The Google Chrome Vs Microsoft Edge Battle Is Proving To Be Bad News For Mozilla Firefox

Microsoft revamped the Edge web browser to use Chromium earlier this year from the EdgeHTML platform it used before, and is now available for Windows 10, Windows 7, macOS, Android, iOS and iPadOS platforms. While it has its advantages over Google Chrome, at least in terms of being less resource hungry, Edge most certainly got a big push over the summer as Microsoft is now pushing the Edge web browser via the automatic Windows Update route to PCs running Windows 10. Microsoft has been consistently adding new features to Edge and also improving its performance regularly to make it work better on older PCs as well.

This is a follow-through of the war of words that Mozilla and Microsoft have already engaged in, over web standards. In December 2018, when Microsoft announced that it would adopt Chromium for its next Edge browser evolution, Mozilla had accused Microsoft of giving up on the EdgeHTML standard and strengthening Google’s position.

“Google is a fierce competitor with highly talented employees and a monopolistic hold on unique assets. Google’s dominance across search, advertising, smartphones, and data capture creates a vastly tilted playing field that works against the rest of us,” said Mozilla’s Chris Beard at the time. He eventually stepped down as CEO of Mozilla Corporation in September 2019. Subsequently, Microsoft fired back in a post which said, “It’s time for Mozilla to get down from their philosophical ivory tower. The web is dominated by Chromium, if they really cared about the web they would be contributing instead of building a parallel universe that’s used by less than 5 percent.”

There may have been some truth in what Mozilla had indicated at, back in 2018. Just a look at the data for the last three months shows Google Chrome’s share continues to rise as more people are adopting it as the standard browser on their PCs, smartphones and tablets. Chrome had 69.81% share in May this year, which increased to 70.19% in June and is now 71.11% as per the latest numbers at the end of July. Microsoft Edge’s growth, in the same period indicates shares of 7.86%, 8.07% and 8.09%–most certainly not as steep a rise as one would have expected now that the new Microsoft Edge browser is being updated on most Windows 10 PCs, if not all already.