The browser wars took an historic turn in April, when Firefox narrowly overtook Microsoft's Edge and Internet Explorer in global market share for the first time, according to a report from StatCounter.
Firefox took 15.6 percent of worldwide desktop browser usage compared to a combined 15.5 percent for IE and Edge. All three browsers rank far below Google's Chrome, which has 60.5 percent of the desktop browser market and has been steadily gaining in recent years.
The StatCounter report shows IE at 12.25 percent in April, which means Edge by itself took just 3.25 percent of of the market. That's less than Safari, which held 4.62 percent, but more than last-place Opera, at 1.92 percent.
StatCounter says its tracking code is installed on more than 3 million sites globally, recording more than 15 billions page views every month. Its results differ from those reported by Net Applications, another established analytics firm. It pegged Internet Explorer at 41.33 percent in April, narrowly behind Chrome's 41.71 percent and far ahead of Firefox, which took 10.06 percent.
Net Applications has a much smaller footprint, about 40,000 websites, but it only counts unique visits—that is, one visit to each tracked site per day.
Regardless of which method is used to track market share, Edge hasn't been a resounding success for Microsoft. The fast, lightweight browser has won praise from critics for adopting modern web standards, which IE mostly struggled to do. But it also requires Windows 10, an OS upgrade that many corporate IT departments have yet to make. With consumer sales of traditional desktops declining, corporate users make up an increasingly important portion of the overall Windows footprint.
Meanwhile, Firefox maker Mozilla has been pursuing its own efforts to keep up with Chrome's success on the desktop. It has made overtures to the gaming and IoT industries, and updated Firefox to take advantage of 64-bit Windows operating systems.