opening too many Chrome tabs. Edge just doesn't have that much of a problem in this regard (obviously, opening 200+ Edge tabs will also slow its performance).
However, Edge's growth falters when it comes to mobile browsers, and it doesn't even have enough market share on mobile to break out of the Other category in StatCounter. Here too, Chrome dominates the market with around 63% of the global market, and Safari takes another 25% (Safari is the default browser on iPhones). Chrome and Safari are much closer to each other in tablet market share, at 47% to 38%, respectively, with Edge accounting for just 0,27%.
Even if the Redmond giant continues its efforts to compete with Google in the browser wars and makes additional profits, it still has a lot of work to do.