Top web browsers, April 2020

Firefox staved off another ruinous month by remaining stable in April, while Chrome raised its share to a level last seen more than a decade ago by Microsoft’s now largely irrelevant Internet Explorer (IE).

According to data posted Friday by analytics vendor Net Applications, Firefox’s share in April rose very slightly — by less than one-tenth of a percentage point — to 7.3%. It was the first month in the last four in which the browser added share — and more importantly — kept it from dropping below the 7% bar, the milestone not seen since 2005, when Firefox was scratching share from Microsoft’s IE and Google was more than three years away from introducing Chrome.

Firefox remained behind Edge for the second month in a row after ceding second place to Microsoft’s newest browser in March. The gap between them expanded in April by one-tenth of a percentage point to half a point.

Because Firefox remained more or less flat rather than decline as anticipated, Computerworld‘s new forecast — based on the browser’s 12-month average — puts it right at 7% rather than under it at this month’s end. The losses could resume, of course, in which case if they matched the last year’s average, would drop Firefox under 6% by October and leave it at a very dismal 5.3% by year’s end.

Chrome sets record

Chrome climbed by seven-tenths of a percentage point in April, about half what it gained the month before, but it established a record for Google by reaching 69.2%. It was the first time the browser had topped 68% — as it did in March — without slumping the very next month to fall below that level.

In the last 12 months, Chrome has added 3.5 percentage points to its total, the largest change, positive or negative, of any browser during the stretch.

The boost improved Chrome’s 12-month forecast yet again, putting the browser on a linear path of significant growth, considering its dominance of the space. Computerworld‘s prediction now pegs Chrome at above 70% by July and over 71% by November. Only two browsers have accounted for 70% or more of all browser activity since the web’s start: Netscape Navigator (an ancestor of Firefox) and IE. Chrome would join a very selective club.

The last time a browser controlled as much share as Chrome did in April was February 2009, when IE had 69.2%. (The most popular version of IE at the time? IE7, although its lead over IE6 was slim, just a couple of points.)

But can Chrome keep it up? Possibly.

Unlike in 2009, when IE faced a significant rival — Firefox, with approximately 22% of the space — as well as a trio of smaller competitors (Chrome, Apple’s Safari and Opera Software’s Opera), today Chrome’s adversaries are individually weak, none with more than 8%. The way Firefox seems to be headed and the continued inevitable decline and ultimate demise of IE, leaves open more percentage points Chrome may scoop up down the line.

Realistically, the only danger to Chrome anytime soon will be Microsoft’s Edge, ironically a near-clone of Google’s browser.

Edge up, IE down

Microsoft’s browsers, the aged IE and rebuilt Edge, combined to lose three-tenths of a percentage point in April, ending the month at 13.2%.

Edge, though, remained the second-most-used browser last month by gaining two-tenths of a point, reaching 7.8%. Meanwhile, IE gave up four-tenths of a percentage point, sliding to 5.5%. Edge’s number was a record high; IE’s was a record low for the 15 years Computerworld has records from Net Applications.

The Edge-up, IE-down trend has been well established. Though IE’s downhill run has been rapid — it’s lost three percentage points in the last 12 months — that may not reflect the old browser’s residual strength: Browser metrics vendors have a hard time collecting accurate data from enterprise networks, which may mask multiple internal IP addresses by showing a single address externally.

Edge’s April addition was the fifth consecutive month of gains, the most since the first 15 months after the browser’s mid-2015 kick-off when it grew because of Windows 10’s free-upgrade-fueled adoption. Computerworld remained reluctant to call the “Chromiumization” of Edge a success — more data’s required — but the seven-tenths of a point in the last three months, the period since Microsoft released a stable build of the browser, certainly puts it on the path toward the major milestone of 10%.

Ultimately, the only way for Edge to grow beyond that will be at Chrome’s expense. That’s a lot to ask of a browser which is, after all, Chrome at its roots.

Elsewhere in Net Application’s numbers, Safari retrieved the three-tenths of a point it lost the month before, getting back to 3.9%, and Opera Software’s Opera lost less than a tenth of a point to stay, with rounding, at 1.1%.

Net Applications calculates share by detecting the agent strings of the browsers used to reach the websites of Net Applications’ clients. The firm counts visitor sessions to measure browser activity.

Top web browsers, March 2020

Firefox in March continued a march toward ruin, falling twice its average loss over the past year and losing its place as the world’s second-most-used browser.

According to data posted today by analytics company Net Applications, Firefox’s share in March slumped to 7.2%, down four-tenths of a percentage point. It was the fifth month in the last six in which the browser shed users — and much more importantly — a record low since Firefox climbed out of obscurity to threaten Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) 15 years ago.

This record was the second in a row for Firefox, after February’s debut below the 2016 slump that previously marked the browser’s trough. Two do not a dataset make, but if a legitimate trend develops with, say, another month or two of declines, Mozilla will be, to say the least, in deep trouble.

Notably, Firefox’s fall meant it ceded second place to Microsoft’s Edge. Although Mozilla’s browser had handed second place to Chrome in March 2014 as the latter climbed ahead in the race against the still-dominant IE, Firefox resumed the silver spot in December 2018 when Microsoft’s browser lost it for good.

Computerworld again has had to adjust its forecast based on the latest losses. A month ago, that prediction — based on Firefox’s 12-month average — signaled the browser would fall under 7% in June; now, that mark should be reached in the first few days of May. By year’s end, Firefox’s share could be as low as 5.6%.

Now No. 2, Edge

Microsoft’s browsers — IE and Edge — lost three-tenths of a percentage point in March to end at 13.5%.

But as has been the case recently, the Redmond, Wash. company’s two browsers forged different paths, with Edge rising and IE falling. IE shed half a percentage point last month, plunging to 5.9%, while Edge added two-tenths of a point, climbing to 7.6%, another record high for the five-year-old browser.

Edge’s increase was the fourth consecutive, matching the longest stretch yet of that browser’s gains. In the last two months, Edge has added nearly six-tenths of a percentage point to its total, which represented a growth rate of 8%.

That two-month span was not randomly selected; February and March were the first two complete months after Microsoft released a stable, polished version of the revamped Edge — built atop Chromium code, the same that powers Chrome — on Jan. 15.

Yet the cause of that increase remains unknown. It may be that Microsoft’s decision to clone Chrome is behind the increase, but it is far from certain. More data is needed.

There was a positive-for-Microsoft signal, however. March’s percentage of Windows 10 PCs running Edge — assuming that Edge on Windows 7 and macOS has added little to the total — was 13.2%, tying the record previously set by the browser several times since its introduction. The growth on Windows 10 may be from the beginnings of Microsoft’s automatic swap of old-Edge for new-Edge, even though the firm promised it would not make the latter the default on systems where it wasn’t already set so.

IE’s downturn, meanwhile, was also a positive for anyone rooting for Windows. The browser — in this case IE11, last of its kind — is on what appears to be its deathbed, now under 6% and by all rights should slide under 5% by the end of July. Getting rid of IE — along with its ancient technologies and security vulnerabilities — will be a win for everyone, even if that means shifting legacy labors from that browser to the IE mode inside Edge.

Chrome jumps, again

Chrome leaped 1.2 percentage points last month — the most since September — to reach 68.5%, the highest mark since July, when the browser peaked at a tenth of a point higher.

The increase improved Chrome’s 12-month forecast, putting the browser on a slow river of growth: The prediction now pegs Chrome at around 69% by the end of this year. Computerworld wouldn’t be surprised if that didn’t pan out, however, as the two times Chrome crested 68%, both because of 1.2-point or larger increases, it immediately slumped, albeit not by as much, the month following.

Elsewhere, Apple’s Safari slipped three-tenths of a point to 3.6%, and Opera Software’s Opera remained flat at 1.1%. Safari’s impressive growth of last year, estimates that were flawed because Net Applications counted iPads running iPadOS 13 as macOS devices, was erased from the record when the metrics vendor revised several months of data. By March, Safari had settled into a dead tie with its year-ago number. All the fuss, then, had been for naught.

Net Applications calculates share by detecting the agent strings of the browsers used to reach the websites of Net Applications’ clients. The firm counts visitor sessions to measure browser activity.

Have work-at-home, stay-at-home orders impacted the browser shares?

To answer that question: Who knows at the moment? But the general drift of the browser shares does hint at an affirmative.

The downturn in Firefox’s fate, for example, makes sense, as it’s the least likely of the top three — Chrome, Edge and Firefox — to be favored by IT. Sent home to work with company devices or told after that to download the preferred browser to their personal PCs to, say, access corporate assets, Firefox may have been replaced in many instances, if only temporarily, by Chrome or Edge.

Meanwhile, Chrome, and to a lesser extent Edge, might have received usage boosts based on the same conceit, that commercially-approved browsers — and both those would certainly apply — would benefit from a mass work-at-home order as has happened in large swaths of the U.S. and elsewhere.

An April of continued gains by Chrome and Edge — and a concurrent loss by Firefox — might confirm the theory, since few companies, at least in the U.S. asked employees to work at home all that month. (Microsoft and Google, for example, ordered theirs home in the first week of March.)

If the COVID-19 pandemic did spark a browser usage shift, will that become permanent? Too soon to know.

Top web browsers, February 2020

Firefox took a significant turn for the worse last month, falling three times its average share loss over the past year and dropping to a level not seen since 2005.

According to data published Sunday by web metrics vendor Net Applications, Firefox’s share in February sank to 7.6%, down six-tenths of a percentage point. It was the eighth month in the last 12 in which Firefox spilled users and the third largest downturn during that stretch.

The last time Firefox recorded a share that low was in September 2005, when it also posted a 7.6% marker. At the time, Firefox was still chipping away at Internet Explorer (IE), Microsoft’s then-keystone of browsers, as it slowly grew to become a legitimate threat to Redmond. IE accounted for an astounding 86.8% of global share in September 2005.

Firefox’s decline erased nearly 7% of the browser’s position at the start of the month. To put that into context, Firefox’s slide was equivalent to Google Chrome’s losing 4.5 percentage points since Feb. 1.

The plummet upended Computerworld‘s forecast, which relied on Firefox’s 12-month average. A month ago, that prediction pointed to a June share of 7.7%. Not only did Firefox lose all that, and more, in just a month but according to the revised forecast, June now looks to be when the browser slips under 7%. By year’s end, Firefox could be as low as 6% unless something clots the bleeding.

The stress of these share losses was recently revealed, as Mozilla posted a revenue-expense imbalance in 2018 and a little later laid off 70 people.

It’s possible things will become even bleaker at Mozilla.

Getting Edgy?

Microsoft’s two browsers — IE and the revamped-with-Chromium-Edge — added two-tenths of a percentage point in February, a slight rebound from the triple-that decline of the month before. IE+Edge ended last month at 13.8%.

The increase, such as it was, came solely from Edge: IE spilled two-tenths of a point, sliding to 6.4% while Edge put four-tenths more on its tally, climbing to 7.4%. That’s as it should be, the old out and the new in.

Edge’s increase put it at a record level, something that’s occurred monthly for the past three quarters. But it’s still impossible to say with certainty that Microsoft’s decision to abandon its own Edge technologies and replace them with those from Chromium has been behind the gradual increase. It is looking increasingly likely, however. February’s percentage of Windows 10 PCs running Edge — assuming that Edge on Windows 7 and macOS contributions has been negligible — was 12.9%, above the 12-month-prior median by a full point.

Meanwhile, IE’s share was at its lowest since September, when it took a temporary dip.

Forecasting Edge’s future will be difficult until it establishes a clearer trend, which may not happen until Windows 10’s growth slows. (Up to Jan. 15, when Chromium Edge officially launched, Microsoft’s newer browser was Windows 10-only; it almost certainly will remain Windows 10-dominant.) Microsoft has promised that it will not make the new Edge the default browser on systems where it wasn’t already so set. That means the company’s plan to replace the original Edge with the Chromium-based Edge shouldn’t artificially boost the browser’s numbers.

Staying Chromey

Chrome added three-tenths of a percentage point last month — the same as in January — to end at 67.3%, its highest mark since October.

The increase left Chrome short of its 2019 peak — 68.6% in July — and improved the 12-month forecast by putting Google’s browser back on a growth road, albeit a very slow road. (The forecast had Chrome staying within 67% through year’s end, even past the midway point of 2021.)

In plainer terms, Chrome will continue to play the browser gorilla. Unless Microsoft pulls some unknown-as-yet rabbit from its Edge hat, Chrome will remain untouched by rivals for the near-to-mid-range future.

Elsewhere, Apple’s Safari slumped four-tenths of a percentage point to 3.9%, while Opera Software’s namesake dropped two-tenths of a point, falling to 1.2%. Safari’s once impressive growth by Net Applications’ account — spurred by mistakenly tallying iPads running iPadOS 13 as macOS devices — was reined in last month when the analytics company revised several months of past data. In February, Safari did stay above the same month’s 2019 level, though (but by just two-tenths of a point).

Net Applications calculates share by detecting the agent strings of the browsers used to reach the websites of Net Applications’ clients. The firm counts visitor sessions to measure browser activity.

Top web browsers, January 2020

After three months of gains, in January Microsoft’s browsers flipped to the “Decline” setting and shed user share. And for the first time, Microsoft’s newer browser, Edge, posted a larger share than the aged veteran Internet Explorer (IE).

According to data published Saturday by analytics company Net Applications, Microsoft’s January browser share — a combination of Edge and IE — fell by six-tenths of a percentage point to 13.6%. On its own IE dropped almost nine-tenths of a point — that browser’s largest one-month decline since September 2019 — but Edge’s increase of three-tenths of a percentage point nullified some of the older browser’s loss.

For January, IE recorded a user share of 6.6%, while Edge posted 7%. It was the first time since Edge’s mid-2015 debut in its original form that that browser bested IE. (Microsoft relaunched Edge on Jan. 15 as a browser built atop Chromium, the Google-led open-source project whose technologies also power Chrome.)

Although IE might again occasionally edge Edge in user share, the trend will almost certainly be IE’s continued decline. The browser will be supported on Windows 7 for three years and Windows 10 for likely as long, but it’s a dead end kept alive only to keep enterprise customers from revolting. Even Edge’s integrated “IE mode” will eventually be retired.

Meanwhile, Edge’s portion of Windows 10’s browser activity — a measurement Computerworld has touted as a better indicator of the browser’s mettle than user share on all personal computers — ended January at 12.3%, the same number as the month before, hinting that there was little new demand for the revamped Chromium-based Edge on Windows 10, or the other platforms (Windows 7, Windows 8.1, macOS) that it runs on, for that matter.

Edge’s user share performance will be worth watching in 2020, as Microsoft has staked everything on the all-Chromium clone of Chrome, what with IE relegated to a legacy role and the original Edge a complete flop. Going for the new Edge: Microsoft’s reputation in supporting its software in the enterprise, primarily through its management chops. Against it: Chrome’s dominance in corporations, unequal management be damned, and strangely enough, Microsoft’s odd decision to force Chrome in Office 365 environments to default to Bing as its search engine.

If Microsoft perseveres — resistance has mounted, with users and IT administrators denouncing the decision — and weds Chrome to Microsoft Search for Office 365 tenants, it’s annulling one of the most obvious reasons enterprises would adopt Edge.

That just seems odd.

Firefox slumps to share low not seen since 2016

In January, Firefox gave up two-tenths of a percentage point of user share, sliding to 8.1%, the lowest mark since August 2016.

Last month was the eighth straight that Firefox’s user share was lower than 9 percentage points, also a record. (Firefox had a four-month slump in the summer of 2016, but it bounced back, climbing to 13% before it again started the decline that continues.)

Nor is the forecast anything but depressing for Mozilla. That prediction — based, as always, on the 12-month average of changes — now has Firefox slipping under 8% as early as April and falling to 7% by September. Both dates are sooner than the forecast of a month ago because of the January dip.

That’s the last thing Mozilla needs at the moment. It’s 2018 finances showed slightly greater expenditures than income. More recently, the organization admitted it had failed to make its revenue goals, which had included significant subscription moneys, and laid off 70 employees.

Firefox-related subscriptions can’t save Mozilla if Firefox has fewer and fewer users.

Can anything unseat Chrome?

Chrome turned it around — somewhat — in January, adding three-tenths of a point to its user share to end the month at 66.9%. (Ironically, that was the same number Chrome hit in February 2019.)

The small gain put an end to a three-month stretch of losses, a first for Chrome. It also softened the impact of Chrome’s 12-month downturn so that Computerworld‘s forecast now predicts the browser stays about 66% well through this year and all of next. Without considerably more turbulence in Chrome’s share movement, there’s no chance Google loses its top-of-the-heap spot.

Considering the weakness of Firefox, the only viable threat to Chrome has to be Edge, Microsoft’s attempt to supplant the leader with, well, the leader’s step-sister.

Safari’s explosive growth? Yeah, that didn’t happen

And here we thought that Apple’s Safari was making a huge comeback on the Mac. Not so, said Net Applications.

“Due to changes made to the user agent in iPadOS 13, iPads were identified as macOS devices,” the California metrics vendor wrote on its website. “This change propagated progressively from September to December and required an adjustment to the data in that timeframe.”

In other words, by mistakenly tallying iPads running iPadOS 13, which launched in September, as macOS-powered devices, Net Applications overestimated not only the share of macOS but also of anything running on it, like Safari.

In Safari’s case, the differences between the contemporaneous shares and those recently adjusted to remove the iPadOS data were dramatic. In December, for instance, Net Applications had pegged Safari’s user share as 6%.That month’s adjusted share: just 3.8%.

The other months from September on showed similar variance between original and adjusted shares. November’s 5.3% (reported at the time) fell to 3.6% (adjusted by eliminating iPadOS); October’s 4.8% became 3.4%; and September’s 4.4% sunk to 3.4%.

In January, Safari added another five-tenths of a percentage point to climb to 4.2%, meaning that during 2019 Safari grew by less than one-tenth of a point, not the gargantuan-in-comparison 2.3 percentage points Computerworld reported a month ago.

Frankly, the very large gains by Safari should have raised eyebrows and questions. Instead, Computerworld posited that Safari’s growth “demonstrated that Chrome can be vulnerable, at least in some spaces.”

How naive.

Net Applications calculates user share by detecting the agent strings of the browsers people run to reach the websites of Net Applications’ clients. The firm tallies visitor sessions to measure browser activity.

Top web browsers, December 2019

Microsoft’s browsers last month surged to close the year with the highest user share since August 2018, giving its maker a morale boost just weeks before it is to deliver a totally revamped Edge.

According to data published Wednesday by metrics vendor Net Applications, Microsoft’s December browser share — a combination of Internet Explorer (IE) and Edge — climbed 1.4 percentage points to 14.2%, the highest mark in all of 2019. The year’s total user share increase of 1.8 points marked the first time since 2014 that Microsoft’s browsers put in a positive January-to-December.

Over half of December’s gain came from Edge, which added eight-tenths of a percentage point, reaching 6.8%, a record for a browser Microsoft will relaunch in two weeks. IE also climbed last month, adding six-tenths of a percentage point and rising to 7.4%, the most for that browser since August.

(On Jan. 15, Microsoft will begin replacing the homegrown version of Edge on Windows 10 with the new browser built on Google’s technologies.)

Edge’s increase bettered, proportionally, the accompanying December increase of Windows 10, and so the percentage of the latter’s users relying on the browser ticked up to 12.3%, the best number since last summer. December may be the last month that Edge’s portion of Windows 10’s browser activity can be reliably pegged, what with the impending launch of the final “full-Chromium” version for Windows 7, which at the end of 2019 accounted for nearly 31% of all Windows. Although Windows 7 will receive its final security updates on Jan. 14 – except for businesses that pay Microsoft for the post-retirement Extended Security Updates, or ESU — there will be a sizable number of PCs globally running the OS after that date (an estimated 446 million, give or take). It’s almost certain that some will dump IE for the new Edge.

But how much ground the new, Chromium-based Edge gains, if any, once it is in polished form remains unclear. Much will depend on how strong users’ ties are to Chrome, whether IT admins will return their charges to Microsoft’s browser and Google’s reactions. How Edge plays out during 2020 will be among the year’s more interesting enterprise stories.

IE fared well, too, as difficult to believe as that is. By Net Applications’ numbers, IE accounted for 8.6% of all Windows browsing last month, its best mark since May. Although Microsoft has maintained IE on life-support, catering to those organizations that still need it to run specific web apps or intranet sites not worth refreshing, the browser’s share will likely fall as the new Edge’s rises: The remade Edge includes an IE mode, which should make the stand-alone Internet Explorer moot for most commercial customers. Another year like that and IE will be an afterthought run by fewer than 5% of Windows users.

It may be months, however, before an accelerated IE decline, if one occurs, becomes clear enough to fuel future forecasts of its final days.

Year-end recap: Microsoft’s browsers gained 1.8 percentage points in 2019, representing a 14% increase in share.

The S.S. Firefox stays afloat

In December, Firefox recovered almost half the user share it lost the month prior; the browser ended the year at 8.4%, up two-tenths of a point from November.

Although that kept Mozilla’s ship from slipping under the waves — something Computerworld feared was in the cards a month ago — Firefox’s future remained more gloomy than glad. It spent the whole second half of 2019 under 9% — the six-month average was 8.5% — and all but one month of the year in single digits, a first (at least since when it was regularly gaining share as it nibbled at IE).

Computerworld‘s revised forecast — based, as usual, on the 12-month average of changes — now has Firefox slipping under 8% by April and falling to 7% about a year from now. And that’s in the face of a small bump in December. The harder Mozilla works, it seems, at improving Firefox — it’s easily the leader in the across-the-browser-market-bar-Chrome anti-tracking movement — the lower droops its user share. How depressing for its fans, users or not.

Year-end recap: Firefox lost 1.2 percentage points during 2019, representing a 13% decline in share.

Chrome sets consecutive loss record

During December, Chrome dropped half a percentage point, slipping to 66.6% and ending the year down that same amount from 2019’s beginning. This was the first time since 2014 that Chrome lost share over the course of a year.

Last month also marked the first time Chrome had posted three consecutive months of losses (they totaled 1.8 percentage points), an even stronger signal than in November that Google’s browser may have topped out.

There’s certainly no danger that Chrome will suddenly find itself usurped by, say, Firefox or Edge, not when it accounted for two-thirds of global browser activity on personal computers last month. But it was impossible for Chrome’s growth, which started seriously only in 2014, seven years after the browser’s debut, to continue forever. Although it may be too early to say Chrome has peaked — the high-water mark thus far was 68.6% in July — declines over multiple months seem a worthwhile indicator.

This year’s browser story should be the impact, if any, on Chrome from Microsoft’s decision to recast Edge as a clone of the Google application. If swaths of enterprise IT decide to ditch Chrome and replace it with the Edge knock-off — for manageability reasons, Chrome could be threatened in the very long term. That has to be at the center of Microsoft’s strategy.

A new Computerworld forecast now puts Chrome on a very gradual — half a percentage point a month — decline, with the browser dipping under 66% sometime in the spring of 2021.

Year-end recap: Chrome lost half a percentage point in 2019, representing a 1% decline in share.

Safari reclaims defectors

Elsewhere in Net Applications’ data, Apple’s Safari posted the fifth straight month of gains, adding seven-tenths of a percentage point to reach 6% in December. Opera Software’s browser lost three-tenths of a point and slid to 1%.

Safari’s increase came as macOS itself dipped to accounting for 11.1% of all desktop operating systems, a decline of half a point from November. In turn, that sent Safari’s share of macOS for December soaring to 54.3%, its highest portion of that market since November 2017. (December was also the third straight month during which that metric increased.) Safari, which has also emphasized its privacy chops, particularly its anti-tracking capabilities, has demonstrated that Chrome can be vulnerable, at least in some spaces; as recently as May 2019, Safari accounted for just 35% of macOS-based browsing.

Year-end recap: Safari gained 2.3 percentage points during 2019, representing a 62% increase in share.

Year-end recap: Opera lost seven-tenths of a percentage points during 2019, representing a 43% decline in share.
IDG/Gregg Keizer
Safari boosted its user share by more than 60%, making Apple’s browser the clear winner of 2019. Meanwhile, Opera and Firefox lost ground between January and December. (Data: Net Applications.)

Top web browsers, November 2019

If Firefox were a ship, it would be becalmed on a flat sea, loosened seams leaking faster than the hand-worked pumps can empty the bilge, passengers springing overboard and swimming toward other vessels — those with sails bearing rivals’ logos.

According to data published Sunday by analytics company Net Applications, Firefox’s share for November slumped to 8.2%, down half a percentage point. It was the seventh month in the last 12 in which Firefox spilled share, the fifth where the loss amounted to a half point or more.

From 2005, when Firefox was scratching its way out of the single digits in an insurrection against Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE), the browser has posted lower shares only three times, all in a short stretch of 2016 when Firefox bottomed out at 7.7%. That time, the browser clawed back to 13% (in October 2017) before again shrinking.

Unless something suddenly stems Firefox’s current free-fall, the browser will return to that low point of 7.7% by June, according to Computerworld‘s forecast, which relies on Firefox’s 12-month average. That same forecast predicts the open-source browser will dip under 8% as early as January.

Mozilla’s efforts to make Firefox more attractive as a browser choice have failed to move the share needle. From its November 2017 “Quantum” relaunch to its recent emphasis on the hottest browser topic — privacy in general, blocking ad and site trackers more specifically — the improvements and enhancements have been accompanied by collective shrug. Or worse, a step toward the exit.

Historically, Firefox has been the counterweight to the then-current leader, first IE, then Google’s Chrome. Firefox’s flirtation with irrelevancy as exhibited by its smaller user share may see that counterweight go weightless. Microsoft’s decision to adopt Google’s browser technology for its reborn Edge strengthened the monoculture. Sans Firefox, the browser choice becomes Chrome or near-Chrome.

Chrome: Settling into its spot?

During November, Chrome lost a quarter of a percentage point, dipping to 67.2%, the browser’s lowest mark since June.

While the loss was little more than a rounding error and could not be considered a threat to Chrome’s dominance by any stretch, Google’s browser may be close to its upper-end limit.

Last month’s share was identical to Chrome’s number at the start of the year, for one, so for all the wild swings — up 2.3 points one month, down 1.7 points the next — it ended where it began. And although Chrome shed three-quarters of a percentage point in the past six months, in the last three the movements were a wash, hinting that changes to share have slowed.

The forecast based on the 12-month average foretold some gains — Chrome should make the 68% mark by June — but the prophesied increase was significantly less than a month ago, when the prediction contended Chrome would hit 70% by mid-2020.

IE edges Edge

Microsoft’s browsers recovered three-tenths of a percentage point in November, the second straight month of share gains (and only the fourth time that’s happened in the last five years). IE+Edge ended November at 12.8%.

That total was tallied of two browsers, IE and Edge, with the increase credited entirely to the ancient and obsolete IE, not the at-least-newer Edge: IE climbed four-tenths of a point to 6.8% while Edge fell a tenth to 6%.

Because Windows 10’s share of all operating systems also declined, Edge remained with an 11.2% share of all Windows 10 browser activity, the level it’s been stuck at for a full quarter.

Measuring Edge against Windows 10 will soon be impossible, as the revamped browser — Microsoft tossed its own technologies and built a new Edge from Google’s Chromium — will reach release status Jan. 15, launching for Windows 7 and 8.1 as well as 10, not to mention macOS.

Whether Edge’s remodel will result in a jolt to its user share is unknown. Microsoft is, if not counting on Edge’s phoenix-rising, eager to put a thumb on the scale to boost the chances; it will automatically replace the original homegrown Edge with the Chromium-based version rather than wait as users do what they do best, stick with the status quo.

Edge may never gain much ground in Net Applications’ measurements. The California metrics vendor best quantifies individuals’ browsing activity, and while Microsoft wouldn’t object if that group dumped Chrome for a Chrome clone, there’s good evidence that the retuned Edge is a corporate play.

Elsewhere in Net Applications’ numbers, Apple’s Safari gained half a percentage point for the fourth consecutive month, climbing to 5.3%, and Opera Software’s browser remained flat at 1.3%. Safari’s increase came as macOS climbed six-tenths of a percentage point to 11.6%, a record for Apple’s operating system. For November, Safari’s share of macOS rose to 45.6%, the highest mark since December 2017, showing that it is possible for a browser to convince customers to ditch Chrome for a browser they’d used before.

Net Applications calculates user share by detecting the agent strings of the browsers that render the websites of Net Applications’ clients. The firm tallies visitor sessions to measure browser user activity.

Top web browsers, October 2019

Chrome last month continued its seesaw in user share, throwing away most of the gains it had made the month prior while remaining fully in charge of the browser market.

According to data published today by California analytics vendor Net Applications, Chrome’s share for October dropped by 1.1 percentage points to 67.4%. It was the fourth straight time that Chrome shed some of its share the month following an increase of one point or more. In September, Chrome had recorded a boost of 1.3 points.

The up-down has not always resulted in a net gain for each months’ pairings, and when increases have outweighed losses of the month previous, the upside has been small. That’s why over the course of the past 12 months, Chrome has climbed by just one percentage point.

Yet the difference between Chrome, the browser leader, and the next in line — Microsoft’s Double-mint twins of Internet Explorer (IE) and Edge — was 54.9 points, nearer the high end of the 12-month range between 51.7 and 56.5. That metric shows that Chrome’s position is solid. Very solid, in fact.

Computerworld now forecasts that Chrome will return to 68% shortly (within three months at the most) and crack 70% by June. Even if its seesaw keeps at it.

Firefox slips

One of the unanswered questions in Browser Land is whether Mozilla’s Firefox can survive. Can the browser, which kicked off renewed competition in the space — when it launched in 2004, Microsoft’s IE had eradicated all rivals — keep its head above the proverbial water, say, above the very-minor-browser marker of 5%?

Good question.

Firefox lost one-tenth of a percentage point during October, ending the month at 8.6%. Although that wasn’t Firefox’s nadir of the past 12 months, it was the third-lowest number during that period and the sixth-lowest overall (or at least since the browser crawled out of the single digits in early 2006).

It’s almost painful to watch Firefox struggle to sustain its share, much less grow it. In October, the browser’s user share was below the median for the past 12 months (9.1%) and significantly under the median for the 12-month span before that (November 2017-October 2018, 10.2%).

Although Mozilla continues to stress Firefox’s privacy chops — the latest upgrade added tools that block social media networks’ trackers — that has not resonated enough with potential users to bring large numbers to the browser.

By Net Applications’ data, Firefox’s near future looks weak, but not necessarily bleak. Using the browser’s average movement over the last 12 months, Firefox should remain above 8% for the next year, dipping below that only in November 2020. But if the past six months are a better clue, Firefox is in trouble: That forecast would put the browser under 8% as soon as January, under 7% by June and below 5% as soon as December 2020.

(The difference in the two predictions? The six-month average contains three months of large, more-than-half-a-point losses, which dominated the total. Those three months were diluted in the 12-month average.)

How long will Microsoft maintain IE?

Microsoft’s recovery from September’s all-time browser low wasn’t much of a come-back, but it was better than nothing. In October, the Redmond, Wash. company’s browsers snatched back some of the share they lost the month before, adding four-tenths of a percentage point to up its share balance to almost 12.5%.

The firm’s total was, as always, composed of two different browsers, IE and Edge. And the increase was neatly split between the pair, each adding about two-tenths of a percentage point to the kitty. IE climbed to 6.4%, while Edge edged up to 6.1%.

Windows 10’s share of all operating systems climbed at almost the same rate, so Edge simply kept its share of Windows 10’s browsers at the same 11.2% of September. That mark, remember, was the lowest of the year so far, but not a record low. (The latter would be the 10.9% in September 2018.)

Meanwhile, IE’s increase translated into a slight boost in its share of all Windows browsers, ending October up two-tenths of a point to 7.3%. That IE’s portion of all Windows browsers has fallen by about a fourth — a year-ago, the number was 10.6% — is proof of its fast fade among customers.

Within months, Microsoft will finalize its “full-Chromium” Edge, which will feature an integrated IE mode that replicates that browser for the corporate users who still need it — notably IE’s ActiveX controls — to run aged web apps and obsolescing intranet sites. At some point after the new IE’s debut, Microsoft will forcibly replace the old Edge on Windows 10 PCs (and likely push it onto the Windows 7 systems being serviced by the for-a-free Extended Support Release (ESR) after that OS’s public retirement) with the new.

Computerworld has speculated that Microsoft will eventually purge IE from Windows machines and tell the few customers then still needing the browser to instead rely only on the mode inside Edge. That forecast has been driven by IE’s quickly-declining share. A year from now, going by its performance over the past 12 months, IE will be run by less than 3.5% of all Windows users, just not enough to warrant a separate application.

Elsewhere in Net Applications’ data, Apple’s Safari gained half a percentage point for the second consecutive month, climbing to 4.8%, and Opera Software’s browser stayed dropped a tad to 1.3%. Safari’s increase came in the face of a dip in macOS, which lost about six-tenths of a percentage point in October. That drop in macOS — expected as it was because September’s nearly-two percentage point leap was clearly not realistic — contributed to pushing Safari’s share of Apple’s operating system to 43.9%, the highest it’s been since March 2018.

Net Applications calculates user share by detecting the agent strings of the browsers people use to reach the websites of Net Applications’ clients. The firm tallies visitor sessions to measure browser user activity.

Top web browsers, September 2019

Microsoft’s browsers stumbled last month, dropping share like a lame Netflix series and falling to a record low after wiping out all of 2019’s gains, plus more.

According to data published today by analytics company Net Applications, Microsoft’s browser share for September — composed of Internet Explorer (IE) and Edge — fell 1.8 percentage points to 12%, an all-time low. To put the decline in perspective, the browsers accounted for a user share of 12.4% at the first of this year and hit a high of 14% in April.

More than two-thirds of that decline was attributed to IE, which plummeted by nearly 1.4 points, falling to 6.1%, a record low for the browser that once lorded if over the web. Edge also slid in September, losing four-tenths of a percentage point and dropping to 5.9%. Edge’s slip erased almost all of its gains in August, when the Windows 10-only browser reached a record high.

Because of the concurrent rise in Windows 10’s share of all operating systems, Edge’s raw decline translated into a more substantial drop in its share of Windows 10’s browsers. That number fell to 11.2% in September, the lowest level all year.

Although the “full-Chromium” Edge, the version Microsoft’s building using technologies from the Google-dominated Chromium project, is under construction, the browser’s future is cloudy at best. Clarity won’t come until Microsoft finishes the Chromium-based Edge and forces that onto Windows 10 users, something the company has said it will do at some point after launch.

IE fared even worse in a comparison with all the other browsers that run on Windows. By Net Applications’ numbers, IE accounted for only 7% of all Windows browsing last month, also a record low. Microsoft kept IE on support only because some organizations require it for aged apps or intranet sites, but that rationale has faded fast: In the last 12 months, IE’s share of all Windows declined by 60%. Another year like that and IE will be an afterthought run by fewer than 5% of Windows users.

Firefox scratches, survives another month

Firefox added three-tenths of a percentage point to its user share in September, wrapping up the month at 8.7% and marking the second straight month of keeping things in the black. Even so, it was fourth consecutive month that Firefox remained under 9%, tying a record set in May, June, July and August 2016.

Although it was another month that Firefox scratched out some gains, the browser still stands on shaky ground. Because the last 12 months shows a decline of nearly a percentage point, Computerworld‘s revised forecast — based on the 12-month average — has Firefox slipping under 8% about mid-2020.

For all of Mozilla’s work on Firefox — from the redesign two years ago to its aggressive adoption of anti-tracking and pro-privacy measures — nothing has kicked the browser into sustained growth. A year ago, Firefox’s share was 9.6%; when Mozilla introduced Firefox Quantum in November 2017, the share was 11.4%. Only three of the past 18 months recorded shares of 10% or more.

Chrome commandeers more share

Google’s Chrome put another 1.3 percentage points on its frame, weighing in for the month at 68.5%, just a tenth of a point off the record high set in July.

Last month, Computerworld noted the odd pattern to Chrome’s share, stretches when the browser would add share one month, lose much of it the next. That continued in September — this has been regular as the proverbial clockwork since February — when Chrome went on its growth spurt after shedding 1.4 points in August.

If the tick-tock continues this month, October should be a downer for Chrome.

But as Computerworld has said before, what counts is the long-term movement of a browser. There, Chrome has done well, adding 2.1 percentage points to its share over the last year. Another sign: The 68.5% of September was the second-highest mark for the browser, edged out only by July’s 68.6%.

Chrome’s gains, stymied as they have been at times by losing months, put a new spin on Computerworld‘s prediction of its future. Using the 12-month average, the forecast pegs Chrome at more than 69% in November and over 70% by May.

Computerworld has Net Application records going back to January 2005, so it’s possible to compare Chrome’s prowess today with IE’s of yesteryear.

Google comes off second best there — for now, at least — because IE’s share was an astounding 89.4% that month. The remainder was split among rivals, including Firefox (at 5.6%), Apple’s Safari (1.7%) and Netscape’s Navigator (2%). It wasn’t until December 2008 that IE’s share fell to about where Chrome’s is now.

Elsewhere in Net Applications’ data, Apple’s Safari grew by half a percentage point to 4.4% and Opera Software’s browser stayed where it was at 1.4%. Safari’s increase was the second straigh,t but was a due entirely to a nearly-two percentage point leap by macOS that put the operating system in unknown territory (and likely on shaky ground; macOS’ 11.6% simply won’t stand up).

Net Applications calculates user share by detecting the agent strings of the browsers people use to reach the websites of Net Applications’ clients. The firm tallies visitor sessions to measure browser user activity.

Top web browsers, August 2019

Microsoft’s Edge completed a six-month surge in user share that represented a 24% increase and brought the browser to its highest-ever level.

According to U.S. analytics vendor Net Applications, Edge’s August user share rose by half a percentage point to 6.3%, a record for the browser in its first four years. During the six months ending Aug. 31, Edge added 1.6 points to its share, the equivalent of a 24% boost.

The growth by Edge, however, did not translate into a similar-sized increase in the browser’s portion of Windows 10 browsers because the operating system jumped up more than two percentage points. (Although the “full-Chromium” Edge, the version Microsoft’s building using the Google-dominated Chromium project’s technologies, has been released in preview for non-Windows 10 OSes, it’s a certainty that the vast bulk of Edge’s users are on 10.)

By Net Applications’ numbers, Edge accounted for only 12.4% of all Windows 10 browser activity, a half a point increase over the month prior. But the six-month increase of Edge’s share of Windows 10 was a measly 4%.

It may be tempting to credit Microsoft’s switch to Chromium for the increase but Microsoft did not give users a working preview until mid-April. Of the four months since, two recorded decreases in Edge’s browser share.

Until Microsoft rolls out a polished version of full-Chromium Edge — a Stable channel build, using Chrome’s nomenclature, which Microsoft has adopted — and better yet forces the new Edge onto Windows 10 users — Computerworld is convinced it will be impossible to pin the browser’s ups and downs on the revamp.

On the share stairs, Chrome takes one step down after two up

After a near-record leap in July, Chrome last month dropped 1.4 percentage points, falling to 67.2%, the same number it booked at the start of 2019.

Chrome has had a habit of doing this two up, one back — or even two up, two back — recently. In May, Chrome added 2.3 points, then promptly lost 1.6 points in June. July saw an increase of another 2.3 percentage points, with August subtracting 1.4 of those.

The ups and downs have produced projections that have been alternately up- then downbeat. This one is the latter: Chrome now won’t reach the 70% milestone until December 2020, a full year later than the forecast of just last month. (Reality will likely be somewhere in between.) But there’s still no signal that Chrome’s rise has plateaued, much less that it’s in danger or reversing.

Edge’s 1.5 percentage point increase over the last six months notwithstanding, there simply isn’t a competitor worth the name among the browsers-not-named-Chrome.

Firefox hangs on

Firefox added a tenth of a percentage point to its user share in August, wrapping up the month at 8.4% and putting an end to a three-month slide.

But August was also the third consecutive month that Firefox remained under the 9% bar. Its record: Four straight months below 9% in May through August 2016.

While Firefox at least didn’t lose share, it continued to flirt with disaster. Computerworld‘s revised forecast put the browser under 8% by November and predicted that the browser will drop below 7% by August 2020.

It becomes harder and harder to visualize how Mozilla will work its way out of the browser basement. Can its focus on privacy, specifically the emphasis on blocking web trackers, convince millions to try (or retry) Firefox? That seems tough when every rival but Chrome rushes to implement their own anti-tracking. Is the enterprise Firefox’s salvation? How can it be when Microsoft positions Edge as more-or-less-Chrome but with its enterprise imprimatur? Firefox needs a solid six months of growth at a minimum to convince anyone that it has put possible extinction behind it.

Elsewhere in Net Applications’ numbers, Apple’s Safari grew by half a percentage point to 3.9% and Opera Software’s browser slid a tad to 1.4%. The only silver lining for either was Safari’s share of all macOS-powered computers — 39.8% — was the highest since May 2018.

Net Applications calculates user share by detecting the agent strings of the browsers people use to reach the websites of Net Applications’ clients. The firm tallies visitor sessions to measure browser user activity.

Top browsers, July 2019

Chrome again jumped in user share, adding the most in a single month since its 2016 heyday, when Google took advantage of a disastrous Microsoft decision to claim the top spot.

According to web analytics company Net Applications, Chrome’s July user share climbed by 2.3 percentage points to end the month at 68.6%, a record for Google’s browser. The month’s increase was the largest since August 2016, at the tail end of an eight-month tsunami that swept Microsoft from its decades-old perch.

In five of the past seven months, Chrome has held more than two-thirds of global browser share, a statement to its grip on the market. The only extant browser that has accounted for such a large portion of the world’s web activity? Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE), which a decade ago was as dominant as Chrome is today.

But Microsoft deliberately pulled the plug in the IE bathtub and within months watched its lead swirl down a drain. In mid-2014, the Redmond, Wash. company told Windows users that they would have to upgrade to the newest-available IE for the OS running their PCs. The order scratched a year of support from IE7, four years from IE8 and IE9, and seven years from IE10. (At the time, IE8 was the most popular version of the browser.) Only IE11 survived with support intact.

But if Microsoft expected an uptake of IE11, it was sorely disappointed. After the mandate went into effect in January 2016 — when more than half of all those running a Microsoft browser were forced to switch — a stunning decline began. In the first eight months of 2016, Microsoft’s global browser share plummeted 16 percentage points, representing a loss of about a third of its total. During the same stretch, Chrome gained 21.6 percentage points, sprinting from 32% to 54%. Computerworld has long maintained that when faced with an upgrade of one sort or another — IE8 to IE11 or IE to Chrome — millions upon millions picked the latter.

In any case, IE never recovered, and Chrome has never looked back. Instead, Google’s browser has angled to eat the world. According to its 12-month average user share change, Chrome will account for more than 70% of all browser share by the end of the year. By the end of 2020, that number will approach 75%.

Firefox feels like it’s slipping away

Firefox shed user share again in July, making for the third consecutive month of losses. Mozilla’s browser dropped half a percentage point, falling to 8.3%, a mark not far above its record low of 7.7%, which it recorded three years ago.

Although Firefox has had several three-month periods where it lost user share, the 1.9-point total decline of the latest was the largest since a 2.3-point drop between November 2017 and January 2018.

As Computerworld has pointed out before, Firefox has had a tough time the last two years. Every once in a while, the browser posts a positive number, but those gains are always erased. Over the last 15 months, for example, Firefox reached 10% or more just twice, most recently in April. But then May, June and July came and washed Firefox near the 8% bar.

Firefox’s prognosis remains dire. In the last six months, the browser gave up 1.9 percentage points of user share, a depressing amount for an application that has no fat to begin with. Computerworld‘s latest forecast puts Firefox under 8% by October and contends that the browser will flirt with a sub-7% share by July 4, 2020.

Mozilla has banked on privacy as Firefox’s edge over rivals. But it’s also recently trumpeted enterprise manageability, likely hoping for some adoption in organizations apprehensive about Chrome’s connection to Google, and the latter’s reputation as a data collector and monitor of online behavior. Something had better work for Firefox, or it could easily become a boutique browser forever stuck in the low single digits.

Good luck with that Edge thing

Meanwhile, Microsoft’s browsers — IE and Edge — were also down for July.

The combined user share of IE+Edge slipped by one-tenth of a percentage point to 13.2%. Over the past several months, Microsoft’s browsers have alternately climbed and fallen, often taking one step forward followed by two steps back. Over the past six months, for example, Microsoft has added seven-tenths of a point to its user share bank; but during the past 12 months, it was down 2.1 points.

The July downturn was on Edge’s shoulders: Microsoft’s newest browser lost two-tenths of a point, slumping to 5.8%. Only a curious increase in IE by about three-fourths that amount kept Redmond’s losses down. (At this point, how is IE collecting new users?) Amazingly, IE, with a user share of 7.4%, continued to tally more user activity than Edge.

Edge — the current Edge — accounted for just 11.9% of all Windows-based browsing activity, a significant slip from the month prior, caused by Edge going down and Windows 10 going, well, up in spades.

Neither of Microsoft’s browsers are going to set any growth records. In fact, by the IE+Edge 12-month average, they’ll continue to contract. At the end of 2019, the combined user share will have dropped to 12%; a year from now, they could account for just 11% of all share.

Microsoft has its work cut out for it in reclaiming Edge from the morgue.

Elsewhere in Net Applications’ numbers, Apple’s Safari grew by a tiny tad to 3.4% and Opera Software’s eponymous browser slid a small bit to 1.4%. The only silver lining for either was Safari’s share of all macOS-powered personal computers — 37.9% — ending up setting a three-month record.

Net Applications calculates user share by detecting the agent strings of the browsers people use to reach the websites of Net Applications’ clients. The firm tallies visitor sessions to quantify browser user activity.

Top browsers, June 2019

Mozilla’s Firefox took a user share beating for the second straight month, slipping under 9% for the first time since November 2018.

According to web analytics vendor Net Applications, Firefox’s June user share fell seven-tenths of a percentage point to 8.9%. The month’s decline was the second-most since Net Applications reset shares — to purge bot traffic from its data — more than a year and a half ago. Firefox’s largest one-month decline since then? May’s slide of just over seven-tenths of a point.

As Computerworld pointed out a month ago, Firefox has had a very tough time generating share growth over the last two years. Every once in a while, the browser posts a positive number, but those gains are quickly erased. Over the last 14 months, for example, Firefox recorded a share of 10% or more just twice, most recently in April. But then May and June came along and washed Firefox back under the 9% bar.

Firefox’s long-term prognosis remains dire. In the past year, the browser shed 1.3 percentage points of user share, a depressing amount for an application that has no fat on its frame. Computerworld‘s newest forecast has Firefox slipping below 8% by March 2020, then flirting with a sub-7% share near the end of that year.

But Mozilla’s browser has been in a slightly deeper hole before, then climbed up if not out of that hole. Three years ago, Firefox sank under 8%. Yet in six months, it had added more than four percentage points to its share total. Firefox largely held those gains for the next year before again heading into a downturn. Maybe Mozilla can pull another rabbit from a hat, perhaps on the back of its anti-tracking initiative, which has garnered attention if not users.

More for Microsoft’s Edge

While Mozilla’s browser lost user share, Microsoft’s found some more.

The combined user share of Internet Explorer (IE) and Edge climbed by three-tenths of a percentage point to 13.3%. But the added share did little to change Microsoft’s overall trend, which has been negative for much longer than CEO Satya Nadella has held the company’s top spot: IE + Edge lost 3.1 points in the past 12 months.

The user share drop-off came from IE, the legacy browser Microsoft maintains with monthly security updates but won’t upgrade with new features. Over the last year, IE’s share dropped 4.9 points; meanwhile, Edge added 1.9 percentage points during the same period.

In June, just 8.3% of all Windows users ran IE, a record low for the iconic browser. At its current 12-month average, IE will zero out within two years. That’s unlikely — someone will be running the creaky application in July 2021 — but the projection still speaks a truth, that like the rivals Microsoft crushed, IE will eventually go extinct.

Edge’s user share of all personal computers grew by seven-tenths of a percentage point in June, ending the month at 6%. The latter was a record high for Windows 10’s default browser. Edge accounted for an estimated 13.2% of all Windows 10 browsing activity last month, up 1.5 points from May and that metric’s highest point since April 2018.

It was unclear why Edge’s user share jumped in June, but it was almost certainly not due to the still-under-construction “full-Chromium” Edge, the revamp that will be powered by the same open-source rendering and JavaScript engines as drive Google’s Chrome. Full-Chromium Edge has yet to reach beta status, much less a production-quality stable build, and has been available to Windows 7, Windows 8 or Windows 8.1 for less than two weeks.

Elsewhere in Net Applications’ numbers, Chrome stalled for the second time in three months, losing 1.6 percentage points to drop to a still-overwhelming-user-share-lead of 66.3%. June’s decline was the third largest for Chrome, beaten only by August 2013’s 1.8 points and April 2019’s 2.2 points. The whacky up-down-up-down-up rhythm of Chrome’s short-term moves thus continues.

Even the April and June losses, however, didn’t eliminate the year-long gain by Chrome: Google’s browser added 3.5 percentage points in user share over the past 12 months. June did, though, confuse Chrome’s future. Where the prior prediction pegged the browser making the 70% mark by October, the latest losses postponed that milestone to July 2020, near the prognosis put forward after April.

Apple’s Safari stayed stable in June at 3.3%, its lowest mark since the end of 2008. Safari’s smaller share was yet again partly due to the continued shrinking of macOS, which slipped between one- and two-tenths of a point last month. Just like IE, Edge and Firefox, Safari has been damaged by Chrome’s growth; Safari’s share of all macOS stood at 36.3% in June. Even though that was slightly better than the month prior, it was a shadow of its past. Four years ago, Apple’s browser accounted for two thirds of all Mac browser activity.

Net Applications calculates user share by detecting the agent strings of the browsers people use to reach the websites of Net Applications’ clients. The firm tallies visitor sessions to quantify browser user activity.

Top browsers, May 2019

Chrome in May bounced back from a massive April decline to reach a record user share of nearly 68%, sending rivals’ shares tumbling.

As Computerworld pointed out a month ago when reporting on Chrome’s record loss during April, short-term browser movements often lead nowhere. Such was the case when Chrome did a 180-degree turn, adding 2.3 percentage points in May, more than it had lost the month before.

The bounce-back was the fourth straight time that, when Chrome lost user share, it regained enough to erase the loss a month later.

According to Internet analytics company Net Applications, Chrome’s May user share reached 67.9%, a new high for the Google browser. The increase was the largest since August 2016, when Chrome accounted for 54% of all user share and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) and Edge still owned over a third of global share. Over the last 12 months, Chrome has gained five percentage points.

May’s gain put Chrome back on track to break the 70% barrier before year’s end. Where last month’s forecast pegged the browser making that mark by June 2020, the latest calculation — based on the 12-month average — pegs Chrome at 70% by October.

Firefox retreats…, again

As Chrome climbed, other browsers descended the user share ladder. Mozilla’s Firefox lost seven-tenths of a percentage point in May, its largest single-month decline since November 2017, when Net Applications reset shares across the board because it eliminated bot-driven traffic from its data. Firefox last month fell to 9.5%, returning the browser to its December 2018 level.

Firefox has had a terrible time sustaining any user share growth. In the last year, the longest uptick has been just two months, so May’s quick retreat wasn’t unexpected. But it has to concern Mozilla that the browser, the mainstay of its efforts, can’t shake itself out of the single-digit doldrums, climb into 10%+ territory and stay there.

Computerworld‘s latest forecast for Firefox now concludes the browser will remain under 10% for the foreseeable future, sliding below 9% in August 2020. Somehow, Mozilla’s engineers and designers have to come up with features that will entice new users to join up (or old ones to return). The November 2017 release of “Quantum,” a Firefox redesign that rolled out to some fanfare, has failed to translate into greater share. In fact, it’s been the opposite: Firefox’s user share has fallen about 2 percentage points since, representing a 20% decline.

Only Microsoft’s browsers have dropped more than that in the same stretch.

IE’s share of all Windows slides below 9%

Elsewhere in Net Applications’ numbers, the combined user share of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) and Edge slid nine-tenths of a percentage point to 13%. The decline added to the ongoing slide for Microsoft’s browsers, which have lost 3 percentage points in the last 12 months. May’s fall erased more than two-thirds of April’s out-of-the-blue gains.

Most of the user share drop-off came from IE, the legacy browser Microsoft maintains with monthly security updates but won’t upgrade with new features. During May, an anemic 8.7% of all Windows users ran IE. No wonder some — including Computerworld — expect IE to vanish, or at best be absorbed into Edge when that browser adds an IE mode to its Chromium foundation.

Edge slipped as well, dipping in May by two-tenths of a percentage point, even as Windows 10’s user share grew by 1.6 points. Edge accounted for an estimated 11.7% of all Windows 10 browsing activity last month, down eight-tenths of a point from April. That was, however, the first decline since December.

Apple’s Safari fell three-tenths of a point — three times what it had lost in April — to end at 3.3%, its lowest since the end of 2008. Safari’s smaller share was again at least partly due to the continuing shrinking of macOS user share, which slipped about a tenth of a point. But like IE, Edge and Firefox, Safari has suffered from the come-to-Chrome movement; its share of all macOS drooped to 35.5% in May. Two years ago, Apple’s browser owned 54% of the Mac browser activity market.

Net Applications calculates user share by detecting the agent strings of the browsers people use to reach the websites of Net Applications’ clients. The firm tallies visitor sessions to quantify browser user activity.

Top browsers, April 2019

Chrome last month lost a record amount of user share, a measurement of browser activity, just one month after reaching a new all-time high.

Down. Up. Up. Down. Tracking the month-by-month movement of browsers’ user share can be trying when the data doesn’t show a crystal-clear short-term trend line. Does this mean that Chrome is poised to plummet? Doubtful. Could it? Certainly. Nothing stays on top forever.

Just ask Microsoft.

According to Internet analytics vendor Net Applications, Chrome’s user share plunged 2.2 percentage points in April to 65.6%, its lowest mark since October. The fall was over half a point more than the previous record, set in August 2013, when Chrome accounted for a mere 16% of all user share and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) was the beast of browsers with 57.6%.

Even that massive drop-off, however, didn’t erase the past year’s gains by Google’s browser. For the last 12 months, Chrome remained up four percentage points, the most of any browser by far. History is also in Chrome’s favor: The last three times Chrome lost user share, the following month it added a percentage point or more of share to its total, enough to erase the earlier decline.

The plunge did put a crimp in Chrome’s bid to break the 70% barrier. Where last month’s forecast pegged the browser making that mark by August of this year, the latest calculation — based on the 12-month average — puts 70% down on the calendar for June 2020.

Firefox scratches above 10%

In the zero-sum browser game — one’s losses means another’s gains — Mozilla Firefox was one of April’s winners. The open-source browser gained a full percentage point, ending the month with 10.2%. The total was Firefox’s highest since March 2018 and the first above 10 points since June that year.

Firefox has given its makers stretches of optimism in the past, but those have been brief, a month, two at consecutive at the most. It’s been nearly two years since Firefox has had a sustained period of growth (five months, from March until July 2017). In plainer terms, that means it would be smart to hold any applause until Firefox demonstrates it can maintain some kind of growth.

Computerworld‘s newest forecast for Firefox predicts the browser’s share will remain above 10 points through this year and at least halfway into next. It’s up to the browser’s engineers and designers to make that happen by continuing the modernization strategy they adopted in late 2017 with the version dubbed “Quantum.”

Elsewhere in Net Applications’ numbers, the combined user share of Microsoft’s IE and Edge also rose, climbing 1.4 points to 14%. The one-month increase was the largest-ever for Microsoft in Computerworld‘s nearly 12 years of recorded data, and the month-end total was the highest since September. Both were likely welcomed in Redmond, which has had to swallow months of data that painted its browsers as sad sacks on the way to oblivion.

IE sees an uptick, too

Look closer at the numbers, though, and Microsoft’s sunny skies turn overcast. Most of the user share increase — 70% of it — came from IE, which even for Microsoft is a dead end. The company halted all IE development long ago after it relegated the browser to legacy status. IE is maintained with monthly security updates, but it will never be better than it is right now.

(Windows’ increase in user share — the OS climbed by about seven-tenths of a percentage point — also assisted in IE’s uptick, giving it a bigger pie to slice.)

Microsoft’s one bright spot was Edge, the browser Microsoft plans to transform with the Chromium rendering and JavaScript engines. Not only did Edge gain user share — up about three-tenths of a percentage point in April, reaching 5.5% — but it boosted its share of all Windows 10 PCs. On the latter, Edge accounted for 12.5% of the browser activity on Windows 10, an increase of six-tenths of a percentage point, making April the fourth straight month where that critical metric was in the black.

In April, Safari dropped a tenth of a point — about what it had gained in March — to lower Apple’s browser to 3.6%. Safari’s smaller share, though, was due to an even bigger fall in macOS’ user share last month. Because Safari runs only on Apple’s platforms, the browser’s position is largely decided by the operating system, although it, like Edge and IE, has seen the share of its native OS erode. The difference in declines meant Safari actually ran on a greater percentage of macOS systems in April than in March; April’s Safari share of macOS was 38.2%, a percentage point increase.

Net Applications calculates user share by detecting the agent strings of the browsers people use to reach the websites of Net Applications’ clients. The firm tallies the visitor sessions rather than count users, as it once did. In other words, Net Applications’ data represents user activity.

Top browsers, March 2019

After a short pause earlier this year to their usage slide, Microsoft’s browsers last month resumed their expected-by-now decline.

According to California-based web metrics company Net Applications, Internet Explorer’s (IE) and Edge’s March combined user share dropped to 12.5%, a half-percentage-point decline. The decrease entirely erased the February uptick. March’s fall was tied to IE, as the legacy browser shed nine-tenths of a percentage point of its user share to end the month at 7.3%, a new low. Meanwhile, Edge grew by four-tenths of a point, to 5.2%, its highest mark since August 2017.

The gap between IE and Edge — just over 2 percentage points — was the narrowest ever, highlighting IE’s inevitable future as a browser doomed to extinction.

Interestingly, IE’s downturn wasn’t coupled to a dip in Windows’ fortunes, as the operating system actually scored one of its relatively rare increases. The bottom line: IE’s usage portion among all Windows PCs — a more accurate measure of its position, as IE runs only on Windows — dropped a full point in March, sliding to 8.4%.

That number has been in decline, of course, just as has IE’s and Edge’s combined share. But IE is a special case, as Microsoft has stopped development — it’s as good as it’ll get — and maintains it only as a backstop for customers, enterprises in large part, who need it to run creaky web apps and display frozen-in-amber intranet websites.

A year ago, IE accounted for nearly twice its March 2019 user share. But the old browser fell below the double-digit bar in December and never recovered. That’s why, even though Microsoft has pledged to support IE11 indefinitely, it’s easy to imagine a day when the Redmond, Wash. company pulls the plug.

Net Applications calculates user share by detecting the agent strings of the browsers people use to reach the websites of Net Applications’ clients. The firm tallies the visitor sessions rather than count users, as it once did. In other words, Net Applications’ data represents user activity.

Edge runs to keep up

Although Edge added to its user share last month, the browser was running to stay in place.

Because its four-tenths of a percentage point gain was matched by a 3.3-point increase by Windows 10, Edge’s portion of all Windows 10 personal computers remained stuck at 11.9%, the same as in February.

In other words, while Edge’s usage increased, it came from the boost in Windows 10 usage, not from a sudden affection for the much-maligned browser. On the plus side, at least Edge’s share of all Windows 10 PCs didn’t fall, something it’s been in a bad habit of doing.

Edge as it now exists is a dead browser walking because Microsoft has committed to retooling it with technologies borrowed from Chromium, the open-source project that feeds into Chrome, Opera and other browsers. But Microsoft needs Edge to stay alive long enough for the transition to take place; if Edge’s importance to Windows 10 users falls much further — when it’s the default, for Pete’s sake — how can it fare when it’s more-or-less a clone of Chrome and the real thing already has a headlock on Windows devices?

Whither Firefox?

Firefox suffered a second straight loss, dropping a tenth of a point to close March at 9.3%, around where it had been back in October 2018.

Mozilla’s browser doesn’t seem to know whether it’s up or down any given month, but it has seemingly settled into a spot that’s neither terribly encouraging for its makers nor depressing enough that its hardcore users rush to ditch it.

Firefox’s user share was below the 10% mark in 10 of the last 12 months. The average monthly user share over that year-long stretch was 9.6%, the median 9.7%. Those numbers meant that Computerworld‘s forecast — as always, based on the 12-month average change in user share — said Firefox will remain in the 8% to 9% range through the rest of this year and into early 2020.

It may not be what Mozilla would like to see, but it’s not the dismal picture of Microsoft’s browsers’ much steeper decline.

Elsewhere, rolling-in-riches Chrome added a full percentage point to its user share, claiming 67.9% as its end mark for March. Chrome’s place was a new record for Google’s browser, only reinforcing its victory over the web. (And contrary to musings a month ago, “peak-Chrome” doesn’t look to be in sight.)

Chrome’s 12-month average hints that the browser will crack 69% in June and 70% in August, an accelerated schedule compared to past months’ calculations.

In March, Apple’s Safari recovered some of the share it misplaced in February, climbing a tenth of a point to 3.7%, which was, coincidentally, its 12-month average. Safari’s larger share, however, was likely due to an even larger boost to macOS user share during March. (Safari last month was used by 37.2% of all systems running macOS, an increase of half a percentage point over February’s number.) Because Safari runs only on Apple’s platforms, the browser’s position is largely decided by the prevalence of the operating system.

Top browsers, February 2019

Microsoft’s browsers stepped back from the edge of the cliff last month, halting, perhaps only temporarily, their years-long slide in usage.

According to web analytics vendor Net Applications, in February IE’s and Edge’s combined user share climbed by half a percentage point to 13%. The increase was the largest since March 2018. Most of the uptick was credited to IE; the legacy browser added three-tenths of a percentage point to its share, ending the month at 8.2%. Edge grew by about two-tenths of a point, to 4.8%, its highest point since September 2017.

However, IE’s gains were less striking when compared against Windows’ own growth for February. Because Windows overall climbed by 1.2 points — ending the month at 87.4% — IE’s share of all Windows browsers climbed by just two-tenths of a point, not the larger three-tenths in absolute value.

Edge took a different turn: With Windows 10’s decline in user share for February — it slid six-tenths of a percentage point to 40.3% — and Edge’s absolute value increase, its share of all Windows 10 browsers rose six-tenths of a point, to 11.9%, the most in that metric since May 2018.

(IE’s share of all Windows browsers and Edge’s share of those run on Windows 10 can be calculated because Microsoft’s pair work only on Windows overall and Windows 10, respectively.)

Net Applications calculates user share by detecting the agent strings of the browsers people use to reach the websites of Net Applications’ clients. The firm tallies the visitor sessions rather than count users, as it once did. In other words, Net Applications’ data represents user activity.

Edge’s position remains perilous

Nearly three months ago, Microsoft said that during 2019 it would rebuild Edge from the ground up with Google Chrome’s rendering and JavaScript engines. Microsoft has yet to release a preview of the recast Edge to testers in the Windows Insider program.

By adopting code from open-source Chromium project, Microsoft said, it would “create better web compatibility for our customers,” even as it ignored Edge’s dismal status in share. And Edge remained in a precarious position, even after posting impressive growth last month in the share-of-Windows-10 benchmark.

Edge’s 4.8% all-OSes user share was just half that of Firefox, and only 58% of the obsolete IE, which will, Microsoft’s claims notwithstanding, be dispatched to Browser Boot Hill sooner rather than later. For a browser bundled with Windows — bundled, in fact, with the most widely-used version of Windows — and given substantially more of a, well, edge by Microsoft than IE had been given since the settlement of the U.S. Department of Justice’s antitrust case, Edge’s under-5% mark is an embarrassment. Microsoft’s about-face last year — the move to go “full Chromium” — only confirmed the company’s dissatisfaction.

Edge’s survival won’t be measured by how its user share moves up or down — within limits — until the preview lands on Insiders’ PCs. At that point, Edge’s share of Windows 10 will be under the microscope, its flows and ebbs dissected for insight into Microsoft’s decision to join Chrome and Opera in relying on Chromium.

(It’s unclear when the Chromium-based Edge will be issued to the general Windows 10 public.)

Firefox loses it

Two steps forward. One step back.

That was the story for Firefox since November, when for two consecutive months it gained user share, scratching out of an under-9% hole to almost reach 10%. In February, though, the open-source browser retreated, losing half a percentage point and slumping to 9.4%, about where it was part way through December.

The step back altered Computerworld‘s forecast for Firefox again. A month ago, the prediction was that the browser would stay above 9% through 2019. The latest prediction — as always, based on Firefox’s 12-month average — accelerates the downturn, with the sub-9% mark set for May and under-8% for December. Mozilla badly needs Firefox share growth to demonstrate that the browser’s November 2017 revamp was not only worth the time and money but would lead to a true turnaround.

Portents do not paint a rosy picture for Firefox. The browser’s user share has been in the single digits for eight straight months and for nine of the last 10.

Elsewhere, Chrome lost four-tenths of a percentage point in February to close at 66.9, still above the two-thirds bar. Meanwhile, Apple’s Safari also dropped four-tenths of a point, leaving it with just 3.6%, its lowest mark since April 2017.

Even with Chrome’s slip, the most popular browser’s trend line remains enviable: The 12-month average indicates it would crack 68% in May and 70% in September. In each case, the newest prognostications are two months later than the previous ones. Chrome hasn’t posted back-to-back declines in almost six years, so it bears close watching this month for clues that “peak-Chrome” has arrived.

Safari’s fall looked much more serious, as it could little afford to lose share; the browser has been under 4% for 11 out of the last 12 months.

More troubling was last month’s decline in Safari’s share of all browsers used on Macs. Net Applications’ numbers attributed just 36.7% of on-Mac usage to Safari, the second-lowest number ever. (January’s portion had been 37.8%, significantly higher than the record low of 35.1% in December.) Mac owners, like those sitting in front of Windows systems, have clearly not been immune to the siren call of alternatives, notably Chrome.

Top browsers, January 2019

Mozilla’s Firefox wrapped up a two-month resurgence this week, clawing back some previously-lost user share to return to a level last seen in the middle of 2018.

The open-source browser remains the only major browser committed to using a rendering engine that is not based on Google’s Blink or its predecessor, WebKit.

According to web analytics vendor Net Applications, Firefox’s share rose by three-tenths of a percentage point in January, reaching 9.9%. The increase was the second consecutive month of user share growth and put Firefox back where it was last June.

Firefox’s gains were important, as the browser flirted with dangerous territory as recently as November, when it slumped to below 9%. The trend at the time looked nasty; if the declines had continued at the 12-month average pace, Firefox would have fallen below 7% by August 2019.

The increases of the last two months have altered that forecast. The 12-month average, if continued, would still erode Firefox’s user share, but at a much slower tempo: the browser should remain above 9% throughout this year, falling under that bar only in January 2020.

If Mozilla maintains the Firefox user share recovery, its efforts to revitalize the browser — starting with the November 2017 debut of Firefox Quantum — will be validated. What’s unclear is whether that work will simply let Firefox survive or if it can trigger a return to a time when the browser was in solid second place (then behind IE) with a quarter of the world’s share.

The browser maker does have a message that may resonate in 2019: On Windows, it will soon be the only major browser running on non-Google technologies. In December, Microsoft announced that it would abandon its home-grown rendering and JavaScript engines for those built by Chromium, the open-source project led by Google. Mozilla has already used that to argue people should download and try Firefox, and certainly will do so again.

Net Applications calculates user share by detecting the agent strings of the browsers people run to reach the websites of Net Applications’ clients. The firm tallies the visitor sessions rather than count users, as it once did. In other words, Net Applications’ data best illustrates user activity.

IE sinks, Edge doesn’t

Microsoft’s browsers — Internet Explorer (IE) and Edge — also gained ground in January, adding approximately two-tenths of a percentage point to put their combined shares at 12.6%. The increase wasn’t unprecedented, as the browsers posted in-the-black numbers four out of the 12 months in 2019. One month does not a trend make, however.

The increase was solely due to Edge, which rose by half a percentage point to 4.6%, a number that meant about 11% of all Windows 10 users ran the browser in January. The latter figure has been an important metric, as it has showed the enthusiasm (or lack thereof) for the Windows 10-only browser. Plainly put, there has been little to none, although it also has occasionally climbed rather than fallen.

Microsoft’s decision to go “full-Chromium” with Edge — to effectively give up the fight against Chrome’s dominance and join it by crafting a doppelgänger — was a bet that the browser could survive, even grow, under that strategy. The question is whether there will be much of an Edge left by the time Microsoft switches technologies. As a result, January’s uptick had to be welcome by Microsoft.

On the other hand, IE dropped nearly four-tenths of a percentage point last month, sliding to 7.9%, a record low for the browser that once lorded it over the world — at least the worldwide web — with as much impunity as any of history’s monarchs. IE was used on about 9% of all Windows PCs in January, also an all-time low.

Microsoft may well applaud the downward spiral of IE, as the browser has been maintained solely for legacy purposes in enterprises. There are, in fact, good arguments to be made that Microsoft will drop IE as soon as it has built “full-Chromium” Edge.

Chrome grabs more share…yawn

Net Applications pegged Chrome’s user share at 67.3% for January, a one-tenth of a percentage point boost. It was the ninth increase in the previous 12 months.

Google’s browser remained on a steep trend line, with its 12-month average indicating it would crack 68% in March and 70% in July. Each time Chrome takes a pause that could be interpreted as a high-water mark, within a month or two it jumps up again to maintain momentum.

Elsewhere, Apple’s Safari added three-tenths of a percentage point to its user share, ending January with an even 4%, the browser’s highest mark since April 2018. Its portion of all Macs also grew, climbing to 37.8% — or more than two-and-a-half points above December — even though the operating system share of macOS remained above 10.6% for the second straight month.

Top browsers, December 2018

By the time Microsoft manages to refit its Edge browser with Chrome’s engines, there might not be much of an Edge there.

Microsoft’s browsers — Internet Explorer (IE) and Edge — jettisoned the most user share in over a year last month, falling to a record low. Meanwhile, Edge’s share of all Windows 10 PCs, a metric Computerworld views as the most accurate reflection of user acceptance, also dropped to a new low.

According to web analytics company Net Applications, IE’s and Edge’s combined share plunged by 1.5 percentage points to end 2018 at 12.4%. The decline was the largest since September 2017, excepting a larger share sell-off two months later when Net Applications purged its data of fraudsters’ bots. Most of the drop-off was due to users fleeing IE; the obsolete browser lost 1.3 percentage points all by itself, slumping to 8.3 percentage points. Edge shed slightly more than one-tenth of a point, more-or-less tying its former record low, first set in September 2018.

The continued deterioration of IE’s position was expected, most of all by Microsoft, which three years ago sidelined the browser, telling customers it was useful only on some Windows 7 PCs and even fewer Windows 10 systems, where it was nothing more than a sop to legacy requirements. Microsoft halted all development on IE in early 2016 and since then has only serviced the browser with patches to block newly-reported vulnerabilities.

Net Applications calculates user share by detecting the agent strings of the browsers people run to reach the websites of Net Applications’ clients. The firm tallies the visitor sessions rather than count users, as it once did. In other words, Net Applications’ data represents user activity.

Edge, the choice of just 10%

Last month, Microsoft announced it would recreate Edge using the same rendering and JavaScript engines that drive Google’s Chrome. By adopting the results of the open-source Chromium project, Microsoft said, it would “create better web compatibility for our customers.” The company said nothing about Edge’s dismal position as an afterthought on its sole-supported OS.

By Net Applications’ numbers, Edge in December accounted for just 10.4% of the browser user share on Windows 10, a decline of seven-tenths of a percentage point from the month prior and the lowest ever in the three-and-a-half years since 10’s launch.

The decline was exacerbated by a one-two punch: Edge’s drop in absolute numbers and the growth of Windows 10 (by 1.1 percentage points, to 39.2% of all personal computers and 45.5% of all PCs running Windows). The combination magnified the small decline in absolute share when calculated as a portion of all Windows 10.

That’s been Edge’s problem all along. Growth, when it occurred, never kept pace with Windows 10’s. And when that growth slowed and began to decline — Edge peaked in August 2017 — the relative importance of the browser to Windows 10 users evaporated. Worse times are to come. If Microsoft’s new plan to go “full Chromium” with Edge doesn’t alter trends, a year from now the browser’s share of Windows 10 will have shrunk to around 6.5%.

Firefox recovers — for now — from another near-death experience

Net Applications pegged Firefox’s user share at 9.6% for December, a six-tenths of a percentage point boost from November. It was the largest increase for the open-source browser since November 2017, when it was still clawing its way out of a mid-year 7.7% user share grave.

The growth changed Computerworld‘s forecast for Firefox. A month ago, the prediction was that the browser would slip below 8% in March and beneath 7% by August. Although the auguries — based on Firefox’s 12-month average — remain in the red, the latest puts the browser above 9% until May, above 8% until January 2020.

Mozilla must maintain growth to demonstrate that Firefox really has a future, of course, something easier written than made reality. December’s increase could well be a one-month blip, not the beginning of some kind of real turnaround.

Elsewhere in the December data, Google’s Chrome gained 1.6 percentage points, ending the month at 67.2%. The increase was Chrome’s fourth of 2018 that exceeded a full point.

As forecast, Chrome broke through the two-thirds mark — albeit a month earlier than anticipated — and continued a march to what may be an unassailable browser supremacy. Using the 12-month average, Chrome could hit 70% in June 2019 and 75% in March 2020.

Apple’s Safari stayed flat at 3.7% in December but because of an increase in the share of macOS/OS X, the portion of Mac users running Safari dropped to 35.1%. That’s the lowest Safari share of all Macs since Computerworld began recording data in mid-2015. Apple’s laissez-faire attitude toward Safari on the desktop — the browser gets an upgrade only once a year — has weakened its hold on Mac owners. Safari may be the next browser to be “Edged,” or rendered moot as an operating system’s default.

Top browsers, November 2018

Microsoft’s browsers last month staved off decline for the first time since June, managing to hold on to their share of the market even as Mozilla watched more users desert Firefox.

According to U.S. analytics vendor Net Applications, Internet Explorer’s and Edge’s share rallied in November, increasing by one-tenth of a percentage point to close the month at 13.9%. The boost to Microsoft’s browser fortunes came entirely from the if-not-obsolete-then-certainly-creaky IE, which scratched back to 9.6%. Edge, the default for Windows 10 and the browser Microsoft has pinned hopes to, remained flat at 4.2%, the same ground it occupied in October.

The rise of IE was ironic, since Microsoft long ago demoted the browser, saying it was suitable only for the soon-to-be-retired Windows 7 and for Windows 10, as a legacy stop-gap. Microsoft stopped improving or enhancing the browser, specifically IE11, in early 2016. Since then, the Redmond, Wash. company has only serviced the browser with security updates.

Net Applications calculates user share by detecting the agent strings of the browsers people run to reach the websites of Net Applications’ clients. The firm then tallies the visitor sessions rather than count users, as it once did. In plainer terms, Net Applications’ data represents user activity.

IE and Edge, on the edge

Microsoft’s browsers may have kept heads above water in November, but their past performance signals that the effort will be short lived.

Since January 2015, IE’s and Edge’s increases have been brief: no longer than two consecutive months. Three of the four post-2015 periods of increases have been but a single month, with declines returning the next.

The only plus for Microsoft is that in the last 12 months, five have seen increases (including November’s). That’s the most positive 12-month stretch since 2013, when IE recovered some share from a years’-long downturn. The 5-in-12 may hint that Microsoft’s browsers may be ready to stabilize, rather than disappear entirely.

However, the latter remains a distinct possibility. Even with the five months’ of increases, IE + Edge shed 2.4 percentage points in the last 12 and 2.2 points in just the last six months. And at the current average monthly movement, Microsoft’s browsers will slip under 13% in March and fall below 12% in August 2019. A year from now, the browsers could be in the psychologically-dangerous 10% range.

Firefox falls below 9%

Net Applications pegged Firefox’s user share at 8.96% for November, a three-tenths of a percentage point decline from October. It was the first time that the open-source browser ended the month with less than 9% since May 2016, during a stretch when Firefox flirted with disaster.

Computerworld‘s forecast — calculated using Firefox’s 12-month average — now puts the browser below 8% in March and beneath the 7% comatose bar by August.

Firefox has been near death, and recovered, before: In mid-2016, the browser plummeted to 7.7%, yet by year’s end had climbed back to 12.2%. But this latest string of user desertions must concern Mozilla: Firefox has been under 10% for six out of the last seven months. That’s not happened since the browser was on the upswing in late 2005 and early 2006.

Elsewhere in the November data, Google’s Chrome lost nine-tenths of a percentage point, ending the month at 65.6%. The loss was Chrome’s largest one-month drop since August 2013.

It’s unclear whether the substantial decline forecasts that Chrome’s explosive growth is nearing an end. (Chrome gained an astounding 24.1 points of user share in 2016, for example.) Past dips have been temporary, for one thing; for another, Chrome is still up five percentage points over the last 12 months.

Computerworld‘s forecast remains rosy for Google’s browser: Using the 12-month average, Chrome should crack the two-thirds mark in January and reach 68% in April.

Apple’s Safari stayed flat at 3.7% in November. During the month, 38.5% of all Mac owners ran Safari, a slight improvement over October. (Another browser that runs on a single platform — Edge — accounted for only 11.1% of all Windows 10 users’ activity, a record low.)

Top browsers, October 2018

Microsoft’s browsers last month continued to slouch toward invisibility as the combined user share of Internet Explorer (IE) and Edge fell to yet another record low.

According to California-based analytics company Net Applications, IE’s and Edge’s share dropped by a quarter of a percentage point in October, ending at 13.8%, a record for the century and a number not seen by Microsoft since IE first took on Netscape Navigator in the 1990s.

On its own IE — the 23-year-old browser last updated nearly three years ago — slipped nearly half a percentage point to just 9.5%. (Edge, the default browser for Windows 10, made up for some of IE’s decline by climbing a quarter of a point.)

Net Applications calculates user share by detecting the agent strings of the browsers people run to reach clients’ websites. The firm then tallies the visitor sessions — site visits, essentially, with multiple sessions possible daily — rather than count users, as it once did. In plainer terms, Net Applications’ data represents browser user activity.

What’s happening to IE and Edge?

Microsoft’s browsers have been trapped in a repetitive story of decline, decline and more decline.

After years of dominance, IE started its free fall after Microsoft announced that Windows users would be forced to upgrade to the latest version. Since then, IE has lost 84% of the user share it owned in August 2014, when the company delivered the upgrade-or-else ultimatum. Those losses accelerated in the months after January 2016, when the requirement began to be enforced.

The long-term result? Disaster.

There have been only the most fleeting of signals that the decline of IE, or even IE + Edge, will stop. Any pause in the downward trip has been fleeting — at most, two months — and always immediately followed by losses that erase the upswing.

At the current average monthly loss, IE + Edge will slip under 13% in December, drop below 12% in February 2019 and fall beneath 11% in April. The browsers could breach the psychological barrier of 10% by June.

Pin the blame on IE: In the last four months, IE has lost an estimated 45.6 million users. That’s significantly more users than ran Apple’s Safari browser last month (about 37.5 million).

IE’s decay should come as no surprise, least of all to Microsoft. IE11, which accounted for about 84% of all versions run in October, was demoted to legacy status in January 2016. At that time, Microsoft stopped all IE development, saying it would service the browser with security fixes only. IE11 is akin to an amber-trapped bug from the Cretaceous period; it hasn’t changed, even though competitors like Chrome and Firefox have furiously added features and functionality.

Meanwhile, Edge has been unable to capitalize on the decline of IE. Windows 10 users, the only ones who can run the browser, have rejected Edge. Over the last four months, as IE shed three full percentage points of user share, Edge’s needle moved an almost-imperceptible three-hundredths of one percent. Just 11% of all Windows 10 users ran Edge in October.

Firefox freak-out time?

Net Applications said Firefox’s user share slid another four-tenths of a percentage point in October. The open-source browser ended the month with a 9.3% share, its lowest mark in more than two years. Computerworld‘s forecast — calculated using Firefox’s 12-month average — now puts the browser below 9% sometime this month, under 8% in February and beneath a barely-breathing 7% come May.

Firefox has clawed back from the abyss before — in the summer of 2016, the browser slumped to just 7.7%, but came out of that trough — so no one should write it off. But the prolonged user share funk certainly warrants thought of at least a minor freak-out: Firefox has been under 10% for four straight months and five out of the last six.

Later this month, Mozilla will celebrate the one-year anniversary of the release of Quantum, a major revamp of Firefox’s UI (user interface) and the debut of a new rendering engine that dramatically boosted page load speeds. Net Applications’ numbers, however, show that Quantum failed to arrest the user share slide.

Elsewhere in the October data, Google’s Chrome added approximately two-tenths of a percentage point to its already-massive share, closing out the month with 66.4%, just a bit shy of the two-thirds milestone.

Chrome’s climb has not slowed: Its 6-month average increase was more than half again as large as the 12-month average. Using the latter as a guide, the browser could crack the 70% mark by May. Only Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Netscape’s Navigator have been that dominant.

Apple’s Safari gained two-tenths of a percentage point, reaching 3.7%, its highest since April. But during October, only 37.6% of all Mac owners ran Safari. Like Windows users, they have largely dispensed with their operating system’s default in favor of a cross-platform alternative such as Chrome or Firefox.

Top browsers, September 2018

Microsoft’s tired Internet Explorer (IE) last month slumped below 10% for the first time, dragging down the company’s total browser user share to a record low.

According to California analytics vendor Net Applications, IE’s user share plummeted by nine-tenths of a percentage point in September, falling to 9.94%. The bulk of that — approximately 83% — was accounted for by IE 11, the final version of the 23-year-old browser. It’s IE 11 that is run in Windows 7 and Windows 10; the browser is relegated to legacy status on the latter.

Together, IE and Edge — the default browser for Windows 10 — controlled just 14% of the September global user share, a decline of 1.1 percentage points from the month prior. That 14% figure was a record low for this century.

Net Applications calculates user share by detecting the agent strings of the browsers people run to reach the company’s clients’ sites. The firm tallies the visitor sessions — site visits, essentially, with multiple sessions possible daily — rather than count users, as it once did. Net Applications thus measures activity differently than rival firms that total page views.

The IE and Edge slide

IE’s September slip-and-slide was nothing new: The browser has been in a tailspin since Microsoft announced it would require Windows users to upgrade to the latest version. IE has plummeted 48.5 points, equivalent to a decline of 83%, in the four-plus years since the 2014 announcement that triggered Microsoft’s browser disaster.

At the current average monthly loss, IE + Edge will drop beneath 13% by December, under 12% by February 2019 and below 10% by next July. While Computerworld‘s forecasts have at times missed marks, Microsoft’s assumed fall is built on some fundamental facts. First and foremost, because IE has received only security updates since January 2016 it has not been refreshed for more than two and a half years. In plainer terms, it’s at least that far behind rivals like Chrome and Firefox.

Second, Edge has been marginalized — pushed to the edge of irrelevance — on Windows 10. In September, just 10.9% of all Windows 10 users relied on Edge, a half percentage point reduction and another new low for the browser Microsoft hoped would turn the tables.

Instead, Google’s Chrome became the bully that regularly shook down Microsoft for its user share lunch money.

Google Chrome continues its streak

Chrome added a full percentage point of user share last month to reach 66.3%, a record for the cross-platform browser. In the last 12 months, Chrome has gained 6.7 percentage points, the only one among the top four browsers to raise its total during that span.

If the trend of the last year continues unabated, Chrome will account for two-thirds of all user share at some point this month. Chrome could account for 70% of the global share as soon as April 2019 and an amazing 75% by January 2020.

No current browser can realistically be viewed as a worthy competitor to Chrome. Microsoft’s Edge has clearly failed to energize Windows 10 users, Apple’s Safari is restricted to the macOS enclave and Mozilla’s Firefox teeters on the wire between survival and extinction.

Net Applications pegged Firefox’s user share change as down more than a tenth of a percentage point. The open-source browser ended September with a 9.6% share, its lowest mark in two years. Calculations using the 12-month average predicted the browser will fall under 9% by December, and below 8% by April 2019.

Elsewhere in the September data, Apple’s Safari lost less than one-tenth of a percentage point, descending to 3.6%. During September, only 38% of all Mac owners ran Safari as their primary browser. Like Windows users, they have shifted from their operating system’s default to a cross-platform alternative, most likely Chrome.

Top browsers, August 2018

Google’s Chrome last month continued to creep up on a two-thirds supermajority of browser share, while Microsoft’s once-dominant position deteriorated. Again.

According to analytics company Net Applications, Chrome’s user share climbed half a percentage point in August, reaching 65.2%, an all-time high. In the last 12 months, Chrome has gained 5.9 percentage points, the only browser of the top four — others include Apple’s Safari, Microsoft’s Edge and Internet Explorer (IE), and Mozilla’s Firefox — to add to its total during that period.

Net Applications calculates user share by detecting the agent strings of the browsers people use to visit its clients’ websites. The firm then tallies the visitor sessions — which are effectively visits to the site, with multiple sessions possible daily — rather than count only users, as it once did. Net Applications primarily measures activity, although it does so differently than rival sources, which total page views.

If the trend of the last 12 months continue, Chrome will take the two-thirds prize in November. Barring any change in the browser battle, Chrome will account for 70% of the global share by June 2019.

The only other browsers to have accumulated that much share since the web broke out of its academia-government ghetto in the 1990s were Netscape’s Navigator and Microsoft’s IE. The former faded under assault from the latter, vanishing for good in early 2008; IE is following in its one-time rival’s footsteps.

Whither Edge and IE?

Microsoft’s combined Edge and IE user share slipped two-tenths of a percentage point last month, falling to 15.2%, another record low this century. During the four years since Microsoft announced it would require Windows users to upgrade to the latest version of IE — in effect, pulling the plug on the still-popular IE8, IE9 and IE 10 — the browser has plummeted 43.3 points, representing a massive decline of 74%.

At their current average monthly loss, IE + Edge will drop beneath 14% by November, under 12% by March 2019 and below 10% by next July. While nothing is guaranteed — including Computerworld‘s forecasting — there are solid reasons why Microsoft’s user share will almost certainly keep falling.

First, IE has been demoted to legacy status and now receives security updates only; it will be disowned by commercial customers as they migrate to Windows 10 and, more importantly, update and modernize the web apps and websites that force them to support the aged browser.

Second, Edge has never taken up the slack. In August, just 11.4% of all Windows 10 users relied on Edge, a drop of one-tenth of a point and another record low for the browser.

According to Net Applications, IE and Edge accounted for 17.3% of the browsers that ran on Windows in August. (The 17.3% was larger than the 15.2% IE and Edge tallied overall because Windows did not power 100% of all PCs; in August, it ran 87.8% of the world’s systems.)

Firefox: Running in place?

Elsewhere in Net Applications’ data, Mozilla’s Firefox picked up nearly one-tenth of a percentage point, clawing back to 9.8%. The open-source browser, which Mozilla revamped in late 2017 and aggressively updates with new features in an attempt to stop the losses, continues to have a dim future by Net Applications’ numbers. Calculations using the 12-month average change predicte that the browser will dip under 9% by December and keep falling.

By May 2019, Firefox could have a scary user share of just 7.9%.

Apple’s Safari added approximately two-tenths of a percentage point last month to edge up to 3.7%. As of August, 39% of all Mac owners ran Safari as their primary browser, showing that they, too, have largely abandoned their operating system’s default browser for cross-platform alternatives like Chrome or Firefox.

Top browsers, July 2018

Microsoft’s and Mozilla’s browsers fell to new lows in July as users continued to switch to Google’s behemoth, Chrome, which again looks unstoppable.

According to California-based analytics vendor Net Applications, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) and Edge dropped to a combined user share of 15.4% last month, down a whopping 3.8 percentage points from June. Meanwhile, Mozilla’s Firefox cast off a much smaller two-tenths of a percentage point, recording a user share of 9.7%. Microsoft’s July number was a record low in Computerworld‘s tracking of browser data, which began in 2005. Firefox’s figure was its smallest user share since February 2006, when it was fighting for the scraps left by the then-dominant IE.

Net Applications calculates user share by detecting the agent strings of the browsers people use to visit its clients’ websites. It then tallies the visitor sessions — which are effectively visits to the site, with multiple sessions possible daily — rather than count only users, as it once did. Net Applications primarily measures activity, although it does so differently than rival sources, which total page views.

Microsoft’s and Mozilla’s browser problems are not new: Both companies have watched their once-substantial user share shrink over the last decade.

A long downhill slide

Microsoft’s troubles appeared more dire, as its IE and Edge have shown few signs of stanching their continued losses. With very few exceptions — notably in June, which in hindsight now looks to have been a miscount by Net Applications — IE and Edge have shed share month after month after month. Of the past 24 months, for example, IE and Edge lost share in 19. In the last year, the IE-and-Edge user share dropped by 6.8 percentage points, a 31% decline from the July 31, 2017 mark.

Firefox was in a leaky boat, too. July was the third consecutive month in which Mozilla’s open-source browser posted a number under the 10% bar. In the past year, Firefox has lost 2.6 percentage points, or 21% of its July 31, 2017, user share.

Losses like Microsoft’s and Mozilla’s are unsustainable.

If the trends of the last 12 months continue and IE and Edge lose another 31% in the next year, they will account for just 10.6% of the world’s browser user share by this time in 2019. If Firefox again drops by 21%, it will fall to 7.6% in the same period. (Because IE and Edge lost more than twice as much each of the last 12 months as Firefox, Microsoft’s browsers will fall faster than Mozilla’s under this forecasting model.)

Ironically, Firefox may have the best shot at beating that prediction. That’s because Firefox survived a near-death experience relatively recently to bounce back to some degree. Two years ago this month, Net Applications reported that Firefox’s user share had sunk to a record low of just 7.7%. But over the next year and two months, the browser clawed itself back to 13.1%. (Since October 2017, Firefox has lost share in all but one month.)

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer — Edge was not yet around — had a come-back, too: IE climbed from a December 2011 flirtation with 50% to grow to 59.1% three years later. But IE, and then IE + Edge, have lost ground, first slowly, then more rapidly, since December 2014. In other words, Microsoft’s browser slide has been on-going for more than three and a half years, significantly longer than Firefox’s nine-month decline.

An ominous future for IE and Edge

The future of IE and Edge look nearly as ominous if the user share calculation considers their place within the Windows ecosystem, the only platform available to the browsers. According to Net Applications, IE and Edge accounted for 17.4% of the browsers that ran on Windows in July. (The 17.4% was larger than the 15.4% IE and Edge tallied overall because Windows does not power 100% of all PCs; in July, it ran 88.4% of the world’s systems.) Darker clouds await, however. IE, already relegated to legacy status, will increasingly be disowned by commercial customers as they adopt Windows 10 and modernize the web apps and websites that now require them to support the old browser. That will leave Edge as the only competitive browser in Microsoft’s arsenal.

And Edge remains a flop. In July, just 11.5% of all Windows 10 users relied on Edge, a record low for the long-struggling browser. To get an idea of Edge’s loose hold on Windows 10, consider that the browser was being used by almost twice the percentage of 10’s owners, 20.4%, only 12 months ago.

In the zero-sum browser battle, Microsoft’s and Mozilla’s losses became Google’s gains: Chrome added nearly 4 percentage points to its user share in July, ending at 64.7%. The last time a browser owned that large a chunk of the world’s browser market was in late 2009, when IE accounted for two-thirds of the total.

Calculations by Computerworld now put Chrome on a faster track to that same two-thirds dominance. Using the average monthly change over the past 12 months, Computerworld now expects Chrome to reach 66.7% or more in December and make it to 70% by August 2019.

The 12-month average for Microsoft’s and Mozilla’s browsers paints a different picture. IE and Edge will account for less than 12% of all user share by February 2019, then fall under 10% by May. Firefox will continue its decline as well, slipping below 9% in November and dipping under 8% in March 2019.

Elsewhere in Net Applications’ data, the user share number for Apple’s Safari fell for the third straight month, ending at 3.5%, its lowest since April 2017. Safari’s share of all macOS-powered systems also dropped to 38.3% in July, reinforcing Computerworld‘s analysis last month that being an operating system’s default browser no longer guarantees success.

Top browsers, June 2018

The browsers bundled with operating systems, notably Microsoft’s Edge and Apple’s Safari, fell to new lows last month as they continued to lose users, showing that being the default no longer provided a significant advantage.

According to California-based analytics vendor Net Applications, Edge’s share of all Windows 10 personal computers and Safari’s share of all Macs dropped to record lows in June. Edge, the default for Microsoft’s newest operating system, was the preferred browser on only 11.8% of all Windows 10 systems. Meanwhile, Safari, the browser packaged with macOS (and before that, OS X), ran on 38.4% of all Mac machines.

Net Applications calculates user share by detecting the agent strings of the browsers people use to visit its clients’ websites. It then tallies the visitor sessions — which are effectively visits to the site, with multiple sessions possible daily — rather than count only users, as it once did. Net Applications thus primarily measures activity, although it does so differently than rival metrics sources, which focus on page views.

Edge’s popularity among Windows 10 users has been in decline since the OS debuted three years ago. A year ago, for example, Edge was the browser of choice for about 22% of all Windows 10 PC users. Two years ago, that number was about 27%.

At first, Edge’s problem was that its user share did not grow at the same pace as Windows 10’s. Even as Edge’s user share of all PCs increased, albeit slowly, its share of all Windows 10 devices fell month after month as the operating system added users in larger numbers than did Edge. The news for Edge got even worse, however, around September 2017, when the browser’s user share (of all PCs) began to fall, reducing its share of all Windows 10 machines even more.

There’s no other way to put it: Edge is a flop. In the face of some significant barriers put up by Microsoft — among them a multistep process to change Windows 10’s browser default — users have clearly rejected the browser. If all users of Windows 10 were represented by, say, a baseball team, only one of the nine players would be browsing with Edge.

It’s impossible to tell from publicly available data such as Net Applications’ what browser is the most popular on Windows 10 — Edge’s share can be calculated because it runs solely on Windows 10 — but the most likely suspect is Chrome. Google’s browser lost 2.1 percentage points of user share in June, falling to 60.7%. But it remained the No. 1 personal computer browser on the planet by a huge margin: Second-place was held by the effectively obsolete Internet Explorer (IE), with a user share of 15%.

Apple’s Safari has traced a track similar to Edge’s over the past two and a half years.

At the start of 2016, Safari was the preferred browser for about two-thirds of all Mac owners, a fraction that had been remarkably stable for some time. Within a year, Safari’s hold on Macs had weakened to the point where it barely held on to half of all machines. By January 2018, its share of all Macs had dropped to 43%.

June was the first time that Safari’s share of all Macs slipped under 40%, posting just over 38%.

As with Edge, it is impossible to know which browser or browsers replaced Safari for those Mac owners who ditched Apple’s. Chrome is the likeliest replacement because of its massive user share, but other possibilities include Mozilla’s Firefox and lower-tier browsers such as Opera Software’s Opera.

Safari’s inability to hold on to the Mac based on its default status is also more puzzling than Edge’s.

Microsoft’s browsers began their decline when the company forced Windows users to upgrade to the most recent version of IE and terminated some versions’ support early. The mandate kicked in in January 2016.

But by opening the door to change, Microsoft triggered a massive user desertion. As millions of users and businesses were told they had to switch browsers, they instead used the opportunity to abandon Microsoft’s and install rivals’, notably Chrome.

Although IE lost significant share — about 11 percentage points — in the 12 months before the deadline (Microsoft had first told customers of the new policy in August 2014), IE shed twice as much, around 22 points, in the 12 months after the mandated move.

Apple never demanded anything similar of its Mac users and continued to support Safari for the current version of macOS and the two previous versions.

One theory is that as Chrome replaced IE on users’ at-work Windows PCs, people followed suit on their at-home Macs, so they could, for instance, synchronize data such as passwords and bookmarks. In companies that supported both PCs and Macs, the Microsoft order may have sparked a similar shift from IE to Chrome, with Macs also adopting Google’s browser as those firms turned toward browser homogeneity.

Elsewhere in Net Applications’ data, the user share numbers reported that Firefox, which slipped under the 10% bar in April, remained stable in June at the same 9.9%.

Top browsers, May 2018

Mozilla’s Firefox landed on a slippery slope last month and may face a slow demise as users desert the browser for Google’s Chrome.

According to California-based analytics vendor Net Applications, Firefox lost a quarter of a percentage point of user share in May, ending the month at 9.9%. It was the first time Firefox has fallen below the 10% marker since November 2016.

Net Applications calculates user share by detecting the agent strings of the browsers people use to visit its clients’ websites. It then tallies the visitor sessions — which are effectively visits to the site, with multiple sessions possible daily — rather than count only users, as it once did. Net Applications thus measures activity most of all, although differently than rival metrics sources that focus on page views.

Eight years ago, Firefox accounted for more than a quarter of the globe’s browser share. That’s fallen to less than a tenth. More importantly, the trend for Firefox looks ugly. If the six-month average holds, Firefox will drop below 9% by September, then slide under 8% by January 2019.
Mozilla
While Mozilla may have access to different data — it should know, for instance, whether the active-user count is up or down — Net Applications’ numbers must be tough to swallow. The company has poured time and resources into revamping Firefox, which produced “Quantum” late last year. But the redesign failed to stop the browser’s drip-drip-drip of user share.

Other browsers also got bad news in May.

Microsoft’s browsers — Internet Explorer (IE) and Edge — shed seven-tenths of a percentage point last month, accounting for 16.1% of all visitor sessions worldwide. The decline erased two consecutive months of gains by IE and Edge. Like Firefox, IE and Edge are on a downward line; the six-month trend forecasts that they will dip below 16% by September.

That number will fall even more as the months tick by, and more enterprises discard Windows 7 for Windows 10. IE has been downgraded to a legacy application — suitable for running older web apps and sites, though with all but maintenance servicing abandoned — and as corporations revamp their apps, the need for it will vanish. And Edge has simply been a flop: In May, only about one in eight Windows 10 users ran the browser, a record low in its three-year history.

Even Apple’s Safari took a hit. The default Mac browser lost three-tenths of a percentage point to finish at 3.7%, the lowest number in nearly a year. And Apple’s “Chrome Disease” continued to progress, with no cure in sight, as just 41% of Mac users relied on Safari in May. The bulk of the rest had almost certainly deserted Apple for Google and its Chrome browser.

Chrome, in fact, gained an impressive 1.2 percentage points in May, the largest one-month increase since January 2017. The additional user share pushed Chrome to 62.8%, closing in on two of every three desktop and laptop browsers. The last time a browser had such a dominating position was more than eight years ago, when IE accounted for 63.2% of all user share.

If the six-month trend holds true, Chrome should pass the 64% milestone sometime in September, and zip above 65% before New Year’s Day.

Top browsers, April 2018

Microsoft’s browsers have scratched out user share gains in three of the last five months, halting what late last year looked like a death spiral.

Less than half of the half-a-percentage point increase since November has come from Edge, the Windows 10 browser Microsoft has bet on for the foreseeable future.

According to data published Tuesday by California-based analytics vendor Net Applications, Microsoft’s Edge and Internet Explorer (IE) combined to account for 16.8% of the browser market during April. The one-tenth of a point increase over March was near the browsers’ five-month average.

The rosier outlook for Microsoft’s browsers stood in contrast to earlier forecasts based on Net Applications’ numbers. The reason for the change: The metrics company again went back into its data, this time for February, and revised its numbers after expelling bot traffic.

As it did in November, Net Applications purged the bot traffic because it skews results. These software-based tools are usually deployed by criminals and hucksters, who program the bots’ automated scripts to mimic human online behavior, often for ad click fraud purposes.

“Bots can cause significant skewing of data,” Net Applications explained last year. “We have seen situations where traffic from certain large countries is almost completely bot traffic. In other countries, ad fraudsters generate traffic that spoofs certain technologies in order to generate high-value clicks. Or, they heavily favor a particular browser or platform.”

The revised data put Microsoft’s browsers in a slightly better light, with increases to both Edge and IE since November’s retuning. There’s little indication that either browser actually grew its user share — as opposed to the bot scouring causing the gains — because both Edge and IE added to their share. As a second-class browser since Microsoft relegated it to legacy support duties, IE is unlikely to climb in user share.

Of Microsoft’s two browsers, Edge was responsible for just under half — 48% — of the November-to-April increase; IE accounted for the remaining 52%.

Mozilla’s Firefox did not benefit from Net Applications’ latest bot cleansing, as it again shed share in April, losing four-tenths of a percentage point to end at 10.2%. That was after March’s decline of six-tenths of a point to 10.5%.

As Computerworld has pointed out several times since Mozilla launched a revamped Firefox labeled “Quantum,” the redesign and associated attention has failed to stop the browser’s long bleeding of user share. In the five months since Quantum’s debut, Firefox has lost 1.3 percentage points, which represented 11% of its end-of-November share.

If the trend over the past five months continues, Firefox will slip under the 10% user share bar this month, and fall below 9% by September.

Meanwhile, the user share of Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari fell and climbed, respectively, last month. Chrome lost almost a tenth of a percentage point, slipping to 61.7%, while Safari scratched out another half of one-tenth of a point to make an even 4%.

However, Safari continued to lose ground where it counts, on Apple’s Mac systems. Like Microsoft, Apple has been laid low by “Chrome Disease,” as more of its Mac owners have deserted the company’s own browser (Safari) for an alternative (almost certainly Chrome for the most part). Although Safari was the browser of choice for as much as two-thirds of those running OS X (the former name for macOS), Safari slipped into the minority on Apple machines in December. Last month, Safari was the primary browser on just 43% of all Macs.

Net Applications calculates user share by detecting the agent strings of the browsers people use to visit its clients’ websites. It then tallies the visitor sessions — which are effectively visits to the site, with multiple sessions possible daily — rather than count only users, as it once did. Net Applications thus tracks both users as well as their activity, where rivals analytics sources focus solely on the later.

The company also accounts for the size of each country’s online population to better estimate share in regions where it lacks analytics customers, such as China and India.

Top browsers, March 2018

Mozilla’s radical overhaul of its financial cornerstone, Firefox, has so far failed in its primary mission, to stop the slide in browser share, new data published Sunday showed.

According to new numbers from California-based analytics vendor Net Applications, Firefox lost six-tenths of a percentage point of user share in March. That was the largest decline in almost two years, excepting November 2017, when Net Applications revamped its tallies by eliminating fraudulent bot traffic from its data.

For March, Firefox’s user share — an estimate of the portion of the world’s PC owners who ran the browser in a given period — was 10.3%, the lowest since a near-death experience in the summer of 2016, when it plunged to below 8%. At one point — April 2010, to be specific — Firefox accounted for more than a quarter of the globe’s browser share.

More distressing to Mozilla, Firefox’s user share has fallen rather than climbed since the November launch of Quantum, a.k.a. version 57, which the company trumpeted as the “biggest update” since Firefox 1.0 in 2004. Quantum boasted major speed improvements, a redesigned UI (user interface) and a switch to a new add-on framework that necessitated rewrites of all legacy extensions.

In the four months since Quantum’s debut, Firefox has shed 1.1 percentage points, which represented more than a tenth of its end-of-November user share. Only in one of those four months did Firefox add share, and then only a tenth of a percentage point.

If Mozilla cannot stem that user-share bleeding, its financial future may be at risk; in 2016, the most recent year for which figures are available, royalties from Mozilla’s search deals — to make search engine Z or Y the default of the browser — accounted for a whopping 91% of its total income. If the browser continues to shed users, search firms such as Google, the current default for the browser in many regions, will have less reason to pay for the privilege.

(On the bright side, Mozilla had nearly $400 million in cash, cash equivalents and investments at the end of 2016, or enough to run the organization for more than a year at the then-current spending levels.)

Firefox’s immediate future may be rough: If the trend of the last four months continues, the browser will drop under the 10% bar sometime in May, and under 9% in August. That’s not certain of course — Firefox has clawed out of user share holes before, if only temporarily — but the overall trend has been downward.

Apple’s Safari also lost substantial user share last month, casting aside four-tenths of a percentage point to end March with 3.9%. The decline was the first for the year.

But Apple has suffered, like its operating system rival Microsoft, from “Chrome Disease.” Safari has, just as has Internet Explorer, lost its once-majority position on its native OS, ceding share to Google’s Chrome browser.

Where once Safari was the browser of choice for as much as two-thirds of those running OS X (the former name for what Apple now calls “macOS”), since late last year, Safari has slipped below the 50% mark on Apple machines. During March, for example, Safari was the primary browser on 46% of all Macs.

The obvious beneficiary of Safari’s decline? Chrome. While it’s impossible to prove that’s the case with Net Applications’ public data, the increase in Chrome’s user share over the last two years — it was the only browser to continuously grow share during that period — points to it, not to the other cross-platform choice, Firefox.

The remaining major browsers — Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) and Edge, and Google’s Chrome — gained share last month.

Microsoft’s IE and Edge combined to post a user share of 17.9%, a month-over-month increase of about half a percentage point. That was the third boost to IE+Edge since Net Applications markedly downgraded their numbers in November when it scrubbed bot traffic from its data. But as Computerworld pointed out a month ago, Microsoft will soon face an Edge-only world that may have a huge impact on its position in the browser battle.

Already labeled a legacy browser for Windows 10, where it’s relegated to rendering stagnant enterprise intranet pages and can’t-be-or-won’t-be upgraded apps, IE will fall off Windows 7’s support when that OS gets its walking papers in January 2020. Users will still be able to run IE on Windows 10, but that’s likely to be an increasingly smaller number as corporations revamp their online sites and apps to accommodate more modern browsers.

There’s little evidence that that modern browser will be Edge: Microsoft’s newest ran on just 13.2% of all Windows 10 personal computers last month, according to Net Applications. Although the number was one-and-a-half percentage points higher than February’s, the truth is that Edge has been on a decline since its introduction, when it was the first choice of nearly 40% of all Windows 10 users.

When Edge becomes Microsoft’s sole browser, more or less, there is a very good chance that the Redmond, Wash., developer will account for a share in the single digits. Even if Windows 10’s PC penetration doubled, Edge would, by March’s figure, be the browser on fewer than 9% of the world’s personal computers.

Chrome also accumulated more user share last month, gaining three-tenths of a percentage point to rack up a record 60.9%. At its 12-month growth trend, Chrome should crack 62% by September and 63% by early 2019.

Net Applications calculates user share by detecting the agent strings of the browsers people use to visit its clients’ websites. It then tallies the various browsers, accounting for the size of each country’s online population to better estimate share in regions where it lacks large numbers of analytics customers.

Top browsers, February 2018

Microsoft is less than two years away from becoming a browser afterthought, according to the newest data from analytics vendor Net Applications.

Data published Thursday by the California-based company showed that the user share of Internet Explorer (IE) stood at 13.5% for February. That was an impressive 1.7 percentage point increase from the month prior and the highest, by far, since Net Applications revamped its tallies by eliminating bot-made traffic from the data.

Even that increase was but a temporary reprieve from a depressing-to-Microsoft trend that has seen the browser shed an enormous amount of user share in the past several years. As recently as June 2015, before Microsoft launched Windows 10 and thus that OS’s native browser, Edge, IE accounted for 54% of the world’s browsers, and nearly 60% of those that ran on a Windows-powered personal computer.

Last month, IE’s user share among all Windows-based PCs stood at 15.4%, meaning that fewer than one in every six Windows machines relied on IE to access the Internet.

Even worse for Microsoft, IE is on borrowed time. Already designated as a legacy browser in Windows 10, where it’s been relegated by enterprises to rendering stagnant internal websites and can’t-or-won’t-be upgraded web apps, IE will be dropped from support on Windows 7 when that OS gets its retirement papers in January 2020. Users will still be able to run IE — and Windows 7 for that matter — after that month, but they will assume significant risk because neither the browser or the operating system will receive security updates.

Because IE accounted for more than three-fourths of the combined user share of both Microsoft browsers, and what with Edge’s tenuous foothold on Windows 10, Microsoft faces a dramatic decline in its total user share when IE is put to pasture.

(Last month, Edge accounted for the browser of record on a record-low percentage of all Windows 10 machines — just 11.7% — which represented a nearly-two-percentage-point decline from the month before. In other words, Edge is a flop.)

By the time Microsoft retires Windows 7, and for effective purposes, IE as well, Windows 10 should have reached a user share (of all Windows) of around 63.6%, assuming its climb continues on the past year’s trend line. If Edge hasn’t, well, edged up as a share of all Windows 10 by that time — and all evidence is that it will not — then Microsoft’s active browser share will be in the single digits, perhaps as low as 6%.

(By “active,” Computerworld means still-supported browsers; there will undoubtedly be users who continue to run IE after Windows 7’s retirement, sans security patches. And IE on Windows 8.1 will be a negligible contribution to user share, as that OS will have faded to under 5% by January 2020.)

As a comparison, Edge’s predicted 6% in 2020 would be only slightly more than half the share that Mozilla’s Firefox — another browser that has been, and is once again, on the ropes — now holds.

Other browsers’ February results were mixed. Google’s Chrome, while still the big dog, shed eight-tenths of a percentage point last month, falling to 60.6% and upending Computerworld‘s forecast that the browser would soon top the two-thirds mark. Firefox ran to stay in place, ending February with a user share of 10.9%, while Apple’s Safari, always a single-digit browser on the desktop, picked up a tenth of a percentage point to reach 4.3%.

Apple, like Microsoft, has seen its primary browser lose share on its home turf. In February, approximately 44% of all Macs ran Safari as the main browser, down from a dominant 66% less than three years ago. Chrome has probably claimed the bulk of the Safari deserters, just as it has absorbed those Windows users who abandoned IE in the same period.

Net Applications calculates user share by detecting the browser agent strings of the applications people use to visit its clients’ websites. It then tallies the various browsers, accounting for the size of each country’s online population to better estimate share in regions where it lacks large numbers of analytics customers.

Top browsers, January 2018

Browsers built by Microsoft and Mozilla jettisoned some of their precious user share in January, while Google’s broke out of a months-long malaise by grabbing what its rivals lost, and then some.

According to California-based analytics vendor Net Applications, the user share of Internet Explorer (IE) and Edge — the estimated portion of all personal computer owners who ran those browsers — fell by half a percentage point to 16.5% in January.

After a one-month reprieve from losses — IE+Edge had climbed in December — Microsoft’s browsers returned to their long-time pattern of decline. The 16.5% mark was the second-lowest for Microsoft’s combined user share in the decade that Computerworld has recorded Net Applications’ numbers.

Together, the two browsers ran on about 19% of all Windows PCs, or on slightly less than one in five systems. That was the lowest-ever share of Windows PCs for the pair and stood in stark contrast to the 52% they accounted for just two years ago.

January 2016 was a red-letter month for IE because it was then that Microsoft stopped serving security updates to most editions of its kingpin browser, forcing customers to upgrade in most instances to IE11. Many instead switched browsers. It was Microsoft’s decision to retire non-IE11 editions that fueled the rise of Google’s Chrome.

And Edge, the default browser for Windows 10, has not taken up IE’s slack by any measure. Edge’s own user share — less than 5% — meant that the browser ran on fewer than 14% of all Windows 10 machines in January, or less than one in every seven devices powered by the OS.

If IE’s collapse has been Microsoft’s biggest browser defeat, then the inability of Edge to capture more than a piddling part of the Windows 10 audience has been the company’s second-largest failure. Simply put, Windows 10 users have rejected Edge.

Meanwhile, Mozilla’s Firefox shed two-tenths of a percentage point, ending the month at 10.85%, that browser’s lowest share since September 2016. The November overhaul, on which Mozilla has pinned great hope, has yet to boost the browser’s user share, even though reviews of what the company calls “Firefox Quantum” have generally been upbeat.

Because browser user share is a classic zero-sum exercise — if one browser loses part of the available 100%, one or more others must gain — it was no surprise that Chrome picked up eight-tenths of a percentage point in January, the largest increase since the same month of 2017. Chrome accounted for 61.4% of last month’s user share, according to Net Applications.

Chrome has been the biggest recipient, by far, of the dual decline of Microsoft’s IE and Mozilla’s Firefox. Google’s browser is within striking distance of accounting for two-thirds of the world’s user share, a mark it could reach by November based on trends over the last quarter.

The same trend line now forecasts that IE+Edge, as well as Firefox, will head in the other direction. Computerworld calculated that IE+Edge could slip below the 10% bar as soon as August, while Firefox will beat it there, with a shot at dropping under 10% in March.

Net Applications calculates user share by detecting the browser agent strings of those who visit its clients’ websites. It then tallies the various browsers, accounting for the size of each country’s online population to better estimate share in regions where it lacks large numbers of analytics customers.

Other data sources painted a picture that resembles Net Applications’.

Irish metrics company StatCounter pegged IE+Edge’s January decline at a half percentage point to 11.4%, and a Firefox slide of four-tenths of a point, to 11.9%. Chrome, on the other hand, added 1.3 percentage points to its usage share — a different measurement than Net Applications’ user share, and akin to activity — ending January with a remarkable 66%.
IDG
The user share of IE+Edge slipped in January, a return to the norm for Microsoft, which has seen its rule of the browser world overturned by a Chrome coup.

Top browsers, December 2017

Microsoft’s browsers in December recouped some of the user share they’d sloughed off in November when an analytics vendor changed how it portrays the battle for online hearts and minds.

According to Net Applications of Aliso Viejo, Calif., the user share of Internet Explorer (IE) and Edge — an estimate of the fraction of the world’s personal computer owners who ran those browsers — bumped up seven-tenths of a percentage point to end 2017 at 17%.

Although the uptick recovered only a fifth of the massive loss from the month prior, when Net Applications scrubbed fraudulent bots from its data, Microsoft was likely pleased with even that small bit of good news about its browsers. IE and Edge, the former in particular, have been on an extended slide for several years.

The bot-free traffic of Net Applications pegged the total of 2017’s IE+Edge downturn at just 1.3%, a loss of only three-tenths of a point. December’s boost was a big reason for the relatively small decline during last year.

Microsoft, of course, will take anything it can get at this point, having handed its browser crown — worn since the 1990s when it unseated Netscape Navigator — to Google’s Chrome. By other measurements, notably the data acquired by Irish metrics firm StatCounter that was used to generate browser usage share, IE+Edge was already in third place, at 11.9% behind Mozilla’s Firefox and its 12.2%. (StatCounter’s usage share reflects activity, since it tallies page views, meaning that ultra-energetic users may skew results.)

In Net Applications’ numbers, Firefox remained the third-place browser, with a 11% user share, down four-tenths of a percentage point from November.

Firefox, whose maker recently overhauled the browser, also took it on the chin when Net Applications scratched out bot traffic. In the new, cleansed data, Firefox’s user share dropped 3.5 points in 2017, representing a 24% decline. That was the largest decrease among the world’s top browsers.

Chrome led the pack in December with a user share of 60.6%, virtually the same as in November, while Apple’s Safari climbed two-tenths of a percentage point to 4%.

IE+Edge’s improving number also affected another important data point: The percentage of Windows 10 users who rely on Edge ticked up slightly in December to 14%, an eight-tenths of a point increase. The gain put Edge’s share on all Windows 10 PCs at the highest mark since July 2017. Add IE, and Microsoft’s browsers ran on a combined 19.1% of all Windows PCs in December, also an increase from the month before.

But under the best circumstances, it will take months for IE+Edge to establish a clear trend of growth. Of course, the Net Applications numbers for December may have been just a fluke, a blip on the data radar. Microsoft’s browsers have seemed to stabilize after extended periods of decline in the past, for instance, only to resume their slide toward obscurity.

Net Applications calculates user share by detecting the browser agent strings of those who visit its clients’ websites. It then tallies the various browsers, accounting for the size of each country’s online population to better estimate share in regions where it lacks large numbers of analytics customers.
IDG/Data: Net Applications
The user share of IE+Edge ticked up slightly in December 2017, a welcome sign to Microsoft, which has watched its lead evaporate over the last two years.

Top browsers, November 2017

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) and Edge browsers tumbled last month in user share as the once-universal programs ran on just one in every six personal computers worldwide.

According to U.S. analytics vendor Net Applications, the user share of IE and Edge — an estimate of the world’s personal computer owners who ran that browser — plummeted by 3.3 percentage points to end November at 16.3%. The decline was the largest ever for Microsoft’s browsers.

Mozilla’s Firefox also stumbled badly last month, losing nearly 2 of its hard-won percentage points, slipping to 11.4%, its lowest user share since October 2016.

These numbers, and more importantly the fact that IE+Edge’s and Firefox’s numbers sank to such a degree, is striking. But it was as much a data reset by Net Applications as proof of massive user desertions.

As it has periodically, Net Applications has reworked how it tracks browsers, operating systems and other metrics of interest to online businesses. In a message appended to a refreshed analytics display, Net Applications explained that it had rewritten its “entire collection and aggregation infrastructure to address” out-of-whack data.

The culprit? Bots, said Net Applications. These software-based tools often are deployed by criminals, who program their automated scripts to mimic human online behavior, perhaps in an attempt to cash in on an ad click fraud scam.

“Bots can cause significant skewing of data,” admitted Net Applications. “We have seen situations where traffic from certain large countries is almost completely bot traffic. In other countries, ad fraudsters generate traffic that spoofs certain technologies in order to generate high-value clicks. Or, they heavily favor a particular browser or platform.”

While some may want to blame the large shifts in browser user share on Net Applications’ scouring its data of bot traffic, that would be the wrong move. “Please note: This dataset is separate from and replaces the legacy data,” the company said, making clear that it had gone back into past data too, not just November’s, and eradicated the numbers it ascribed to bots.

Under the new methodology, for example, IE+Edge in October was 16%, or 3.6 points lower than Net Applications called the pair using the older, bots-plagued data. Using the new-only data, IE+Edge actually edged up (no pun intended) by about two-tenths of a percentage point. Likewise, Firefox was at 11.7% in October under the new scheme, but 13.1% under the old. (Firefox’s drop, then, was about three-tenths of a percentage point during November.)

Assuming that the new methodology cleaned out all or most of the dodgy bot-driven traffic from Net Application’s data, the bottom line is that the numbers now portray IE+Edge, and to a lesser extent, Firefox, in less flattering lights. Microsoft’s browsers have deteriorated to a point unthinkable just two years ago, when they ran on more than half the world’s personal computers. And Firefox’s climb back from a near-death experience in 2016 has not been as impressive as the data once showed.

Also of interest were the new data points for Edge and IE calculated against only Windows personal computers. Because both browsers run only on Windows devices, it has been possible to surmise their share on that platform alone. Of all Windows 10 users, just 13.2%, a record low, ran Edge in November (Edge only runs on Windows 10). As recently as March, Edge’s share of Windows 10 had been around 22%.

IE’s share of 18.4% of all Windows PCs was slightly better than Edge’s, but like its successor, IE’s November mark was an all-time low. At the start of 2016, IE’s Windows-only share was a more respectable 28.5%.

Bottom line: Net Applications’ scrubbed data painted a picture of Windows 10 users shunning Edge, and IE users renouncing the browser in record numbers.

Apple’s Safari also shed user share last month, sliding six-tenths of a percentage point to 3.9%. Meanwhile, the king of the hill, Google’s Chrome, ended November with a user share of 60.6%, up about eight-tenths of a point. It was the first time that Chrome broke the 60% tape in Net Applications’ tracking.

Because browser share is a zero-sum game, the downgrading of Microsoft’s, Mozilla’s and Apple’s browsers meant others experienced growth. In Net Applications’ case, the cleaned-up data and revised website listed a slew of previously-unreported browsers, including several popular outside the U.S. Among those were QQ, the browser created by Tencent, China’s largest web company (with a user share of 1.8%) and Yandex, which belongs to the same-named Russian search firm (0.6%). Others now on Net Applications’ list ranged from Opera (1.4%) to Vivaldi (0.1%).

Net Applications calculates user share by detecting the browser agent strings of those who visit its clients’ websites. It then tallies the various browsers, accounting for the size of each country’s online population to better estimate share in regions where it lacks large numbers of analytics customers.
IDG/Data: Net Applications
Microsoft’s browsers — Internet Explorer and Edge — were used by just 16% of the world’s online users of personal computers last month, or on about one in every six systems. The once mighty Microsoft could soon be eclipsed by Mozilla and that open-source developer’s Firefox.

Top browsers, October 2017

Microsoft’s Edge last month sank to its lowest-ever user share, with less than 16% of Windows 10 users running the browser during October.

According to U.S. analytics vendor Net Applications, the user share of Edge — an estimate of the world’s personal computer owners who ran that browser — fell by six-tenths of a percentage point, ending October at 4.6%. The decline was the largest ever for Edge, and set the browser back to the user share spot it last occupied in April 2016.

More notable was Edge’s usage when calculated as a percentage of Windows 10. (Edge is the default browser for Microsoft’s OS; likewise, Edge only runs on Windows 10.) Of all Windows 10 users, just 15.7%, a record low, ran Edge in October. As recently as March, Edge’s share of Windows 10 had been around 22%.

Edge’s share of Windows 10, which started off at 36% when the operating system debuted, has steadily fallen since then, wrapping up 2015 at 28% and ending 2016 at 22%.

If every Windows 10 user had stuck with Edge, the browser would now have a user share of 29.3%, or more than six times its mark. Instead, the trend line has shown that the more PCs that run Windows 10, the poorer Edge has performed.

Simply put, Edge never caught on among Windows 10 users. And at this point, it may be in an unrecoverable position. It’s hard to envision a strategy that would successfully coax significant numbers to Edge unless Microsoft were willing to take such desperate measures — like barring all other browsers from the OS — that it would invite regulatory intervention.

A user share increase by Internet Explorer (IE) more than compensated for the decline in Edge, with the combined figure for the two edging up by three-tenths of a point to 19.7%. The boost was the first positive move by Microsoft’s browsers since December 2014.

Short-term user share changes are often inscrutable, but the three-tenths of a percentage point increase of IE+Edge could be a partial recovery in data collection sanity after the stunning 1.9-point plummet in September. The next month or two will either confirm that that month’s free-fall was real or contest its accuracy.

Because browser share is a zero-sum game, Microsoft’s uptick meant someone had to face shrinkage. Apple’s Safari took the brunt, falling by 0.7 of a percentage points to 4.4%. Mozilla’s Firefox and Google’s Chrome added 0.3 of a point and 0.2 of a point, respectively, stretching to 13.1% and 59.8%. For Firefox, the October mark was its highest in three years. Meanwhile, Chrome continued to sneak up on 60% but again failed to top that bar.

At the pace of the last six months, Chrome should pass, albeit barely, 60% by year’s end.

Net Applications calculates user share by detecting the browser agent strings of those who visit its clients’ websites. It then tallies the various browsers, accounting for the size of each country’s online population to better estimate share in regions where it lacks large numbers of analytics customers.
IDG/Gregg Keizer
Edge slipped again, with fewer than one in every six Windows 10 users running the browser during October. (Data: Net Applications.)

Top browsers, September 2017

Microsoft’s browsers suffered another big setback last month, losing so much user share that they fell beneath the 20% bar.

According to U.S. analytics vendor Net Applications, the user share of Internet Explorer (IE) and Edge — an estimate of the world’s personal computer owners who ran those browsers — plummeted by 1.9 percentage points, ending at a combined 19.3%. The downturn was the largest since October 2016.

September’s decline was previewed the previous month, when IE+Edge lost nearly a full percentage point after a five-month stretch when the browsers’ slump had been relatively small.

Most notable was that the browsers’ combined share dropped below 20%, a milestone of sorts, albeit a negative one, in their decline, which began in earnest a year and a half ago. It was then that Microsoft forced Windows users to upgrade to the latest version of Internet Explorer supported by their version of Windows — which meant IE11 for most users — or run Edge on Windows 10.

Rather than nudging customers to upgrade IE or adopt Edge, the mandate prompted millions to abandon Microsoft’s browsers and choose alternatives, for the most part Google’s Chrome. The decision, which Microsoft described in mid-2014 as necessary for security reasons as well as to ensure compatibility with services like Office 365, turned out to be among the company’s most disastrous. Since the upgrade order went into effect in January 2016, IE has shed nearly two-thirds of its user share, tumbling from 48.6% to last month’s 19.3%.

Just over one in five Windows personal computers — 21% — ran IE or Edge in September. (The difference between the 19.3%, which represented IE+Edge’s user share of all personal computers, and the 21% of just Windows machines, was due to the latter powering 90.6% of all systems, not 100% of them.)

Nor has Edge taken up enough of the slack as IE’s share has plunged. Last month, Edge ran on a record-low 17.7% of Windows 10 personal computers. Edge’s share has diminished since Windows 10’s debut — it accounted for 39% of all Windows 10 in mid-2015 — even as the operating system’s share has grown dramatically.

If every Windows 10 user had stuck with Edge, the OS’s default browser, Edge would have a user share of 29.1%, or more than five times its actual mark. Instead, the more PC owners who run Windows 10, the poorer Edge has performed. To Computerworld, that signals an irredeemable loss for Microsoft; it’s unlikely the firm will be able to coax customers to return Edge to pride of place on Windows 10.

Since browser share is a zero-sum game, Microsoft’s loss meant rivals won. Apple’s Safari climbed by 1.2 percentage points to 5.1%, its highest mark in more than two years, and Mozilla’s Firefox added six-tenths of a percentage point, climbing to 12.9%, the largest share that browser has enjoyed in nearly three years. And Chrome edged up three-tenths of a point to 59.6%, ending a three-month slowdown in growth.

Net Applications estimates user share by sniffing the browser agent strings of those who visit its clients’ websites, then tallying the various browsers and operating systems. It also weights each country’s data by the size of its online population to account for locations, like China, where it lacks large numbers of analytics customers.
IDG / Net Applications
Microsoft’s browsers — Internet Explorer and Edge — were used by just 19% of the world’s online users last month, according to new data. The browser’s decline, precipitous since the start of 2016, shows no sign of abating. (Data: Net Applications.)

Top browsers, August 2017

Drip. Drip. Drip.

That was the sound Microsoft’s browsers made last month as they leaked user share. Yet again.

According to U.S. analytics vendor Net Applications, the user share of Internet Explorer (IE) and Edge — an estimate of the world’s personal computer owners who ran those browsers — slid by nine-tenths of a percentage point, ending at a combined 22.2%. The August decline was the largest since January.

It can be difficult to accurately spot short-term trends with Net Applications’ data: At times, changes seem more an artifact of the company’s methodology. IE+Edge’s latest plunge may signal a renewal of losses after a five-month slow-down in the desertion rate, or it could be simply a hiccup.

Overall, however, Microsoft’s fortunes remain dark in the browser race. While the share loss in the eight months of 2017 has been just over half that of same period of 2016 — illustrating a slowing of the bleeding — IE+Edge has shed almost a full percentage point each month so far this year. If that reduction rate keeps up, the browsers will vanish before this time in 2019.

That’s very unlikely to happen.

Even so, Microsoft must stare at browser share reports and wonder when the bad news will end. And where IE and Edge will end up as well.

IE, of course, has been pushed aside by Microsoft, which has assigned it legacy status, with a concomitant no-further-development policy. Internet Explorer will live on, in the form of IE11, even after the retirement of Windows 7 in early 2020, but Microsoft has already dug the browser’s grave, if not dropped it in.

Microsoft’s bigger problem is the lack of enthusiasm for Edge, the default browser in Windows 10, the forever OS that may never expire. During August, just 20% of all Windows 10 users ran Edge as their primary browser. Edge’s share has headed downhill since the operating system’s mid-2015 debut — when it accounted for 39% of all Windows 10 — even as the latter’s share has grown leaps and bounds.

The more people run Windows 10, the less they collectively like Edge. That’s not a good sign for the browser’s future.

Because the struggle for share is zero-sum, Microsoft’s loss again meant a win for some rivals. Apple’s Safari climbed by two-tenths of a percentage point to 3.9%, and Mozilla’s Firefox stayed in place, while the generic “Others” category grew by nearly a full point, largely fueled by a big bump in what Net Applications dubbed “Proprietary or Undetectable” browsers.

Google’s Chrome, which has taken in most of the IE+Edge refugees, fell by two-tenths of a percentage point in August, ending at 59.4%, or back at the number it held in May.

Net Applications estimates user share by sniffing the browser agent strings of those who visit its clients’ websites, then tallying the various browsers and operating systems. It also weights each country’s data by the size of its online population to account for areas, such as China, where it lacks large numbers of analytics customers.
IDG/Data: Net Applications
IE’s and Edge’s declines accelerated again in August, dropping nearly a full percentage point. Whatever Microsoft is going to do to save its browsers, it better do it fast.

Top browsers, July 2017

Microsoft has to take solace from any source it can as its share of the browser market continues to dribble down the drain.

To wit: Even as Microsoft’s browser share again declined during July, at least it was a smaller contraction than of late, perhaps giving those in Redmond hope that the worst is behind them and at some point the downward lines on their charts will flatten.

According to data from U.S. analytics vendor Net Applications, the user share of Internet Explorer (IE) and Edge — an estimate of the proportion of the world’s personal computer owners that ran those browsers — dipped by three-tenths of a percentage point, ending at a combined 22.2%. July’s loss was the smallest since March, and the second smallest since December 2014.

At times, browser share data is too fickle for illustrating short-range trends, so the five-month slow-down in IE+Edge declines could be an artifact of the metrics company’s methodology. Or it may be the strongest signal yet that Microsoft’s browsers may have a share basement beyond which they won’t sink.

Exhibit A for the latter: For the first seven months of this year, IE+Edge lost four percentage points, representing a 15% reduction from their Jan. 1 state. Compare that to 2016, when in the same length of time, IE+Edge bled nearly 14 percentage points, equal to a decline of 29%, or more than twice as much as 2017.

Microsoft must get its victories, or even less-drastic defeats, where it can.

Not surprisingly, the slowing of Microsoft’s browser share deterioration was tempered by a continuation of a troubling trend for Edge, the default in Windows 10. Last month, just 20% of all Windows 10 users ran Edge as their primary browser, down from 24% a year earlier. Edge’s one-in-five share of Windows 10 is the browser’s lowest ever showing.

Because the share skirmish is zero-sum, Microsoft’s losses translated into rival browser makers’ gains. When the former slides less, competitors’ growth does as well. Most affected was Google’s Chrome, which has been the biggest beneficiary of IE+Edge’s nosedive.

Chrome remained virtually flat last month, increasing its share by just one-tenth of a percentage point to post 59.8% for July. Since the start of the year, Chrome has climbed by three points, representing a 6% growth rate. In the first seven months of 2016, Chrome added nearly 19 points to its share, equal to a hike of 58%.

Mozilla’s Firefox was the winner for July, putting another three-tenths of a percentage point on its share to reach 12.3%, the browser’s highest number in almost three years. Although Firefox currently controls less than half the share it did at its late 2009-early 2010 peak, its recovery from a near-death experience a year ago has been remarkable. In August 2016, Firefox slumped to 7.7% and seemed in danger of vanishing altogether.

Net Applications estimates user share by sniffing the browser agent strings of those who visit its clients’ websites, then tallying the various browsers and operating systems. It also weights each country’s data by the size of its online population to account for areas, such as China, where it lacks large numbers of analytics customers.
IDG/Data: Net Applications
IE’s and Edge’s declines slowed, as did Chrome’s gains during July, leaving Google’s browser on the verge of grabbing two-thirds of the global browser share.

Top browsers, June 2017

Microsoft’s browsers in June 2017 continued their free fall, again shedding a significant amount of user share, an analytics company reported today.

According to data from California-based Net Applications, the user share of Internet Explorer (IE) and Edge — an estimate of the proportion of the world’s personal computer owners who ran those browsers — fell by nearly a full percentage point in May, ending at a combined 23.2%.

May’s decline was the largest since January, and could signal a resumption of the precipitous plunge IE and Edge experienced in 2016, when the browsers lost more than 22 percentage points, almost half their total share at the start of that year, and ceded the top spot to Google’s Chrome.

Microsoft’s problem, as it has been since mid-2015, stemmed from two factors: A persistent decline in the demoted-to-legacy IE, which was expected after the launch of Windows 10, and the inability, to put it mildly, for Edge, 10’s default browser, to make up the difference. The second was certainly not in Microsoft’s projections.

In the last 11 months, IE’s share dropped by 41%, while Edge’s increased by only 11%. On its own, IE has been under the 20% mark since January, and fell to a new low of 17.6% in May. Meanwhile, Edge stayed flat for the fourth month in a row at 5.6%. All of those ingredients cooked up a debacle.

Projections of the IE + Edge combination hint at an even uglier future. IE and Edge could fall under 20% as soon as this month, and likely by no later than December, according to the 12- and three-month trends in the data.

Although Microsoft has aggressively touted Edge, the effort has not yet paid off. Last month, just 21% of all Windows 10 users ran Edge as their primary browser, down from 29% a year earlier. Some analysts, however, expect Edge to turn toward a larger share of Windows 10 once enterprises seriously start migrating corporate PCs to the new OS, and, more importantly, when they divest themselves of the legacy web apps and intranet sites that require workers to run IE alongside a “modern” browser, like Edge.

May’s biggest beneficiary was Chrome, which added four-tenths of a percentage point to its user share, reaching a record 59.4%. Computerworld‘s forecast — again using the trends in Net Applications’ data — puts Chrome over the 60% bar by August at the latest.

Mozilla’s Firefox, which in the first quarter of 2017 lost four-tenths of a percentage point, recouped half of that last month, climbing to 12%, its highest mark since December.

Net Applications estimates user share by sniffing the browser agent strings of those who visit its clients’ websites, then tallying the various browsers and operating systems. It also weights each country’s data by the size of its online population to account for areas, such as China, where it lacks large numbers of analytics customers.
Data: Net Applications/IDG
Microsoft has pinned great hopes on Edge, its latest browser, but nearly two years after its launch, just one in five Windows 10 users run it.