Google Chrome is nothing short of a non-event, Mozilla's Firefox is defective, and Microsoft's Internet Explorer is going nowhere fast, while continuing to lose market share to rivals. These are the conclusions of a whitepaper put together by Janco Associates. The market analysis firm has slammed Chrome as insignificant in relation to its competitors, despite the fact that the Google open-source browser has managed to climb over 1% of the market in under a year since it was released. Furthermore, Janco indicated that Firefox's problems handicapped its usage on some websites. All the while, the shortcomings of rival browsers have not stopped the erosion of IE's market share, which lost 6.43% of its audience in a single year.

“The major browser findings of the study are: Microsoft's Internet Explorer’s market share has stabilized and Google’s Chrome is a non-event. IE 8 has been released but its acceptance is slow at best," revealed Victor Janulaitis, the CEO of Janco. The whitepaper credits IE with a market share of 68.81% in May 2009, compared to 73.23% in May 2008 and 78.69% in March 2007. According to statistics released by Janco, Firefox is at no threat of losing the no.2 browser position, embraced by no less than 19.55% of all users. The Google Desktop and Google Chrome offerings have a joint market share of 5.4%. Opera is at 0.67% from 0.22 in 2008, and Safari at just 0.48%.

“In the last several months Microsoft has stabilized its browser market. Firefox and Google (Desktop and Chrome) are still forces that could eat away at the Microsoft browser monopoly,” the Janco whitepaper adds. “Google is a challenge for Microsoft to face – so far Microsoft continues to outpace Google and beats both Google Desktop and Google Chrome. Based on our test results IE 8 is significantly more robust than prior versions. In addition, IE 8 is feature rich and a step ahead of the other browsers. Both Firefox and Chrome have major defects which limit their usefulness on all sites.” (Janco mentions that the defects are specified in the whitepaper)

Net Applications, also a market analysis company, has a similar perspective over the evolution of the browser market. At the end of April 2009, Internet Explorer accounted for a usage share of 66.10%, Firefox 22.48%, Safari 8.21%, Chrome 1.42%, and Opera 0.68%. Net Applications reveals that IE7 enjoyed a market share of 44.51% at the end of the past month, with Firefox 3.0 at 20.25%, IE6 17.52%, Safari 3.2 4.29%, and Internet Explorer 8 3.99%.













Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) RTW is available for download here (for 32-bit and 64-bit flavors of Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008).

Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 for Windows is available here.

Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 for Linux is available here.

Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 for Mac OS X is available here.

The latest development milestone of Google Chrome is available for download here.

The latest snapshots of Opera are available for download here.