Despite all the effort the company puts, it seems Microsoft lost the ball to Google and there little to no hope it will ever catch up, let alone outperform. We are talking about browsers, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Edge versus Google’s chrome.
Stats released by analytics vendor NetApplications shows IE and Edge had a combined market share of 16.97% at the end of 2017. At the beginning of that year, they had a combined market share of 18%. The biggest player in the browser world is Google Chrome, commanding 60.6% market share as at the end of 2017.
Microsoft can blame all its browser woes to the brilliance of Chrome since its launch. Pre-Chrome era, IE was the most popular browser; and rightfully so, as it had saved us from the cruel some browser that was the Netscape. Just when people thought the grass could not get greener, Google launched their Chrome browser, and things for most people have never been the same. Sites load up faster and with impressive UX design; most site owners nowadays create sites for optimal viewing by Chrome. It would appear web development standards are skewed towards what is deemed to be Chrome-friendly design.
Another analytics vendor, NetApplication who measures browser shared based on the agent strings of visitors to its client’s sites, recently cleaned out data by fake bots. The resultant data showed Microsoft browser market share decline by 1.3%, while Chrome rose by a similar amount. Mozilla’s Firefox browser also saw a 3.5% decline in 2017 to 11.02%. While Apple’s Safari market share rounded up to 4%.
Another statistics vendor, Stats Counter, tallied the usage share by specific page views. It emerged that Microsoft page views share was 11.9%, Firefox 12.2% and Chrome giving its competitors a huge range.
PS: These stats show browser usage on desktop computers. It does not include mobile browsing, pointing to a likelihood of the stats are different when it comes to mobile browsing.