14 DAY TRIAL // Google Chrome lost market share for the third month in a row, while Internet Explorer saw a small bump in usage, continuing the positive trend of late. Firefox though slipped even further down in March.
The latest numbers from Net Applications tell an increasingly familiar story. Google Chrome, which has been growing like crazy since launch, three and a half years ago, is finally slowing down.
In fact, it's not only slowing down, it's losing market share. Net Applications has explained that it no longer takes pre-rendered pages into account, pages that Chrome loads but never shows to users if its prediction of where the user will want to go next fails.
However, that would account for a small dip, not a three-month slide. Google Chrome had a 18.57 percent share in March, down from 18.90 in February and 19.11 at the end of 2011.
Meanwhile, IE added about one percentage point to its market share, going from 52.84 percent to 53.83 percent. The increasing adoption of IE9, mostly thanks to more and more people switching over to Windows 7, may account for part of the growth.
But, since Net Applications looks at browser usage, it may simply be that more people used IE in the last month than they'd usually do, not that they're switching over from Chrome or Firefox, as Microsoft would like.
Still, Microsoft does like Net Applications reporting, which coincidentally has been more favorable to Internet Explorer and less so to Google's Chrome, over StatCounter, which has shown Chrome gaining more and more market share, and explained why it believes Net Applications numbers are better.
Elsewhere in the market, Firefox is still not seeing any traction and is bleeding a small amount of users (or usage) every month. It's still got a lead on Google Chrome, but the gap is closing even as Chrome is losing market share.