14 DAY TRIAL // In just the first months of availability, Google Chrome Beta has made consistent inroads into the territory of Internet Explorer and Firefox. Both Microsoft’s IE and Mozilla's Firefox started to see their audiences slip a little and ended up losing market share to the new browser from Google. In fact, so did Opera and Netscape with Safari left as the sole browser to gain market share. However, considering that Chrome is based on WebKit open source web browser engine also used by Safari, it is possible that some of Google Browser's traffic to be in fact interpreted as Mac OS X's native browser.
Market monitoring firm Net Applications revealed that Google Chrome's usage share dropped after the initial surge. “Google Chrome usage share has been dropping since its launch, but has stabilized at about .7%,” the outfit stated. This in the context in which Chrome exploded to over 1% of the browser market, more than Opera. Still, at the end of September 2008, Chrome accounted for no less than 0.78% of the browser market, a performance by any standards considering that just a month before, it had 0%.
Internet Explorer usage share dropped in September 2008 to 71.52% from August's 72.15%. Chrome failed to spare Firefox, which is down to 19.46% the past month from 19.73% in August. Even Opera went down from 0.74% in August to just 0.69%. Safari is the only browser that increased its usage share from 6.37% to 6.65% at the end of September.
Net Applications indicated that users of the Mozilla open source browser are rapidly making the jump from version 2.0 to 3.0. “Since August 25th, 51% of Firefox 2.0 users upgraded to version 3.0. This is the result of an update released by Mozilla. This update was offered to all 2.0 users,” Net Applications stated.
Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 is available for download here.
Opera is available for download here.
Google Chrome is available for download here.
Firefox 3.1 Alpha 2 for Windows is available for download here.
Firefox 3.1 Alpha 2 for Linux is available for download here.
Firefox 3.1 Alpha 2 for Mac OS X is available for download here.