The fairly static and uneventful competition between internet browsers has seen third and fourth position contenders change over in June, according to Statcounter. Leading up to June, Firefox was the third most popular browser, worldwide, but now Microsoft Edge has stolen its podium place and moved Firefox into the crosshairs of Samsung Internet.
Google Chrome remains the undisputed leader in market share, but has seemingly reached saturation point. A year ago it had 65.47 per cent of the market, and in June 2021 the figure was 65.27 per cent. Over the same period the best growth I can see is of Apple's Safari, which moved from 16.97 to 18.37 per cent.
Moving along to our headlining story, June 2021 saw Microsoft Edge overtake long time 3rd placed Firefox to gain third position in the browser popularity charts. At the current time there isn't a great difference between their shares with Edge accounting for 3.4 per cent of observed traffic by Statcounter, and Firefox at 3.29 per cent. However, Microsoft's Edge legacy is still seen to be used by 0.23 per cent of users, and IE is used by 0.61 per cent of users – both of these seem likely to transition to the new Edge at some time. Last month, Firefox had 3.36 per cent of browser eyeballs, level pegging with Edge.
Edge looks set to rise further due to the points mentioned above and it being the default browser in Windows, which is now judged by many to be more than just 'good enough'. Microsoft Edge has been Chromium based for about 18 months, and it got some newsworthy updates this March with a performance boost, the introduction of vertical tabs, sleeping tabs, and improved history searching.
Personally, on the desktop, I am still comfortable in Firefox, which has just been updated to v90.0. I moved both my Android mobiles browsing defaults to Samsung Internet a few months back though, when Mozilla changed mobile Firefox's behaviour when you prod the address bar – it no longer brought up my 'speed dial' page (and the change was established as a feature not a bug).
If you want to check the Statcounter data focussed on desktop browsers you can check here.
