Microsoft Edge, the Chromium-based browser, finally seems to be getting some attention as it has become the second most popular web browser in the world

According to the latest figures released by NetMarketShare, Edge accounts for 759% of the web browser market This is second only to Google Chrome, which dominates the market with a 685% share, and falls to third as Mozilla's Firefox browser's share drops from 927% to 719%

Despite Microsoft's announcement of Edge as its next-generation browser, it failed to generate interest in Edge

Later, however, Microsoft went back to the drawing board and improved Edge into a Chromium-based browser, using the open source code behind Google Chrome, Opera, and Amazon Silk browsers

This allowed users to switch to the new Edge and still use the same browser extensions they used in Chrome As a result, Edge is a more flexible browser and no longer suffers from the incompatibility issues that older versions of Edge had because it was built on Microsoft's proprietary engine The Chromium-based Edge is also faster than previous versions

The move to Chromium seems to have paid off for Microsoft, and despite being only a few months out of beta, its market share is growing rapidly It won't catch up to Chrome anytime soon, but neither will other browsers

And Edge's market share would likely be much higher if not for the 56% of people still using Internet Explorer 11, due to corporate IT policy constraints and users who are not very familiar with Windows 10 and want to stick with what they are used to likely

If you are considering switching from Chrome or Firefox, the Edge browser looks good: In addition to supporting Chrome extensions and being faster than before, Edge has finally dropped Microsoft's own Bing search engine to become the world's most popular and arguably the best search engine in the world, switching to Google