It’s official: Project “Edge” has been buried by Microsoft.
It seems as if the browser engine was unable to succeed
among Chromium and Quantum. With this, the browser
engine “market” is now shared among two competitors.

Of course there’s a minority of other engines as well but Chromium and Quantum dominate the market. With 62 percent, Chromium is the most-used engine so far. It’s success can be pinned down on the massive publication and andvertising from Google and it’s own browser Chrome (currently available as version 68). Mozilla Firefox uses the other engine, called Quantum and tries to win back it’s loyal users after earlier versions (up to 56) tended to slow down the browser which used the Gecko engine. A market share of 11 percent, however, isn’t what we would call a wide spread.

Since Version 57, Firefox has become more lightweight and easy on systems with lesser memory and CPU power. Version 57 has been released in 2017 and stopped the user loss a little. In 2016 it’s market share dropped to 10 percent and was less spread than Internet Explorer.

The decision for Microsoft to no longer develop the Edge browser with it’s own engine came without surprise has the browser a market share of only 4.2 percent in 2018. So even with this browser being bundled with Windows 10 which has a wide spread, the browser was not accepted by the users in general. Most users still install either Chrome or Firefox onto their systems as they still fear that Internet Explorer or Edge might suffer from massive security flaws.

Although Edge is way safer now (and even IE 11 has become more safe), the name and symbol has still been associated with security issues and major incompatibility with modern web standards. So Microsoft was unable to launch a new browser experience although they invested a lot of manpower to give the users another choice to Firefox and Chrome.

So in the future, while the Name “Edge” and it’s symbol remains, you will be using another Chromium-based browser instead. So it’s easy to answer the question whether to use Edge or Google Chrome. Most likely the latter one would have faster update cycles. However Microsoft is known for updating browser components with their monthly patchday as well. But while Edge updates will definitely require system reboots, Google Chrome can be updated on the fly.

So anyway, how do you think about the change on the browser market? Take part at this poll:

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