Microsoft Edge is now the second most-used desktop browser | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Edge is now the second most-used desktop browser

news.softpedia.com

60 pointsGarbage58 comments

For anyone who comes straight to the comments, I recommend passing on this article. If you already clicked through, I'm sorry :)

It it misleading, the writer is only considering desktop usage, and then constraining the data the the month of March. The 'evidence' is in the form of a single screenshot, from his lone data source NetMarketShare. He is trying to hype it up as some sort of 'grand' milestone.

Here is another data source that says otherwise - https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl.... Other commenters have also pointed out data that conflicts this premise.

It is poorly written, and over the top. The poster used the subtitle here, but the real title of the article is 'History in the Making: Microsoft Edge Overtakes Mozilla Firefox'. Also making points such as "While some expect Microsoft Edge to become the world’s top desktop browser...". Come on man.

Finally, it is just not that interesting. The real story should be, some Firefox/ IE users decided to try out the new Edge in the month of March, after a flashy new version was released. Maybe Edge really will continue to claw a few points of market share, let's follow up in a few months. But this particular article is really poor.

It's hardly even the right story on the desktop. It was obviously going to be the case that Edge would take market share from IE over time, because it acquires users in the same way that IE did (by being the default on Windows), and they're the same users.

At one point IE was the number one desktop browser. So this is really just a continuation of the story about how Microsoft lost its browser dominance to Chrome, and then conceded defeat by adopting its engine.

Well, I was there and during the first browser wars and I saw users and developers choosing IE because it was faster and had more features than Netscape. Thanks to Microsoft we got XMLHttpRequest (AJAX) and Web 2.0 (DHTML, iframes).

IE was just a better browser and that's how it gained market share - the same way Chrome did. The fact that IE was the default was secondary. If being the default was all that was needed, IE would have never lost any market share.

Having your competitor do all the work and then using it to your advantage sounds like a win to me though. Also as a user and a developer I consider it a win on multiple levels. I'm happy that every desirable target platform now has a default embeddable browser engine derived from a common high-quality WebKit heritage. I also now have a major non-Google fork of Chrome to choose from, one that I know will be there for the next decade.

We can actually measure how much was "choice" and how much was "defaults" because at that time there were versions of IE for Mac and Unix. They were, shall we say, not as popular as the Windows version. Even when there were a lot of websites that only worked in IE. Heck, you can still get Edge for macos/iOS and Android, how popular are they compared to on Windows?

And Chrome got popular in much the same way. For a long time you couldn't go to google.com in a non-Chrome browser without seeing a banner pushing Chrome, and it was bundled as a "you must notice and uncheck this box or Chrome will be installed as your default browser" option in a wide variety of popular third party software installers, and it's the default on most Android devices.

"Good enough" and "gets installed by the user not doing something" consistently beats higher quality options for popularity. Look at Firefox -- it's not doing anything like that, it's a better browser by a lot of metrics, and it's losing market share.

> We can actually measure how much was "choice" and how much was "defaults" because at that time there were versions of IE for Mac and Unix.

Let's see your measurement then. I worked among people that used Mac and Unix back then and most of them were anti-Microsoft zealots or brainwashed by the anti-Microsoft zealots. Aside from that - they were in the vast minority, but more importantly: They weren't getting the same product as on Windows. Furthermore, IE was the default on OSX from 1998-2003. How'd that work out?

Google pushing Chrome from google.com is nowhere near the same thing as "being the default browser". Not even close. And it goes against your idea that "users not doing something" is what gets you a higher market share. It doesn't explain the rise of Firefox at all. As well, Chrome got popular in tech circles before they even started doing that.

Tech circles is where all this starts. Once we like something, we push our families, friends and businesses to use it.

> Look at Firefox -- it's not doing anything like that, it's a better browser by a lot of metrics, and it's losing market share.

It's a worse browser by just about every metric.

> I worked among people that used Mac and Unix back then and most of them were anti-Microsoft zealots or brainwashed by the anti-Microsoft zealots.

Explain Edge on non-Windows platforms today then. A mobile version exists, but so few people use it that it ends up inside "Other" in most charts, behind such well-respected alternatives as the house-brand browsers of various phone OEMs that bundle them by default. Windows Phone no longer has a meaningful user base, so this is from much the same population who use Windows on the desktop.

> Furthermore, IE was the default on OSX from 1998-2003. How'd that work out?

Netscape was disbanded in 2003, so apparently pretty effective.

> Google pushing Chrome from google.com is nowhere near the same thing as "being the default browser".

The equivalent of a billion dollar marketing campaign will raise usage of something independent of whether it's really any better than the competition. Otherwise Coca Cola has been wasting a lot of money on advertising.

> It doesn't explain the rise of Firefox at all.

You have to be the default and be "good enough." It doesn't have to be better but it can't be a lot worse. IE during the rise of Firefox had claimed victory and given up, so it was stagnant and no longer good enough.

> Tech circles is where all this starts.

Somehow Samsung has higher mobile browser market share than Microsoft and Mozilla put together.

> It's a worse browser by just about every metric.

Browsers are so complicated and there are so many possible metrics that we could have that debate for ten years and not cover half of it, but suffice it to say that some people disagree with you:

https://www.google.com/search?q=why+is+firefox+better

> But all of these show that Microsoft Edge is now a fully-featured alternative to Google Chrome

Given that it uses Chrome's engine, Edge isn't an alternative to Chrome. It's just an alternative version of Chrome.

Sure, from a user perspective, it's an alternative. From a dev perspective, it adds to the dominance of Chrome.

M$ Edge will dilute the Chrome brand to the extent that corps will simply use Edge instead. Eventually Edge become the defacto 'Chrome' browser to the extent that everybody refers to Chrome as Edge.

M$ is very clever.

Go back to Slashdot with your "M$" bullshit

This kind of evil cleverness evokes the Slashdot-era Microsoft. It seems appropriate to resurrect the nicknames.

Bill-Bashing can stay buried now that he has moved on to charity, though.

From a dev perspective it also loosens Google's grip on Chromium, the #1 rendering engine :D Having Microsoft collaborate and diversify that project is a major win for all of us.

I am hoping/wishing that Mozilla will drop gecko development and repackage WebKit - it would be great for them to join forces and pool resources with the #2 engine!

It's not just a drop in replacement and since Firefox quantum the rending engine has felt butter smooth. Overall Firefox personally 'feels' faster than Chrome, just a personal view but I do love Chrome's developer tools. Not sure if there's a way to improve Firefox's developers tools to bring it in line with a similar experience.

It's such a shame that failing to test on Firefox became acceptable in dev communities right around the time that Quantum happened and Firefox got back into the fight. Just a year of acceleration on Quantum's timeline, or a year of slippage in Chrome's, could have made such a difference.

There is no such thing as Chromium, it is just a Chrome-lite. Nobody took Chromium and made a separate browser with a separate code from what Google pushes in the trunk. All others do is just add or remove whatever Google allows them, while accepting all serious commits coming down from Chrome. Webkit on the other hand had produced truly different engines - Chromium and Safari, developed differently and making different decisions. If Mozilla with switch to Chrome engine it will be yet another Chrome with mods.

That's only because all of these alternatives want to benefit from the free labor Google is putting into Chrome. If Microsoft wanted to, they could actually fork the entire project but then they would need to divert a lot of manpower to the effort.

I think that would be a precarious situation for Mozilla. Not to say the current situation is a good one. So I'm sure they're weighing this.

But let's assume they switch to Webkit. In itself that is a huge investment. Then either they track whatever Google wants to do with Webkit, or they fork. But once they fork, they're pretty much on their own again. So there was no gain. To profit from Google's dev, they have to track whatever Google does, and maintain patches for their own things that Google doesn't want to merge. In some important ways, they'd be dependent on Google. Their direct competitor.

Mozilla is kept alive by Google funding, without Google Mozilla simply wouldn't even exist right now to be building anything. They are direct collaborators, not enemies.

True, I forgot about that part.

No, absolutely not.

Germany, desktop, statcounter: chrome 44.65%, ff 25.5%, safari 8.8% and edge just below it (can't get it to show the exact number on mobile). and fwiw, I think new Firefox installs since last year block most of those trackers by default

The most important thing is not Edge surpassing Firefox, but the fact that Edge switched to Chromium, so Firefox is the only alternative to Chrome. And FF market share is tiny.

That is bad for end users and businesses alike.

Not really - if Microsoft is unhappy with how Google is handling Blink they can just fork, just like Google forked WebKit - there is a sufficient number of big players competing in this area - having a shared open source rendering engine is a good thing.

I like Mozilla because of Rust efforts and I recently tried switching on OSX since Chrome is a CPU hog and I was looking in to alternatives - Firefox was the most unstable experience I had in years - I had a news site consistently crash the browser tab which also caused audio in other tabs to get screwed up, occasional redraw issues (flickering when resize), developer settings that are trivial to find in chrome (disable localhost CORS with SSL) - just a subpar experience.

Firefox and Safari.

Safari may be proprietary, but its engine remains OSS and you could fork it, which is what Google did.

That said I'm a happy Firefox user.

This doesn't seem to reflect the stats I look at [1], which are

- 1/3 people people using Chrome

- 1/10 people using Safari

- 1/20 people using Firefox

- 1/50 people using Edge

- 1/50 people using IE

Firefox hasn't been #2 browser in a LOOOOOOOONG time

1: https://caniuse.com/usage-table

This article is about desktop browsers.

It's important to note that the article says that Edge is the 2nd most used desktop browser. Including mobile, Edge lags far behind Chrome, Safari and Firefox.

Wikipedia’s analytics say it’s the 5. most used desktop browser:

https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#desktop...

According to Wikipedia’s traffic analytics, Firefox has 13% and Edge has 5% on desktop.

https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#desktop...

NetMarketShare? They have been loving Microsoft for a very, very long time.

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share

This doesn't seem to be the case? I visited NetMarketShare myself, and showed the market share stats for all browsers, excluding bots/spiders. It then shows Chrome > Safari > Firefox > IE11 > Edge.

Pardon the large, ugly URL, but this is the filter I used:

https://netmarketshare.com/?options=%7B%22filter%22%3A%7B%22...

Edit: I see now that softpedia is talking about desktop browsers only. Even then, Edge is in fourth place.

https://netmarketshare.com/?options=%7B%22filter%22%3A%7B%22...

Edit #2: forthefuture found the filter they're using, so you can disregard the above.

It's an aggregate of the months you're selecting (2019/04 - 2020/03). If you select just March you can see what they're seeing:

https://netmarketshare.com/?options=%7B%22filter%22%3A%7B%22...

Ah, thank you. I wish they included the URL, or shown the entire filter they used.

It looks as if some Firefox users bailed to try out the new Edge since the update? Chrome usage remained mostly constant.

I'm curious to see if they stick with it, or switch back to Firefox. I like how the article talks as if it was some sort of inevitable milestone we've all been waiting for. And now, instantly, the second that Edge finally eek-ed past Firefox (if we consider desktop usage only), it will never change. It will just keep climbing and climbing onto browser dominance :)

Pretty lame article if you ask me. Not very interesting.

G Stats suggests the same: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share

Edge is packaged with Windows.

Chrome used Trojan horse tactics to get into the computers. Back in the 2010s when it just appeared, almost any popular freeware installer got sneaky "Also install Google Chrome and make it the default browser" checkbox.

So, underhanded tactics are extremely efficient. Therefore, I expect that Firefox will keep losing shares. Making a better browser won't help them.

I used edge for a while when I did a fresh install of windows and was too lazy to install anything else. It was overall fine but had a few issues that annyoed me. For one a ton of sites or malls would block me from using an "unsupported browser". I'm sure the sites would have worked just fine, and that it was lazy whitelisting of UA strings and not Edge's fault itself. It also still seemed to crash a lot for me, although not as much as when it was first released. And, of course, there was that article posted on here a few weeks(?) back that mentioned how edge has the most intrusive "telemetry".

I personally use Edge almost daily for their awesome in-browser TTS and reading-mode feature. I inspire you to try it.

For general purpose Google account integration convinience grip is yet overweights their constant effort to ruin UI and extensions. Also Edge App Store still lacks uMatrix, but already has uBlock Origin.

> I personally use Edge almost daily for their awesome in-browser TTS and reading-mode feature. I inspire you to try it.

Why should I use Edge for that, instead of Firefox (which also has TTS in its reader-mode)?

I just tested it. They use built-in Microsoft Sam as TTS (at least in Windows), old and awfull.

TTS in the Edge is pretty close to the bleeding edge. It's good. Both English and Russian. And Edge is still a gorgeus Chromium without recent time UI degradations and without ad- and privacy- blocker intolerant management.

Personally i have a prejudice against Firefox for subjectively poor and ugly UI and old scars from their rendering issues.

Well you'd not catch me dead using Windows to be frank. MacOS has the best offline TTS available to consumers right now, so that's what I use for TTS.

Another datapoint: according to analytics.usa.gov [0], and ignoring Safari (which counts iOS users), Edge (4.1%) is the 3rd most used browser behind IE 11 at 4.7%. Firefox is at 3.5%.

[0] https://analytics.usa.gov/

Another Windows thing Microsoft needs help from Google now is multilingual input.

The Japanese IME in Windows 10 is borked. The solution? Install Google Japanese Input, never look back.

(It must be working somehow in Japanese Windows 10 sold in Japan, but it's broken in English Windows.)

Why is it so hard for a mammoth company like MS to maintain their own browser?! Is this because gaining market share with an alternate browser is simply impossible?

https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope....

This is why

These technologies are very deep, and the pool of developers with the skill, time, desire, and understanding to hack on these things is a very shallow pool to pull from. It seems like a lot of companies working on browsers are under-staffed so we seem to be experiencing more cross-company teamwork and collaboration than ever before - which is _great_ for standards and pushing us forward at a faster pace than before!

I would have thought most developers would absolutely jump at the chance to work on something as core as a browser! Having Chrome or Safari on your resume seems like it'd be golden.

I don't want more internet standards or faster pace.

I think the product management was bad. The browser was always full of quirks on how to use it and configuring felt bad. It lacked features and the feature that were there were always bad. They also never were innovating except for some DRM stuff.

IT savvy people just installed all their friend and family Chrome because they were also using it and it works.

Whether they could or not is not as important question of whether they should. What would Microsoft gain by “winning” the browser engine war or even taking a significant share? Where is the profit motive? The reason for IE original was that MS was afraid of the browser becoming the platform instead of Windows. That ship has sailed. Microsoft doesn’t really care about Windows revenue as much as Azure and Office 365.

Google cares because of advertising and Apple really could care less about browser marketshare. It just doesn’t want to be beholden to anyone else.

Microsoft Edge is now the second most-used desktop browser ... to download alternative browser after installing Windows. First is still IE11.

Side effect from all the Windows VM's spun up by IT departments trying to lift and shift into the cloud ASAP due to COVID?

Meanwhile I'm using Vivaldi, which has been a great experience ever since leaving Firefox behind.

It was bound to happen, since it's been the default on W10 for so long now.

Anyone else anecdotally notice that Edge's power usage is much better than Chrome's?

I can't understand how Safari is on only 3.6%. Why aren't all those iPhone users pushing it up?

The article is about desktop browsers.

Mozilla lost any chance of me switching to Firefox the moment they spammed me about switching. Something Google, Microsoft nor Apple have done regarding their browsers.

Your loss.

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