Welcome to the 2020 browser wars where both Google and Microsoft take shots at their competitors as they fight for a bigger share of the market.

With the widespread use of Windows and its bundling of Internet Explorer, Microsoft once dominated the browser landscape. Then in 2008, Google released the Chrome web browser, which offered better performance and features.

According to StatCounter, by May 2012 Google had caught up to Microsoft and quickly surpassed it while Internet Explorer saw a steep decline.

Browser Market Share between Jan 2009 - Jan 2020

Trying once again to regain browser market share, when Windows 10 was first released in 2015, Microsoft included Edge as the default browser. Internet Explorer's successor, though, was unfinished with many basic features missing and degraded performance.

Despite it being the default web browser in Windows 10, Microsoft Edge completely failed to gain the lost market share.

With Google Chrome holding over 68% of the market share in 2018, Microsoft decided to rebuild its Edge browser using the same Chromium engine as Chrome with extra features and a modern user interface.

The first stable version of the new Microsoft Edge was released on January 15th, 2020 and it has been well received by both users and critics.

With its performance on par with Chrome and supporting almost all the same features, Google may be starting to get worried as they begin to heavily promote Google Chrome to Microsoft Edge users.

The 2020 browser wars heat up

Over the past couple of weeks, Google has been increasingly displaying ads on its web properties that target users of the new Microsoft Edge browser.

As Microsoft Edge is based on Chromium and it shares the source code with Google Chrome, it means it can also use Chrome extensions.

Last week, Google's Chrome Web Store started displaying a warning to Edge users recommending that they switch to Chrome for better security.

“Google recommends switching to Chrome to use extensions securely,” the warning reads.

Since then, Google has been recommending Chrome to Edge users in even more of their web services such as Google Docs, Google News, Google Search results, and even Google Translate.

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To do this, Google is using the browser's 'user-agent' string to identify all the Edge users visiting these services and to display a warning message suggesting a Chrome switch.

Microsoft is getting involved too

However, Google is not the only one involved in these types of advertising tactics.

Microsoft has started to use Windows 10 to advertise Edge in the Start menu, Windows Search results, and it also uses Bing to show warnings when users search for 'Chrome'.

Earlier this month, Microsoft started using the Windows 10 Start Menu to suggest that Firefox users switch to the new Microsoft Edge.

Edge suggestion in Windows 10 Start Menu

Microsoft is also promoting the new Edge browser in Bing when people search for Chrome.

Microsoft Edge promoted in Bing

Finally, Microsoft tries to discourage people from changing their default browser in Windows 10 to something other than Edge.

Changing the Windows 10 default browser

Just yesterday, Microsoft started rolling out the new Microsoft Edge browser via Windows Update to Windows 10 Insiders and in a few weeks to all other users.

This will immediately increase Edge's market share as every Windows 10 user gets the new browser and potentially starts to use it.

This move will escalate things even further as the two behemoths battle over a larger share of users for their browsers.