14 DAY TRIAL // There's no definite way of knowing the exact market share of web browsers around the world, but there are some good estimates. Still, sometimes, knowing what browsers a group of people use can be interesting and even useful for determining larger trends.
For example, Google Chrome is now the most popular browser among visitors of Techmeme, one of the most popular and arguably the best tech news aggregator on the web.
Of course, Techmeme visitors are hardly representative of the larger population or the mainstream audience. But the demographic is easy to place, they're mostly tech savvy folks and early adopters.
And it seems they are living up to their labels, visitors used Google Chrome 34 percent of the time in September. Chrome is the youngest browser to compete for a significant chunk of market share and it looks like its replacing Firefox as the favorite browser of the tech savvy crowd.
Firefox still commands a respectable 30 percent share of the visits and it took Chrome two years to reach this point so Mozilla's browser is not going anywhere just yet.
Techmeme users are also Apple fans, the stats show, as 21 percent of them used Safari, which most likely means they were running Mac OS X as well.
Microsoft's Internet Explorer accounted for just 12 percent of the visits. Opera doesn't seem to be more popular with this niche than it is with the general population since it only managed to get a 1 percent share.
Note that this relates to the total number of visits and not to the number of unique visitors. As such, a visitor could be using two, three or even more browsers.
This means that Chrome may not necessarily be the preferred browser of 34 percent of the people visiting Techmeme last month. However, it was used in 34 percent of the cases, perhaps an even more relevant figure.