Chrome grabs "phenomenal" one percent of browser market on day one

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 04 September 2008 01:09

Business IT - Networking

According to Internet monitoring company, StatCounter, Google's new browser, Chrome, took one percent of the global browser market within a day of launch.

"This is a phenomenal performance," said Aodhan Cullen of StatCounter, which is a rival to Google on website analytics. StatCounter analysis conducted on 03 September found that Internet Explorer held 70 percent of the global browser market followed by Firefox with 22 percent, based on a sample of 18.5 million page views globally. StatCounter has over 1.5 million members and claims to track in excess of nine billion page loads per month over its network of two million websites.

According to Cullen, although Google's main target for Chrome is Microsoft "the big loser could be Firefox." Ovum analyst, Laurent Lachal, disagrees, saying Chrome is much less of a challenge to Firefox than Explorer, and the Microsoft desktop environment in general.

"Its release comes a few days after Google renewed its partnership deal with the [Mozilla] foundation, effectively funding it for another three years until November 2011. Mozilla's main challenge (to grow independent from Google's funding) remains unchanged. The foundation now has more time to get its act together in a market that, owing to Chrome, could become not just more competitive but also more open source browser friendly."

Lachal suggests that, eventually, Chrome and Firefox could converge. "But at the moment two strong players (Chrome with Google's mindshare as well as marketing and financial muscle, and Firefox with its market share lead and ecosystem) have more chance against Microsoft than one."