It seems as though the New Year has started positively for Google. Its browser Google Chrome has now overtaken Safari to become the third most used browser. This is extremely promising especially as the Google only released the browser 15 months ago.

Statistics published by Net Applications and based on the 160 million monthly visitors to the network of websites that use its service showed that Google Chrome leapt from 3.9 percent to 4.6 percent in usage leapfrogging Safari which has 4.5 percent usage.

Interestingly the Net Applications have shown that the usage in IE is slowly declining with a drop from 63.6 percent to 62.7 percent usage and developers would be pleased to see that the usage of IE 6 has dropped form 22.1 percent to 21 percent. It is no surprise that Firefox is still the browser that is breathing down Microsoft’s back as they saw and increase of 24.6% to 24.7%.

According to CNET news the increase in usage of chrome is the result in the beta release for Mac OS X and Linux instead of being limited to Windows.

With Google currently giving Chrome a big push with advertising (of which I have seen at least 10 billboards over the last week in the UK) and the prospective release of their operating system the use of Chrome is likely to continue its climb. Becoming the third browser in a relatively short period of time is pretty impressive even though the figures do look small in comparison to IE and Firefox.

It will be interesting to see how much the usage of Chrome increases over the year and whether it will mount a serious challenge to Microsoft as both browsers will have a major say on the future of each company’s respective search engines.

Google Chrome Billboard in UK

This entry was posted on Monday, January 4th, 2010 at 5:39 pm and is filed under Google, Industry News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.