It's safe to assume that Microsoft has absolutely no regrets about dismantling its Edge browser and rebuilding it around Chromium, the same underlying engine that powers Google's Chrome browser, It is not hard to imagine that one day it will challenge Chrome for the top spot.

I'm getting a little ahead of myself. But as WindowsLatest first reported, according to Net Marketshare, Edge usage is second only to Chrome and ahead of Firefox Edge usage is second only to Chrome and ahead of Firefox.

Alternatively, according to StatCounter figures, Edge is in third place behind Chrome and Safari. This is up from a paltry 0.57 percent share in the same month last year and, as BleepingComputer points out, represents a significant growth rate of 1,300 percent over the past 12 months.

Of course, starting from such a low base, even modest growth would be an eye-popping percentage. But it is still impressive that Edge has gone from almost non-existent (in terms of usage) to surpassing Firefox, which sits at 7.95 percent (down from 9.25 percent in March 2020) in the space of a year.

Chrome, on the other hand, has dropped from a high of 70.33 percent over the past year to a current 67.14 percent. In other words, part of Edge's rise in popularity has come at the expense of Chrome.

Not surprisingly, Edge's rise in popularity began in earnest last June, when Microsoft began distributing the new version to Windows 10 users via Windows Update. But the increased use of Edge is not just a matter of convenience; Edge is fast, supports many extensions, and has nifty features (such as vertical tabs).

Whether Edge can catch up to Chrome remains to be seen. It may seem trivial, but browser market share actually matters: some companies, like Mozilla, profit from selling the browser's default search engine, and the bigger the market share, the more companies like Google are willing to pay.

Beyond that, browsers dominate the Web and the standards that drive the online experience. Google, for example, has moved away from allowing third-party tracking cookies in favor of a web technology called Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), which groups users into groups, or "cohorts."

"FLoC is a new approach to interest-based advertising that improves privacy while providing publishers with the tools they need for a viable advertising business model. "FLoC is still under development and we expect it to evolve," Google Google stated.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation believes that "FLoC is a terrible idea" and will ultimately "create new privacy risks" for users. Whether that is true or not, Google's share of the browser market is so large that it does not matter in the sense that it holds the power to make such decisions, whether or not there are valid objections.