Microsoft Edge

Web metrics show major decline in Edge browser share

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Image: Microsoft

7 January 2016

Microsoft’s Edge browser is in trouble. That’s the conclusion drawn from data published Friday by Net Applications showing Edge’s share of the global Windows 10 user base falling to 23% in December, eight percentage points down from the month before.

Sources report that Microsoft’s Edge lost a big chunk of share in December, but the remaining two say the default browser in Windows 10 held steady or gained a small amount of ground.

Although Net Applications had charted the decline of Edge since Windows 10’s late-July introduction, December’s drop was nearly three times the largest prior single-month contraction.

(Because Edge works only on Windows 10, it’s relatively easy to calculate the percentage of Windows 10 users who run the browser. That’s not the case with other browsers, including Internet Explorer (IE), Google’s Chrome or Mozilla’s Firefox, which run on other editions of Windows or on rival operating systems, such as Apple’s OS X.)

Another pair of data sources put Edge’s situation in a different light, however, showing that the new browser had stayed stable or even gained ground, if only slightly, in December.

Irish metrics vendor StatCounter tapped Edge’s worldwide share of Windows 10 for December at 13%, the same numbers as for the month before. (StatCounter’s figures are dramatically different than Net Applications’ in part because it tracks usage share by counting page views tallied for each browser, making its measurements akin to browsing activity, not the fraction of users running a specific browser.)

Edge’s lacklustre adoption flies in the face of concerted efforts by Microsoft to promote the application, including swapping Edge for rival browsers during an upgrade from Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 unless the user intervenes.

Microsoft has been largely silent about Edge’s adoption, spending more of its messaging time touting technical and feature improvements – or in the case of the still-missing support for extensions, announcing the postponement – than on how its uptake has been going.

Among a list of factoids that Microsoft revealed about Windows 10 on Monday, the Windows group’s head marketing executive said that Edge had been used a total of 44.5 billion minutes (about 742 million user-hours) by Windows 10 owners in December. Without context, however – metrics such as the average time online per month for all Windows 10 users, or a corresponding user-hour data point for non-Edge browsers – the statistic is meaningless.

Microsoft was able to tally time spent on Edge because Windows 10’s compulsory data collection policy, the default setting in the OS, as well as the less-intrusive ‘enhanced’ option, collects “how frequently or how long you use certain features or apps and which apps you use most often,” according to Microsoft.

IDG News Service

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