What (Else) Usage Share Reveals About Microsoft Edge (Premium)

I saw a headline stating that Safari usage had surpassed that of Microsoft Edge, but looking at the raw data raises an interesting question: why is Safari so much more successful than Edge, relatively speaking?

That is, if you look just at the desktop usage stats, Microsoft Edge and Apple Safari are almost neck-and-neck this past month, with the former accounting for 11.13 percent usage share and the latter delivering 10.92 percent usage share. Looking at a longer swath of time, we can see that the two browsers closely tracked each other from a usage perspective over the past year, and that in April 2022, Edge had 10.07 percent usage share while Safari had 9.62 percent.

Here's why this is interesting.

Microsoft tells us that there are 1.5 billion Windows users worldwide and, more recently, that 1.4 billion people are using Windows 10 or Windows 11, which means that they are prime candidates to use Edge as well, since Edge is the default on those platforms.

Mac usage share is a little harder to figure out: in 2017, Apple said that there were over 100 million Mac users, but that number is out of date, and it's reasonable to assume that the introduction of Apple Silicon-based Macs has shifted the user base upward at least somewhat. But Statcounter, the same source as the browser data noted above, claims that Windows has 69.4 percent usage share among all desktop platforms, while the Mac has 17.21 percent share. Using those numbers, Windows is used four times for every Mac, which seems low: I would be surprised if there were 350 million Macs in the world.

But let's run with that because doing so doesn't hurt my point. Which is this: somehow Apple, with far fewer users, is able to convince a far bigger percentage of those users to use its own browser than can Microsoft, which has far more users overall. That is, both Apple and Microsoft have convinced roughly 11 percent of all desktop computer users to use their browser. But Microsoft's audience is at least four times bigger (and is probably even bigger still). So Apple has done a much better job of convincing people to use its browser than Microsoft. This, even though Safari is rarely updated in a meaningful way and Edge is updated every single month (and often more than that).

So why is that?

The first thing we should discuss is mobile: Apple's success on mobile surely drives some of this desktop Safari usage because many (if not most) Mac users also have an iPhone (and many also have an iPad), and the firm has built in cross-platform "better together" capabilities that benefit those who use Safari everywhere. The most obvious example of this is Continuity.

But I'm arguing that it's not just Continuity: after all, all web browsers offer some form of mobile and desktop integration, and most web browsers can even be used as a password manager on mobile, including on Apple's devices. So while I'm sure that is a factor, it's not the complete story.

And this can be state...