Chrome vs Firefox vs Edge: The Browser Extension Market in Q2 2026

Chrome added 49,518 brand-new extensions in Q2 2026 — more than the *entire* Edge catalog holds. The Chrome Web Store grew by 43,418 net listings in a single quarter to reach 221,717 published extensions — and it sped up while everyone else slowed down. We tracked all three major stores daily through June 30, 2026. The short version: the gap between Chrome and the rest keeps widening, even as Firefox and Edge dig into niches of their own.

This is our Q2 2026 cross-browser report, the follow-up to our Q1 2026 state of browser extensions. What’s below: where each store stands, who grew and who stalled, why browser market share is a lousy predictor of extension reach, and the platform policies pushing the numbers around.

Chrome added 43,418 net extensions in Q2 — more than five times the combined net additions of Firefox (+6,487) and Edge (+1,895). Scale is the whole story.

Firefox’s growth cooled sharply: +9,821 in Q1 dropped to +6,487 in Q2 — even though new submissions *rose*. Churn, not weak supply, is the cause.

Edge has the worst maintenance problem: 61.6% of its catalog hasn’t been touched in 12+ months, versus Chrome’s 35.3%.

The market in one snapshot: scale is everything

Chrome isn’t merely the largest extension store. It’s larger than the other two combined, with room to spare, and the distance grows every quarter. As of June 30, 2026, Chrome lists 221,717 published extensions, Firefox 89,952, and Edge 30,636.

Put plainly: Chrome holds roughly 1.8x as many extensions as Firefox and Edge put together (120,588). If you’re a developer deciding where to ship first, the arithmetic isn’t subtle — Chrome is where the catalog, the users, and the competition all live.

Chrome accelerated while Firefox and Edge slowed

Quarterly growth is where the divergence really shows. Chrome’s net additions *grew* from Q1 to Q2. Firefox and Edge both added fewer extensions in Q2 than they had three months earlier.

Chrome accelerated about 44% quarter-over-quarter (+30,125 → +43,418). Firefox decelerated 34% (+9,821 → +6,487), Edge 21% (+2,391 → +1,895). Chrome’s Q2 bar is the only one on the chart taller than its Q1 bar.

Here’s the nuance the headline net number buries: Firefox’s slowdown is not a supply problem. New Firefox submissions actually *rose* in Q2, to 16,000 from 12,078 in Q1. Net growth cooled because delistings climbed right alongside them.

Chrome’s submission firehose tells its own story: 49,518 brand-new extensions landed in Q2 alone — more new Chrome extensions in three months than Edge’s entire catalog contains. Edge, meanwhile, is the only store where new submissions actually *fell* quarter-over-quarter (2,814 → 2,466). For a store already fighting to attract developers, that’s the wrong direction.

A methodology note worth pausing on: Chrome shows very high gross delisting-and-restoration churn that nets out to roughly zero — in Q2, 102,391 gross delistings against 96,291 restorations, a re-crawl/visibility artifact rather than real removals. Firefox is the opposite case: most of its Q2 delistings were never restored, which is exactly the real churn behind its slowdown. We rely on the net (stock-based) figures, which reconcile exactly with the flow-based totals, and treat Chrome’s gross churn columns as noise.

Browser share doesn’t equal extension reach

The most tempting cross-check on store size is browser market share — and the two refuse to line up. On desktop worldwide in May 2026, Chrome held 74.93%, Edge 9.94%, and Firefox 3.81% StatCounter.

The mismatch is hard to miss. Firefox has the smallest desktop footprint of the three but the second-largest catalog — about 23,600 extensions per point of desktop share, eight times Chrome’s ratio. Edge has the opposite problem: nearly 10% of desktop share, more than double Firefox’s, yet the smallest catalog by a wide margin.

The likeliest explanation is developer loyalty and platform openness, not raw audience size. Firefox’s add-on community has long punched above its user base — Mozilla notes that "nearly half of all Firefox users have installed at least one extension" Mozilla. Edge, for all its Windows-driven distribution, has never converted that reach into developer mindshare. Plenty of developers just port their Chromium build and never bother submitting to Edge at all.

Reach: Chrome leads, Edge is closer than you’d think

Aggregate the installed user counts and the picture gets more interesting. Summing per-store user metrics on June 30, 2026:

One critical caveat before anyone screenshots that table: these metrics are not comparable across stores. Chrome reports cumulative users, Edge reports active installs, and Firefox reports *daily* active users — a far stricter, smaller denominator. So Firefox’s 73 million badly understates its true reach next to the other two. Chrome’s ~2.0 billion cumulative users still lead, but Edge’s 1.64 billion aggregate installs are strikingly close for a catalog one-seventh the size — with a big asterisk: about 85% of those installs sit in roughly 9,000 listings flagged hidden in the store (no longer surfaced in search), and a single hidden Microsoft component ("Edge relevant text changes") accounts for 1.01 billion on its own — 62% of the store’s entire install base.

The per-extension view makes the same point louder. Edge extensions, while few, are unusually well-installed on average:

Edge’s mean of 53,603 installs per extension is roughly six times Chrome’s — though the single Microsoft component above does a lot of that lifting; exclude it and the mean falls to about 20,500, still more than double Chrome’s. Either way, the signal is the same: Edge’s smaller catalog skews toward established, ported-from-Chrome extensions that arrive with an existing audience, rather than the long tail of experiments that floods Chrome. Then look at the medians: 53 for Edge, 14 for Chrome, 1 for Firefox. Every store is brutally top-heavy. The typical extension anywhere has a near-trivial install count; a handful of giants drag the averages skyward. (Firefox’s median of 1 again reflects its stricter daily-active metric.)

This is the reality check every developer should tattoo somewhere visible: the median Chrome extension has 14 users. Publishing and being found are not the same thing.

Quality is shaky — and abandonment is the bigger problem

Ratings look grim across all three stores when you measure the full catalog, mostly because the overwhelming majority of extensions are unrated.

Those averages are dragged down by unrated extensions counted as zero — 116,735 of Chrome’s listings carry no rating at all, more than half the catalog. Among extensions that *are* rated, quality actually clusters high: 90,390 of Chrome’s rated extensions sit at 4 stars or higher — 67,812 of them at a perfect 5. So the takeaway isn’t "extensions are bad." It’s that rating coverage is thin, and an unrated extension is effectively invisible to ranking and trust signals.

The more useful quality metric is abandonment. We measured the share of each catalog with no update in 12 and 24 months as of June 30, 2026.

Edge has the worst maintenance problem of the three: 61.6% of its catalog hasn’t been updated in over a year, and 46.1% has gone untouched for two-plus years. Firefox isn’t far behind at 53.9% and 35.5%. Chrome is the healthiest at 35.3% / 16.3% — partly a structural effect (a constant influx of fresh submissions dilutes the stale tail) and partly discipline imposed by Manifest V3 migration deadlines, which forced active developers to ship updates or get removed.

For Edge, the abandonment figure ties straight back to its install-per-extension story: a catalog full of older, ported extensions that pull installs but get little ongoing love.

Where the growth is: productivity, AI, and privacy

Each store uses its own category taxonomy, so cross-store comparison here isn’t apples-to-apples. Within each store, though, productivity-style tooling dominates the catalog — and captured most of the net growth in Q2.

Top categories by extension count (June 2026):

The fastest-growing categories in Q2 show where developer attention is flowing:

Chrome’s "productivity/tools" bucket alone grew by 20,062 extensions in a quarter — nearly half of Chrome’s entire net growth piled into a single category. That tracks with a broader platform shift: Google reports that 17% of all extensions created for the Chrome Web Store in the past year use AI Chrome for Developers. Most of that AI tooling lands squarely in productivity.

Firefox’s fastest-growing category being privacy-security (+16.4%) is a telling contrast. It reflects a developer base that still ships the content-blockers and tracker-stoppers the platform uniquely keeps supporting (more on that below). Edge’s fastest mover, Developer-Tools (+15.5%), suggests its growth — modest as it is — leans on technical, ported tooling rather than consumer apps.

The policy forces behind the numbers

Catalog dynamics don’t happen in a vacuum. Three platform decisions shaped Q2 2026.

Chrome’s Manifest V2 endgame is finished. Google disabled MV2 everywhere on July 24, 2025, then removed the last enterprise escape hatch — the `ExtensionManifestV2Availability` policy — with Chrome 139 Chrome for Developers. That forced migration is a big reason Chrome’s abandonment rate is the lowest of the three: stale MV2 extensions got pushed out, and active developers had no choice but to ship MV3 updates.

Firefox deliberately kept both manifests. Unlike Chrome, Firefox still supports MV2 alongside MV3 — including the `blockingWebRequest` API that powers full-strength ad blockers like uBlock Origin Mozilla. This dual stance is the structural reason Firefox over-indexes on privacy-security extensions, and why developers building content-blockers gravitate there. It also helps explain Firefox’s healthy submission flow even as net growth cooled.

Edge has no firm MV3 deadline. Microsoft stopped accepting new MV2 extensions in Partner Center back in July 2022 but still hasn’t set a date to stop *running* them, noting only that it is "in the process of updating this MV3 migration timeline" Microsoft Learn. No forcing function, no deadline pushing dormant extensions to update or exit — which fits Edge’s high abandonment rate perfectly.

Two risk trends deserve a flag for marketers and analysts. First, the Chrome Web Store’s tightened affiliate-ads policy took effect June 10, 2025 — extensions may no longer add, modify, or replace affiliate links without clear disclosure and a direct user benefit, a change driven by the PayPal Honey controversy Chrome for Developers. Second, the AI surge carries documented security exposure: researchers have found high-risk AI browser extensions exfiltrating prompts, page content, and even passwords while posing as productivity tools Unit 42, Palo Alto Networks. As AI becomes the dominant growth engine, store-trust signals — ratings, update recency, permissions — matter more, not less.

What this means if you build, market, or analyze extensions

For developers: Chrome is non-negotiable for reach, but remember the median extension there has 14 users — distribution and discoverability beat shipping, every time. Firefox is your highest-leverage second platform if you build privacy or developer tooling, thanks to an engaged base and dual-manifest support. Edge offers better average installs but a stagnant, ports-heavy ecosystem; treat it as a low-effort Chromium re-publish, not a primary bet.

For marketers: rating coverage is the open gap. More than half of Chrome’s catalog is unrated, which makes soliciting legitimate reviews one of the cheapest competitive moats on the table. And in an AI-heavy market under tighter affiliate-ads enforcement, trust signals — recent updates, clear permissions — increasingly drive conversion.

For analysts and researchers: watch the net, not the gross, because store crawl artifacts wildly inflate delisting/restoration churn. And don’t read browser market share as a stand-in for extension supply. Firefox’s eight-fold extensions-per-share-point advantage over Chrome is the clearest proof that ecosystem health runs on developer affinity, not audience size.

Methodology

All store-level figures (extension counts, net changes, new listings, ratings, installs, abandonment, and categories) come from our own daily parsing of the Chrome Web Store, Firefox Add-ons (AMO), and Microsoft Edge Add-ons, via exstats.com. The latest snapshot in this report is June 30, 2026; Q2 2026 covers April 1–June 30, and Q1 2026 covers January 1–March 31. "Published/listed" counts exclude store-deleted listings. User metrics differ by store (Chrome cumulative users, Edge active installs, Firefox daily active users) and are not strictly comparable. Browser market-share figures and all platform/policy facts are externally sourced and cited inline.