14 DAY TRIAL // The browser market has been fairly static recently, at least in terms of trends. The only browser that is seeing some movement, in either direction, is Google Chrome, while Internet Explorer, Firefox and the other popular browsers are largely static relative to their market share.
Chrome added another half a percentage point in the last month, a bit more than in the previous month. Google Chrome now has about 8.5 percent of the market (8.47 percent to be precise), up from 7.98 percent in September. Google's browser had gained another 0.46 percent points from August.
Of course, even with this growth rate, Google Chrome has a long way to go before catching up with the global leaders in the market, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft's Internet Explorer. But if the trends continue, it's only a matter of time.
Firefox lost a bit of market share, a small enough chunk to not make much of a difference. Firefox was used by 22.82 percent of visitors to websites monitored by the consultancy company in October. That's down from 22.96 percent in September. The open source browser hasn't seen much change in market share since summer.
Safari also saw a small uptick in market share, continuing its slow growth. Meanwhile, Opera saw quite a drop, when accounting for its size, going from 2.39 percent in September to 2.28 percent in October.
In absolute numbers, Internet Explorer was once again the biggest loser. The browser lost about half of a percent point across all of its versions.
By versions, IE 6 lost a little over half of a percent point and IE 7 0.47 percent points. IE 8, which has been growing since launch as users switched from IE 6 and IE 7, stopped rising in October and even lost a bit of market share. Granted, IE 9, which is still in beta, is becoming more popular, but is still used only by 0.28 percent of visitors.