While Microsoft Edge sits pretty steady between 4% and 5% of the overall usage share on desktop computer systems, usage has actually doubled in a year’s time according to Microsoft.
A recent tweet fired off from the official Microsoft Edge Dev account suggests that Edge is used on 330 million devices each month.
That’s more than double the 150 million figure that Microsoft officials revealed back in April of 2016.
Microsoft held the Microsoft Edge Web Summit 2017 on September 13, 2017, and the new usage count was revealed during summit’s keynote.
The Twitter message reads: Microsoft Edge users are activate on 330 million monthly devices! Tune in now to Edge Summit keynote.
Any device that Edge is being started on at least once a month is counted towards the number. So, heave daily Edge use and once a month Edge sessions count both towards the number.
Microsoft counts Edge on all available platforms that run Windows 10. This includes PCs and mobile devices, and also virtual machines that Edge is run in.
The “active devices” metric is not overly accurate because of that, but also because it cannot be equated with the same number of users. A user may run Edge on multiple devices, and others may share a PC.
Microsoft Edge is only available on devices running Windows 10, and the last Windows 10 user metric that Microsoft revealed was that the operating system was installed on more than 500 million devices.
How does the number stack up to Microsoft’s main competition? Techcrunch ran a story back in November 2016 in which it cited Google’s Darin Fisher saying that 2 billion active Chrome installs were in use across desktop and mobile devices.
Read also: Microsoft Edge: show address bar all the time
Mozilla meanwhile revealed in September 2015 that 500 million people around the world use the Firefox web browser.
Google uses the same metric as Microsoft — device installs — to highlight the distribution of the browser on the desktop and on mobile.
It is fair to say that the number of devices that Edge is being used on at least once per month has doubled in a year. That’s good news for Microsoft, but the vagueness of the data makes it impossible to dig deeper and find out how well Edge is really doing, especially when usage tracking companies suggest that the browser is not really improved usage share wise.
Now You: Have you tried Edge?