Edging out Safari after the beta launch for Mac and Linux

Dec 15, 2009 15:21 GMT  ·  By
Google Chrome edges out Safari in browser market share after the beta launch for Mac and Linux
   Google Chrome edges out Safari in browser market share after the beta launch for Mac and Linux

The recent beta launch for Mac and Linux seems to have had the desired effect and has pushed Google Chrome usage quite a bit from November. In fact, the launch seems to have increased Chrome's market share by about 10 percent making it the third most popular browser in the world, marginally squeezing out Safari which moves to the fourth place.

According to numbers by Net Applications Google Chrome is now at number three with 4.4 percent of the market, hardly something to brag about but still a 0.4 percentage points jump from November. The 4.4 percent market share was observed for the December 6 to 12 week and was based on data collected from 160 million users and 40,000 sites. For the same week Apple's Safari, still mainly used only on Macs, only managed to attract 4.37 percent of the users enough to slip behind Chrome in market share.

Even more interesting are the numbers broken down by platform, Google Chrome was used by 1.3 percent of Macs for the week in December, up from just 0.32 percent in November. This can be easily explained as Chrome was only available as an unstable dev channel release up till now on Mac. The rise was made at the expense of both Safari, which dominates the platform even more authoritative than Internet Explorer on Windows, and Firefox.

On Linux though, Chrome saw an even bigger jump of 66 percent in market share up from 3.81 percent in November to 6.34 percent in the measured week in December. Linux is pretty much Firefox's domain at this point, but Linux users are more open to new technologies and products so many were eager to see what Google has done in the space. These numbers are just preliminary and are likely to go down after the initial surge and it will be interesting to see how will Chrome fare in the longer term.

"I believe Linux will be the more intriguing arena to watch," Vizzaccaro, executive vice president of Net Applications, said. "Firefox currently dominates browser usage on Linux the way that IE dominates Windows systems and Safari dominates Mac systems. With the emergence of Chrome, I'll be curious to see if Chrome will be to Firefox on Linux what Firefox is to IE on Windows... a forceful competitor".