It has been more than 3 years since Microsoft undertook to replace their EdgeHTML rendering engine with the industry-standard Chromium rendering engine as used by Chome, Brave and many more.
It appears all that effort is finally paying off, as the latest Statcounter numbers show that the Microsoft Edge browser is finally the second-most popular desktop browser on the internet, only second to Google Chrome.
Of course, it is a very distant second, with Chrome having 66.64% of desktop internet users, while Microsoft had 10.07%. A very close third is Safari, with 9.61%.
Microsoft’s growth came largely at the expense of the Firefox browser, which had 7.86% and which had more than 9% of users at the start of the year.
With Edge being the native browser on the Windows 10 and 11 desktops, part of the reason for the rise may be Microsoft’s efforts to make it harder to change the default browser on Windows, rather than increased confidence in the capability of the platform.
Of course, there is no denying the hard work the browser team has put in to make Edge an attractive and useful internet explorer, so whatever the reason more users are sticking with the browser, the end result should still be a safer and faster web experience.
