Microsoft may have dominated the browser service competition for decades, but recent data showed that it may soon lose its top position.
Last month, the company's Internet Explorer (IE) and Edge saw their most significant decline in a combined user share drop of 2.1 percent, its biggest one-month decline in the 11 years that metrics vendor Net Applications has been recording the statistics.
IE and Edge earned 44.8 percent of the total market share in February, which is significantly lower than the 57.4 percent it earned on the same month of the previous year. These browsers started to go below the 50 percent mark in December last year.
The data also showed that Microsoft's IE and Edge had their biggest advantage over Google Chrome in March 2015, when the browsers hit more than 55 percent compared to the latter's 25 percent market share. However, from that time onwards, the number of IE and Edge users saw a steady decline as opposed to Google Chrome, which continued to rise in terms of users.
Chrome's user share in February reached as high as 36.6 percent – higher than the recorded number in January at 1.5 percentage points and even higher than what it achieved 12 months earlier by as much as 11.9 percentage points. If the trend continues, Google Chrome may just topple Microsoft's browsers as the most used browser in the world.
IE is speculated to fall even under the 40 percent mark during the same period when Chrome would overtake Microsoft's browsers.
Other data showed that Chrome is already winning against IE and Edge. According to the Digital Analytics Program (DAP), Chrome's user share reached up to 44.1 percent in February, while IE and Edge earned a combined user share of 22.6 percent.
The DAP, which has most of its visits coming from the United States, has been portraying Chrome as a top browser for quite a while now.
According to the data, 53.4 percent of site visitors come from the United States while 46.6 percent are site visitors from other parts of the world. These include India (5.3 percent), China (5 percent), Mexico (3 percent), United Kingdom (2.1 percent) and Australia (1.9 percent), among others.
IE's fall and Chrome's rise to the top may be due in part to an announcement in August 2014, when Microsoft told users of older IE versions they need to upgrade their browsers by Jan. 12, 2016.
As a result, IE users needed to rethink the way they choose browsers and ended up using rival browsers instead such as Chrome.
While the Jan. 12 deadline is long overdue, IE users, at least more than a third of the number, chose to stick with outdated versions of the browser despite the consequence of not getting any security updates.
In contrast, Microsoft's Edge, the company's default browser for Windows 10, seemed to perform better in terms of user share. Last month, it accounted for 3.9 percent of the market share, which is an increase of about nine-tenths of a percentage point for the month, and also for its highest gained percentage point since it launched last summer.
