microsoft: How Microsoft’s Windows 11 browser strategy may be hurting Google – Times of India

With its recent moves, Microsoft has made it clear that it wants Windows users to stick to Edge browser and latest figures by Statcounter indicate that the company has managed to do so. According to the tracking website, Edge has seen a slight increase in its market share last month. As seen on the graph shared on the website, the browser’s market share increased to 4.19% in November from 3.99% in October. On the other hand, Google Chrome is the only browser that has lost the market share. The browser’s market share dropped down to 64.04% in November from 65.27% in October.
Although Edge holds the third highest market share from April, it is still quite far from Safari and Chrome. It can not be denied that Microsoft’s move to revamp its browser using Chromium has finally started paying off.
The tech giant recently stepped up its campaign against Chrome when it started to display prompts such as “That browser is so 2008! Do you know what’s new? Microsoft Edge.” whenever a user visited the Chrome browser download page. However, the company later reverted from the aggressive strategy.
Last month, Microsoft also started to block third-party apps like EdgeDeflector. Whenever users search anything through the search box in the Start menu, Microsoft takes them to Edge browser and Bing search engine. Apps like EdgeDeflector are used to avoid these curbs and see the search results in their preferred browser.
With the launch of Windows 11, the company also changed the way users assign default apps. On the new operating system, users had to set default apps according to the type of file or link type instead of a single switch. This means that for changing the default browser, users had to change the default file type for FTP, HTTPS, HTTP, HTML, HTM, PDF, SHTML, SVG, WEBP, XHT and XHTML. The company later added a ‘Set Default’ browser button with Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22509.