Mozilla’s Firefox has now officially surpassed Microsoft’s browsers, Internet Explorer (IE) and Edge, in global desktop usage for the first time, but Google Chrome remains the king of the browser world.
This is according to figures from Web analytics firm StatCounter, who took its data from 3 million different websites and around 15 billion monthly page views. Firefox accounted for 15.6 percent of the world’s desktop browser usage last month. While this was 0.1 percent higher than the combined figure for Microsoft’s two browsers of 15.5 percent (13.25 percent for IE and 2.25 percent for Edge), Firefox still failed to threaten Google Chrome’s dominant position.
In fact, Chrome racked up more than a billion users across all platforms and makes up an impressive 60 percent of the traffic measured by StatCounter. Meanwhile, Safari, Opera and others accounted for just 8.4 percent of the overall share combined, staying level with the two preceding months.
Edge could help Microsoft fight off Firefox’s advances
It’s not all bad news for Microsoft, however. Firefox usage actually dropped in April from February’s figure of 16.1 percent. It is important to note that Internet Explorer and Edge are outperforming Firefox in two of the planet’s biggest PC markets, the US and the UK.
Edge does show promise, and its poor figures could partly be attributed to the fact that it only launched recently and is still a work in progress. Moreover, users need to have updated to Windows 10 in order to use it, which could explain why its adoption is much wider in more affluent countries such as the US and UK. Critics are praising it for its speed and light weight, and it’s a clear improvement on IE.
In a press release issued by StatCounter, CEO Aodhan Cullen said: “Microsoft might have expected a boost to its overall browser share as the result of the launch of the Windows 10 with Edge but it hasn’t happened to date. Chrome has continued to gain share globally.”
For its part, Google’s Chrome has grabbed more than 10 percent of market share in the past year, which is nearly equivalent to the amount lost by Microsoft. All of the other browsers combined don’t reach Chrome’s numbers. This is a big reversal from the time when Internet Explorer ruled the browser market and Chrome was barely making a dent.
