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Top web browsers 2020: Chrome snaps up more share, new Edge again gains ground


Karlston

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Top web browsers 2020: Chrome snaps up more share, new Edge again gains ground

Google's Chrome browser edged toward the 70% mark in user share in May. No one else in the browser wars is close.

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Chrome's share reached a record high in May, the fifth straight month of gains, a run the browser last enjoyed three years ago.

 

According to data published Monday by California metrics vendor Net Applications, Chrome's share in May climbed six-tenths of a percentage point to 69.8%. The browser has been on a run of late, with the previous five months – January to May – putting 3.2 points on Chrome's ledger. The only other browser to post gains during that stretch – Safari – added a mere two-tenths of a point.

 

To put Chrome's position into perspective, no browser has had more than Chrome's current share since December 2008, when Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) held more than 70% even as it was trending down, under assault from Mozilla's Firefox. (That month, Chrome, which had debuted only months before, accounted for a tiny 1.4% of all browser share.)

 

May's addition changed Chrome's 12-month forecast, which now predicts the browser will reach 70% this month (June) but will need until December to make 71%. If Chrome breaks the 70% bar, it will become only the third browser to do so, following Netscape Navigator (an ancestor of Firefox) and IE.

 

It's unclear how much headroom Chrome has – it seems very unlikely that it can duplicate IE's crushing dominance of, say, 2005, when that browser had close to a 90% share – but it almost certainly can squeeze a few more points out of the competition. IE has points to give up, not many but at least a couple, while Firefox could easily continue its ruinous slide and slough another two or three percentage points.

 

As Computerworld has said before, the only threat to Chrome in the near term will be Microsoft's Edge, the Chrome clone.

Firefox hangs in there

For a second straight month, Firefox held onto its share; the browser ended May with 7.2%, losing a statistically insignificant two-hundredths of a point.

 

May was also the third consecutive month that Firefox sat behind Edge after losing its second-place status in March; the gap between the two grew to six-tenths of a point, an increase, like the month prior, of one-tenth of a percentage point. Unless Edge stumbles badly, it looks like it now has solid lock on second place.

Although Firefox remained flat, Computerworld's new forecast – based on the browser's 12-month average – continued to anticipate a future decline. By that prognosis, Firefox will slide below 7% in July and end the year at 5.9%. That dismal prediction may not come true, of course; in fact, Firefox's losses over the past six months has been just 40% of that over the last 12, hinting that its decline has slowed.

 

Mozilla has to be scratching its head, wondering what it has to do to get users on board. In many ways, it's been the force behind browsers' emphasis on user privacy, a movement nearly all have gotten behind. Yet it struggles to keep what audience it has, much less grow that.

Edge's gains make case for Chromiumization

Microsoft's two browsers – the reworked Edge and run-down IE – combined forces to lose seven-tenths of a percentage point in May, posting a share of 12.5% at its end.

 

All of that was due to IE, as Edge added a tenth of a point to its total in May, reaching 7.9%, a record for the just-overhauled browser. Meanwhile, IE surrendered eight-tenths of a percentage point, the most since January, to drag its share to 4.6%, the first time that browser has dipped under the 5% mark in the 15 years for which Computerworld has records of Net Applications' numbers.

While IE's current share of under 5% may be an undercount – Computerworld remains convinced that metrics vendors like Net Applications have little insight into enterprises, where a single IP external address may mask many internal IP addresses – it's difficult to know just exactly where the ancient browser stands. It's clear Microsoft believes it important enough to cater to – seen in the IE mode baked into the Chromium-based Edge – but whether that's because of popularity inside corporations or just the power of some few very important customers cannot be judged from outside Redmond.

 

Computerworld's latest forecast has IE's share evaporating to 1.5% in less than a year, which seems unlikely at first glance. Yet the browser, for all its agelessness, will vanish at some point.

 

Edge's May was the six straight month of increases, and with 1.95 points added to it during that time, its largest gain since the first half of 2016 when the browser was nearly brand new. From the limited data available – since the end of January, Edge climbed by a less-than-stellar eight-tenths of a point – it appears that the "Chromiumization" of Edge has, at the least, legitimized that browser (where before it was little more than laughingstock). At its current 12-month average growth rate, Edge would be in double digits – specifically, approximately 10.3% – by this time next year.

 

It would be a mistake to see that as small potatoes, since no browser other than Chrome currently can boast of a double-digit share.

 

Elsewhere in Net Applications' data, both Apple's Safari and Opera software's Opera remained flat, ending May at 3.9% and 1.1%, respectively.

 

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 2020: Chrome snaps up more share, new Edge again gains ground

 

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3 hours ago, Karlston said:

Chrome snaps

it really does and i never had this proplem  using firefox  or waterfox :lmao:

Ksnip Screenshot

 

I use Linux  so i could care less  if  big tech is wining the browser war  if they can stand to use to buggy chrome  more power to them .It's just like the old IE days lazy  :moon: webmasters imposed  Active X  and other browsers were left in the  dark  but IE never was a good browser people used  it and some do still just not as much because of  compatibility issues.   Same with Chrome it use to be a good browser but by the time i became interested in testing it  was a bloated  pos and full of  bugs people use it because Google sets the web standards just like Microsoft did in the late 90s -2000s .Even Microsoft caved in  and killed there  own engine  that use to set the web standards before . It was so bad Firefox had and Addon  that allowed you to render IE threw it on uncompatible   sites.  People  use Chrome and its forks for the same reason Google has a  monopoly over the web  . It tickled me pink when cloudflare  switch to h. They changed there provider from google’s recaptcha to hcaptcha and took a little of there spy power away.  while everyone was having a fit because UBO was blocking it    i just used advanced settings and allowed the website  it works for any captcha website and  life went on as normal with one big company not using there services any longer.. :dance:

 

Quote

We recently migrated the CAPTCHA provider we use from Google's reCAPTCHA to a service provided by the independent hCaptcha. We're excited about this change because it helps address a privacy concern inherent to relying on a Google service that we've had for some time and also gives us more flexibility to customize the CAPTCHAs we show.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/moving-from-recaptcha-to-hcaptcha/

 

You make ask  what hcaptcha has to do with browsers?  Well  Brendan Eich CEO of Brave Browser. Co-founder of Mozilla. Creator of the JavaScript programming language. Builder of browsers and more. is one of it's Advisors .

https://www.hcaptcha.com/about

 

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1 hour ago, steven36 said:

Brendan Eich CEO of Brave Browser. Co-founder of Mozilla. Creator of the JavaScript programming language.

 

That's something I didn't know. You're a font of knowledge, thanks for sharing that. 👍

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