Microsoft Edge Overtakes Firefox On Desktops

There is bad news for Mozilla Foundation this week, after new research data shows that Microsoft Edge has overtaken it on desktop computers.

Analytics firm StatCounter confirmed that Microsoft Edge has added more users than Firefox in the past few months.

It has been a rough time for Mozila. In August last year it announced that 250 staffers, or a quarter of its workforce, were to be made redundant due to the impact of the Coronavirus pandemic.

Firefox shrinking?

And the bad news continued into 2021 it seems.

The StatCounter latest figures for March 2021 show that Google Chrome is still the top web browser for the desktop browser market share, with a very healthy 67.14 percent share.

Apple Safari has a 10.13 percent share, with Microsoft Edge now in third at 8.04 percent.

Unfortunately, Firefox’s market share has slipped to 7.97 percent.

Opera has 2.61 percent and the veteran Internet Explorer incredibly is still used by 1.71 percent of people.

IE retirement

This is despite Redmond announcing last year that the actual end of IE’s 26 year odyssey will come on 17 August 2021, when Microsoft 365 apps and services will no longer support it.

The StatCounter figures show that Edge has managed to add new users almost every month, and been growing steadily since last year.

The one small consolidation for Mozilla is that Firefox still has a larger overall share than Edge when mobile and tablet user numbers are taken into account.