In April Edge, Microsoft's Chromium-based browser gained a global browser market share of 10.07%, surpassing 10% for the first time since its introduction. In doing so it overtook Safari as the second most popular browser on desktop machines.

Here's the breakdown for April 2022 from Statcounter:

If, like me, you are experiencing deja vu, yes we have been here before. Back in April 2020 we reported Edge Becomes Second Most Popular Desktop Browser. On that occasion Edge had just over 8% share of the desktop browser market and had overtaken  Firefox to achieve second place.

The statistics and charts presented then were based on data from NetMarket Share as were those in another report on the ongoing battle of the browsers from November 2020, by which time Edge was on 10.22% of desktop machines, leaving Firefox well behind.

However, as its title NetMarketShare Bows Out revealed, the important and disappointing news in that article was that there were to be no more such statistics from NetMarket Share and I concluded my report:

without NetMarketShare this could be my last word on the subject [of browser market share] for quite a while.

Eighteen months down the line Martin Brinkmann on ghacks has the headline, Microsoft Edge beats Safari and Firefox to become second after Chrome on desktop systems and it seems worth revisiting this story. 

The new figures are from StatCounter and, as I've pointed previously, while it NetMarket Share always had points of agreement, in this case the overwhelming dominance of Chrome, there were discrepancies between them due to different  methodologies. This makes it more or less meaningless to make direct comparisons. 

So what can we say of the basis of Statcounter's most recent 12-month chart of Worldwide Desktop Browser Market Share ?  

The most obvious is that Google Chrome is leading the pack with a two-thirds share of the market. Three browsers (Safari, Edge and Firefox, with a combined share of 30%) have contended the remote second place over the last year with Safari and Edge so close to one another that you can't distingish Safari's black line from Edge's blue one. The change in the last two months looks as though it was triggered by a decline in the Firefox share rather than any surge in Edge usage. And Internet Explorer, which will be unsupported within a matter of weeks, still has 1% and refuses to leave the chart - sounds familiar? 

More Information

 Statcounter Desktop Browser Market Share Worldwide Mar 2021 - Apr 2022

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