Google Chrome on the march - overtakes Safari

Image via Wikipedia

It's official - Chrome is now #3 in the browser charts by number of users, nudging its way past Safari, Apple's browser offering.

In a little over a year Google Chrome has risen to 4.63% market share and has overtaken Safari, at 4.46%. One possible factor in the swing of about 1% that took place in December 2009 is that Google released Chrome for OS X giving Mac users another, possibly better, lightweight and fast browser to choose from. However, since the total market share of OS X really isn't that high, it was more likely the result of steady growth in Chrome uptake, while Safari stood still.
Mashable covered this in an article yesterday, and the graph they provided shows clearly how Chrome has been steadily growing in popularity. After all, Chrome is technically faster than Safari, and was since the early days, as this chart shows, so it was only a matter of time before it overtook it in terms of its user base.


Of course, Internet Explorer is still king. Then again, my recent acquisition of a new laptop running Windows 7 came with IE8 pre-installed, just as it would have done in Windows 3.x, 95, 98, NT, ME, 2000, XP, 2003 or Vista. The anti-trust, anti-anti-competition brigade didn't manage to change anything in that respect. Until they do, it's not a level playing field, and IE will continue to dominate. Firefox weighs in with 24.61% of the popular vote, and this is what Google are really chasing, so much so, that I think they're starting to really worry Mozilla's CEO John Lilly, and the gloves are coming off - in a way that can only hurt the interests of both companies.

Further reading

• BROWSER WARS: Google Chrome Overtakes Apple's Safari (mashable.com)
• Chrome Overtakes Safari in Browser Wars (appscout.com)
• Apple up, down in end-of-year report (tuaw.com)
• Open source browsers gaining market share (robbiz1978.blogspot.com)
• Chrome grabs market share from IE and Firefox, passes Safari (arstechnica.com)