Microsoft Edge is an Outright Disaster (Premium)

A recent change in NetApplications methodology has revealed the disastrous truth of Microsoft Edge usage. By which I mean, there isn’t any.

Microsoft Edge is controversial, to say the least. I’ve written a lot about why I believe that this web browser falls short of my needs, and I revise this judgment with each new version of Windows 10.

But that’s an assessment of quality. What NetApplications measures is usage. And that is another area of controversy for Microsoft Edge.

As you may recall, Microsoft made the incredible claim in September that over 330 million people were “actively” using this browser. And based on the recent revelation that there are now over 600 million Windows 10 users, that means that about half of all of those users—half—were actively using Microsoft Edge at that time.

Which is, as I pointed out previously, impossible.

I did a lot of math to try and make Microsoft’s claims make sense. But even with the full understanding that my math skills are frightfully bad, it never comes close. There is no way that that many people have ever used Edge actively.

In September, the biggest number I could come up with was about 85 million people: This assumes 1.5 billion people browsing the web on PCs and that the highest usage figure I could find, 5.66 percent at NetApplications—was correct.

Well, that 5.66 percent figure isn’t correct, NetApplications said this week. Why? Bots.

“As bot traffic across the web has risen dramatically, it has been a challenge to detect and remove it from our dataset,” the analytics firm explains. “This is a critical issue since bots can cause significant skewing of data. In particular, we have seen situations where traffic from certain large countries is almost completely bot traffic. In other countries, ad fraudsters generate traffic that spoofs certain technologies in order to generate high-value clicks. Or, they heavily favor a particular browser or platform.”

Net Applications never mentions Microsoft or its web browser, never accuses Microsoft of implementing bots to make Edge usage appear much higher than it really was. But as Computerworld’s Gregg Keizer first reported, the removal of bot data from NetApplications’ web browser usage calculations has impacted Microsoft Edge worse than any other browser.

“As much as half of the traffic to Edge on Windows 10 was artificially inflated,” he writes. “Edge has been designated the primary browser by fewer than one in six Windows 10 users for more than a year and a half. That’s a significant downgrading of Edge’s user share statistics from the browser’s portrayal before this month.”

So here are some data points.

Microsoft Edge is now understood to be used on about 3.68 percent of all PCs worldwide. Assuming that same 1.5 billion base, that means that only 55.2 million people actively use Microsoft Edge. That’s only 9.2 percent of all (600 million) Windows 10 users.

So less than 10 percent of Windows 10 users are using Edge actively. (Remember: Microsoft claimed that over 50 percent of Windows 10 users are using Edge actively.)

Concerned about the new math? You should be. But it’s interesting that Net Application’s data now much more closely maps to what StatCounter has been saying all along. That firm claims that Microsoft Edge usage sits at just 2.06 percent usage overall.

Even worse for Microsoft, usage in its new browser has only declined by percentage over time, even as usage in Windows 10—the only desktop OS on which Edge is available—has gone up. In May 2016, for example, Edge accounted for 28.5 percent of all web browsing on Windows 10. By October 2017, this number had fallen to 15.7 percent. (StatCounter says that Edge usage on Windows 10 has been relatively stable, by percentage, over this time period. But it also says that it is less, and closer to 10 percent.)

I’m curious to see how or if Microsoft will try to refute this data. Its previous claim of 330 million active users was never explained, and I had theorized that a lot of that usage must have come from non-browsing activities like PDF reading, since Edge is the default PDF reader in Windows 10. But no amount of guessing could ever close the gap in the numbers. And that gap is now a yawning chasm.

So we’ll see how Microsoft handles this. But from this newly revised position, Edge isn’t just doing poorly. It’s an outright disaster.