Google's Chrome cements number three spot in browser wars

Stephen Withers
Monday, 04 January 2010 09:45

IT Industry - Development

There now seems little argument that Google's Chrome is the third most popular web browser on the planet, pushing Apple's Safari into fourth place.

Weekly figures released last month by Net Applications' Market Share showed Google's Chrome inching ahead of Apple's Safari.

The December figures have now been reviewed by the company's quality assurance team, and they show Chrome has indeed overtaken Safari.

The shares taken by the top five browsers are now - according to Net Applications - Internet Explorer (62.69%), Firefox (24.61%), Chrome (4.63%), Safari (4.46%) and Opera (2.40%).

That said, Safari's share was the highest for the year, bouncing back from a slight dip to 4.36% in November from 4.42% in October - despite suspicions that the arrival of the Chrome beta for Mac OS X might have been one of the reasons for Chrome's early-December surge.

What is unquestionable is the continuing loss of share by Internet Explorer, which dropped around one percentage point per month during the second half of 2009.

Usage has shifted to Firefox, Chrome, Safari and - to a lesser extent - Opera.

StatCounter - another web analytics company - has been reporting  Chrome as the number three browser since July.

Net Applications' figures show the use of Windows is falling much more slowly than that of Internet Explorer, from 93.66% in January 2009 to 92.21% in December.

The largest beneficiary has been Mac OS X, which rose from 4.71% to 5.11% in the same period. Linux went from 0.90% to 1.02%.

Mobile platforms fared proportionately well, doubling or even tripling their share. Java ME rose from 0.22% to 0.53%, iPhone from 0.20% to 0.44%, and Symbian from 0.07% to 0.23%.