Internet Explorer Is No Longer The Most Popular Desktop Browser

For years, Internet Explorer has enjoyed the title of being the most widely used desktop browser in the world. It was helped by the fact that this browser came pre-installed on hundreds of millions of PCs that were powered by Windows. With the exception of Safari on OS X, there weren’t a lot of browsers out there which had this edge over the competition. Despite that, Internet Explorer now appears to have lost its title of being the most popular desktop browser.

The latest data from Net Marketshare reveals that during the month of April 2016, Chrome accounted for 41.66 percent of the market share as opposed to Internet Explorer’s 41.35 percent. It’s a small margin but the win goes to Google Chrome nonetheless.

Net Marketshare arrives at this conclusion by measuring data from 40,000 websites. It merits mentioning here that this data does not include usage stats for Microsoft Edge, a new browser that Microsoft built from the ground up for Windows 10. It’s already on every PC that runs Windows 10 and there are a lot of PCs out there running on the latest iteration of Microsoft’s desktop OS.

It’s going to be a while before Edge can command the kind of user base that Internet Explorer did, after all, it’s not available on multiple versions of Windows like IE. Microsoft has left its old browser behind and since it’s not actively working on improving IE’s fortunes we can be sure that its numbers will continue to drop in the months to come.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Computers
Tags: internet explorer, Microsoft, Microsoft Edge, Windows 10