14 DAY TRIAL // There's a rather heated competition between desktop browsers, even if the pace of change is rather slow. Since launch, Google Chrome has been growing, Firefox has been staying put for a couple of years now and Internet Explorer is losing market share.
That's the general trend, but things changed in the past few months, the last one in particular, if Net Applications is to be believed. Not only did Chrome lose market share for the third month straight, IE actually gained one percentage point.
But StatCounter paints quite a different picture. Based on its data, Google Chrome is not even slowing down in its ascent; Internet Explorer managed to lose a smaller chunk than in the previous month, but is still going down. Firefox is still frozen in spot though.
The latest StatCounter data shows IE still leading globally, with only 34.81 percent market share at the end of March. That's from 35.75 percent at the end of February and 37.45 at the start of the year.
Chrome, on the other hand, managed to grab 30.87 percent of the market, up from 29.84 percent. It started the year with 28.4 percent.
Finally, Firefox ended March with 24.98 percent, up from, 24.88 percent, virtually unchanged. It started the year with 24.78 percent.
The gap between Chrome and IE is closing and fast. In fact, less than a couple of weeks ago, Chrome overtook IE for the first time for a day, over the weekend when IE usage drops and Chrome usage spikes.
There's no indication that the trend is changing anytime soon and no reason to believe that it will. At best, Chrome's growth will slow down and IE will stabilize once most people switch to IE 9 and then IE 10.