Google Chrome Passes Safari in Browser Share

News

Jeff Gamet

8:29 AM, Jan. 4th ET, 2010

Articles by Author Jeff Gamet on Twitter Contact Author Bio

Comments (6)

Apple's Safari Web browser lost its third place market share slot to Google Chrome in December 2009, ending a multi-year run as the third most popular Web browser according to data from Net Applications.

Chrome's lead over Safari isn't by much with 4.63 percent of the market compared to Safari's 4.46 percent. If, however, Chrome can continue to outpace Safari's growth, it won't take long for that gap to widen.

December also marks the first month where Google Chrome has officially been available for Mac OS X, adding the browser to the cros--platform mix.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer continued it's long term decline to drop down to 62.69 percent of the browser market -- the lowest the Windows-only browser has managed to hit to date. Firefox continued its general upward trend in December with 24.61 percent of the market.

Web browser usage statistics are gathered from a subset of Web sites, so the data represents only a rough estimate of the actual number of people surfing the Web with a specific application. Based on the overall trends, however, it looks like Web surfers are still losing interest in Microsoft's browser offering and interest in Google's Chrome browser is growing.

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6 Observer Comments

Jeff Gamet said on January 4th, 2010 at 9:07 AM:

I’m betting dissatisfaction with Internet Explorer will help boost Google’s Chrome market share fairly quickly. Based on the trends, it looks like lots IE users have been looking for alternatives for quite a while, and Chrome makes for a fresh choice since Firefox and Safari have been the only two significant options for some time.

xmattingly

said on January 4th, 2010 at 9:47 AM:

We were just looking at browser statistics at my day job the other day; I was completely floored to see how much damage Firefox has done to Exploder in the past couple of years. Weak support for web-compliant CSS and faulty security? M$ has earned what they’ve been handed, and then some.

Naturally, as with any other compiled statistic, those numbers change depend on who does the compiling. These guys show Chrome as having twice as much use as Safari: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Safari is my browser of choice, and I’m a little bummed that they get very little play. It’s a fair bet that it’ll be destined to hover in the range of Macs’ market share. The upside to that though is that WebKit will be a lot more prominent, which I think is a very good thing for code compliant HTML/CSS rendering of websites.

geoduck

said on January 4th, 2010 at 11:52 AM (Edited: 01/26/2012 2:46 PM):

The real question is staying power. A lot of people tried Chrome when it came out. We’ll know in January-March if they go back to their old browser or not.

saintlouisranger said on January 4th, 2010 at 7:06 PM:

I find this report a bit flakey and/or half backed. Since it covers a beta version of a product that still has a number of fine bugs. I’ll stick with Safari for now.

computerbandgeek

said on January 5th, 2010 at 4:33 AM:

I find this report a bit flakey and/or half backed. Since it covers a beta version of a product that still has a number of fine bugs.

How does the quality of a beta browser in any way reflect the quality of an article that discusses global browser choice trends?

Alan A.

said on January 5th, 2010 at 5:16 AM (Edited: 01/18/2010 9:41 AM):

How does the quality of a beta browser in any way reflect the quality of an article that discusses global browser choice trends?

I think that with Google Chrome taking a small bite from Safari in it’s new foray into the Mac market, this makes GC a worthy item to take note.

However, I understand saintlouisranger’s concern over GC’s stability. And yes, Jeff G. might be a bit too bold to state that GC is growing interest at this point (then again, I am assuming that assuming that Jeff is only referring to the Mac OS version).

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