Windows 10 users back away from the Edge

Microsoft's new Edge browser has been largely ignored by U.S. users of Windows 10, an online measurement company said Monday.

Instead, Google's Chrome has shanghaied Windows 10's top browser spot.

Although Edge -- the default browser bundled with Windows 10 -- got a temporary boost when the operating system launched in late July, its share of all browsers on the OS quickly slipped from an early peak of about 16% to its current 12%.

According to San Francisco-based Quantcast, Chrome is the dominant browser on Windows 10 in the U.S., with a share slightly north of 70%.

Quantcast measures Web traffic at more than 100 million websites, primarily those in the U.S., to deliver audience and advertising data to brands and publishers. Like most analytics vendors, Quantcast can mine that data to break out browser and OS usage based on website visitors and page views.

In a Monday blog, Quantcast software engineer Jackson Newhouse said that Edge had failed to dislodge Chrome from its dominant spot. Slightly more than 70% of the browser activity originating from Windows 10 was due to Chrome, an even higher percentage than on Windows 7 and Windows 8, where Google's browser accounted for approximately 63% of all activity.

While the raw number of Edge's users has certainly grown as Windows 10's share has climbed -- currently, more than 15% of all Quantcast's Windows traffic comes from the new OS -- Edge's fraction of that increasing number has remained static.

Mozilla's Firefox accounts for more browsing activity on Windows 10 than does Edge. Meanwhile, Internet Explorer (IE) -- -- has a tiny share of less than 5% on Windows 10. IE has been demoted to a supporting role on Windows 10 as an alternative when it's necessary to access sites and Web apps written for that aged browser.

:story: Computerworld