Chrome is now the most popular browser in the world

May 21, 2012 09:20 GMT  ·  By

Google Chrome is now officially the top browser in the world, at least judging by StatCounter data. Last week Chrome overtook Internet Explorer for the entire period for the first time in history. Google Chrome has been more popular than IE in the weekends and saw its market share constantly grow larger, week after week, month after month.

With more than one week left in May, there's still time for Google Chrome to become the most popular browser of the month, solidifying its position.

Google Chrome's growth was helped by a weakening Internet Explorer that lost two percentage points of market share in just four weeks.

This marks a significant milestone for Chrome and for web browsers in general. Internet Explorer has held on to the title of top browser ever since it crushed Netscape in the late nineties.

Microsoft did it by bundling Internet Explorer with every copy of Windows and then solidified its position by forcing the web to adopt Microsoft's own choice of standards and technologies.

Firefox started to fight back eight years ago and Mozilla has been doing great in showing people that they do have a choice when it comes to browsers and by spurring Microsoft and others to actually improve their browsers.

Chrome came much later, four years ago, but it soon took over from Firefox that saw its market share freeze at around 24 percent.

Google's browser has been growing since launch and, even if it may have slowed down recently, it is still going up. Chrome's victory is even more significant when you consider that IE's market share is for all versions combined, IE 6, IE 7, IE 8 and IE 9. Chrome's market share is also for all versions, but the vast majority of users are running the latest stable version thanks to Google's automated update system.