Microsoft Edge has increased its market share to the point where it has overtaken Firefox to become the second most popular browser on the desktop. The trends - upward for Edge and downward for Firefox, over the past few months suggests that this is a permanent and irreversible change.

As this chart, created using the  Net Market Share website, Edge overtook Firefox during March 2020, having overtaken Internet Explorer back in December 2019. This is, however, somewhat irrelevant in that Chrome has a solid, unassailable, share of approaching 70% as the chart for the same period for the top 6 browsers clearly shows:

This really does look like Chrome is on another planet with the rest just fighting over the crumbs. Compare this to a comparable chart for 2011 when the lines on the chart were more evenly spaced. Internet Explorer was obviously the dominant browser. During this twelve month period Chrome was already on the rise, taking share from IE, while Firefox, the second most popular browser was maintaining a share around 20%. 

Looking at the changes in desktop/laptop share over the twelve months to 31st March 2020, Chrome started with 65.64% and finished on 68.50%, an increase of almost 3%. Safari was the browser that kept  its, admittedly small, desktop share the most steady, ending the period at 3.62% an increase of 0.04%. For mobile, of course, Safari comes second to Chrome with shares of 26% and 64% respectively.

At both the start and end of the 12-month period the combined share for Edge and Firefox came to 16% but at the beginning Firefox had almost two thirds of this share by the end Edge had  just over half of it. Meanwhile Internet Explorer had declined from a share of 8.44% to 5.87%. Given that Windows 10 has seen an uptick in adoption over the past three months, and Windows 7 a corresponding decline since it passed its end of support, we might have expected Edge to have done better than it has. It underwent a big change in January 2020 and is now based on Chromium. We will have to wait to see whether this will lead to it achieving a bigger share in coming months but somehow I doubt it. Looking at the shape of the curves in the top chart, it isn't so much that Edge has overtaken Firefox but that Firefox is pretty much in freefall. This is a great shame as Firefox, with its declared mission to be:

a browser that is an honest broker committed to the interests of the individual user and developer, providing amazing experiences that match those offered by proprietary platforms; and user control and developer reach and freedom that is superior to proprietary platforms

does have a lot of good features.

More Information

Browser Market Share from NetMarket Share

Firefox/VisionStatement

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