Webmasters, Windows 10 and the Emergence of Bing

Microsoft has offered Windows 7 and Windows 8 users a free upgrade to Windows 10. What does this mean for the web designer and web marketer?

The Rise of Bing

Bing is essentially built into Windows 10, it is super easy to use, and very convenient. This will definitely increase the amount of people searching using Bing. I would guess that Google will lose 5% or more of their market share to Bing thanks to Windows 10.

This means that you definitely need to start optimizing your site for Bing. Things like Bing Places for Business and Bing Webmaster Tools is something any serious website owner should set up, if you haven’t already. In the past most lazy Search Engine Optimizers would just optimize for Google and let the other search engines play catch up. Bing is a serious search engine and now all SEOs must recognize that. Bing has definitely started a war of search engines. Bing probably won’t supplant Google, but it is definitely catching up.

Windows 10 and Microsoft Edge Browser for the Web Designer

Is the web designer affected by Windows 10? Of course, adding a new Internet Explorer version, (uh I mean Microsoft’s Edge browser) can always give a web designer a headache. So is Microsoft’s Edge browser a breakthrough, on the edge of the latest technologies? Not exactly, as far as the web designer is concerned the Edge browser supports about 6% more features than Internet Explorer 11, but still supporting 25% less features as Chrome, FireFox, or Safari. Just because it is called edge doesn’t mean it is cutting edge, it just means it is the latest version of Internet Explorer.

As more and more people upgrade to Windows 10, designers and webmasters will definitely need to start testing their designs on the new Edge browser. I suspect as a result of Edge being set as the default browser in Windows 10 that there will be a significant amount of Edge users emerging.

Final Thoughts

As years go by the web designer will see the rise and fall of many browsers and search engines. All in all I feel this is a new era search engine competition. But as far as Microsoft’s Edge browser is concerned, it is really just the newest Internet Explorer rebranded.