Firefox is now more popular than Internet Explorer and Edge combined

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Things will likely turn around when Edge is finally finished, though

Firefox browser

The battle of the browsers continues to rage, and for the first time ever according to one analytics company, Firefox has outperformed the combined might of Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Edge browsers.

StatCounter's global desktop browser usage figures for April show that Firefox snared 15.6% of the market, compared to 15.5% for IE and Edge (which managed 13.25% and 2.25% respectively).

In actual fact, Firefox didn't pick up users to overtake Microsoft's browsers as it dipped very slightly from March to April, but Redmond's efforts dropped more, with Internet Explorer losing 0.42%.

Chrome likely chomped those users from IE, as it rose again and is clearly in the lead on 60.5%. Bringing up the rear, StatCounter has Safari on 4.6% and Opera on 1.9%.

Edge adoption, then, has been pretty disappointing, but that's not too surprising given that it launched in a pretty unfinished state and is still missing major bits, and of course you need to have upgraded to Windows 10 to use the browser.

Edging bets

However, we can probably expect Microsoft's market share to rise when Edge picks up with the introduction of extensions and other missing features (including stuff like web notifications) which are due to land with the Anniversary Update this summer.

Also, the picture is admittedly very different when you look at the UK and US markets in isolation.

In the UK, Chrome leads on 54.2%, with IE and Edge on 21.8% way ahead of Firefox on 13.2%. Over in the States, Chrome is top on 51.6%, followed by IE and Edge on 25.2%, with Firefox on 13.4%.

Still, Mozilla will definitely be celebrating the fact that it has outdone Redmond worldwide, at least according to one bean counting firm.

Darren Allan

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).