Although Google Chrome has been the most used browser in the world for many years, and it seemed unbeatable, a new rival has emerged: Edge. Microsoft‘s new browser, also based on Chromium, offers users all the good things about Google’s browser together with a completely renewed experience in Windows 10, both in performance and, above all, in privacy. Therefore, after months of non-stop growth, in the last month it has lost a significant number of users, users who, tired of Google, have decided to jump to the new Edge.
Chrome is still the leader, for now
As we can see in the latest NetMarketShare report, after Chrome spent months adding and adding users, in the last quarter the Google browser has lost, for the first time, users. It’s not that it’s a very big loss, but it has gone from 71.11% to 69.25%.
Who has gained a significant number of users is Edge, Microsoft’s new browser. It had a market share of 8.09% in July, but in the last month this share has risen to 10.22%. A significant rise that makes one in 10 users use Edge on Windows, macOS or Linux.
Firefox has also been another of the winners of the loss of Chrome, rising from 7.19% to 7.22% market share. Another very curious fact is that Internet Explorer , Microsoft’s classic and obsolete browser, has also grown a lot, from 3.88% to 5.57%.
These data are very interesting, as they may be the beginning of a new browser war. Unfortunately, however, these will be the last analytics of browser usage we’ll see, at least in a while.
Google removes the user-agent: we will no longer be able to follow the growth of browsers
NetMarketShare has been publishing, month by month, the market share of the main web browsers for more than 14 years. To do this, the web analyzes the user-agent used to visit a series of popular web pages so that, although it is not exact, the approximation of the data obtained is quite accurate.
Google announced earlier this year that it was discontinuing the use of the User-Agent . In return, the company was to implement a new tracking system known as “Client Hints.” Broadly speaking, its operation is the same, that is, it will allow the servers to know which browser each visitor uses. However, this new system has advanced privacy measures that would prevent analytics websites, such as NetMarketShare or StatsCounter, from controlling the growth of browsers.
It is curious that this change comes just when dangerous rivals have appeared for Chrome and it begins to lose market share. Due to the large number of false positives that can appear on analytics websites due to this change, NetMarketShare has decided to abandon browser analytics, at least for now.
For now, only Chrome has decided to remove this feature to implement Client Hints . It remains to be seen if the other web browsers follow the same steps and it really is a change focused on privacy and not a ploy to hide the new browser war. A war in which Google either decides to get on with Chrome, or it may lose.