In a nutshell: It's a long-running joke that Edge's only function is to download other browsers. But according to Microsoft boss Satya Nadella, Edge has surpassed 30% market share in the US on Windows and has taken share for the last 15 consecutive quarters. However, independent analysis puts a question mark over this statement.
Nadella made the revelation during Microsoft's Q2 2025 earnings call (via Seeking Alpha). He added that the Copilot consumer app is seeing increased engagement and retention with its improved speed, unique personality, and first-of-its-kind features, apparently.
The CEO went on to promote Edge and Bing as being attractive propositions for businesses. "The investments we have made in improving our ad rates are paying off and advertisers increasingly see our network as an essential platform to optimize [return on investment]," he added.
Nadella said Search and News advertising revenue had increased 21% and 20%, respectively, driven by usage from a third-party partnership. He added that growth continues to be driven by "healthy volume growth" in both Edge and Bing.
It's unclear where Nadella is getting his statistics for Edge usage. According to Statcounter, Edge had a 14.5% share of the desktop browser market in the US in January. That's more than the 10.9% it held in April 2021, but its share has fluctuated a lot since then – it peaked with a 16.7% share in January 2024. The likelyhood is that Microsoft is using a different metric that inflates Edge's market share – it's only counting PCs running Windows, for a start.
Edge was first released alongside Windows 10 on July 29, 2015. The browser only managed to gain a tiny portion of market share during its first three years as users were less than enthralled by the offering, especially with market-leader Chrome dominating this space.
Edge's fortunes improved in 2020 after Microsoft fully transitioned the browser from the original EdgeHTML engine to the Chromium open-source project, increasing security and performance while also adding support for Chrome extensions, improving web compatibility, and receiving more frequent updates.
Microsoft has never been averse to playing dirty when it comes to pushing people from Chrome onto Edge. It was reported last week that Bing search results in Edge were obscuring download links for Chrome.
In 2021, Microsoft told people that Chrome was "so 2008" and Edge was better. It also pushed out full-size Edge ads that appeared on the Chrome website, and Edge was accused of stealing data from Chrome without users' consent in January.
Microsoft boasts of Edge's growth, but is it really at 30% market share?
