It’s a good move, but that alone is unlikely to give Edge the surge in popularity it needs to catch up with other browsers.
To provide some perspective, currently, Microsoft Edge is installed on about five million Android devices, based on stats from the Google Play Store. Contrast that with 100 million installs of Mozilla’s Firefox, and more than a billion Chrome installations.
Those are sobering numbers that underscore just how much ground Edge needs to cover to even be playing in the same league as other popular web browsers on mobile devices. While we don’t have statistics for installs from the Apple Store, it’s hard to imagine that they’d be any better, and, are probably a fair bit lower.
That’s not to say that Microsoft’s move wasn’t good, because it definitely was. Anything that a company can do to cut down the number of unwanted, annoying, and potentially dangerous ads is a very good thing. Odds are that the company’s recent move will be copied by the major players in the browser world. Even if it doesn’t boost Edge’s numbers much, that’s a win for anybody who uses the internet. Kudos to Microsoft for making the change.