14 DAY TRIAL // With Chrome, Google livened up the web browser wars and really started to make the market actually competitive. Mozilla had already shown the world that it does have a choice with Firefox, but Google showed the world that there’s an alternative to Firefox as well. Since then, both browsers have gone from strength to strength, to the expense of Internet Explorer, but Chrome has also been ‘cannibalizing’ the early-adopter market, by luring in Firefox users. At this point, Chrome owns a decent market share, which ever source you trust.
For example, w3schools.com shows that 15.9 percent of its visitors were using Google Chrome in June and that’s up from 14.5 percent in May. This is also up from 10.8 percent at the beginning of the year. The growing trend is evident, Chrome has been adding more users every month since it launched. Of course, this metric is not representative of the larger population; the site generally attracts a more tech-savvy crowd. For comparison, Firefox was used by 46.6 percent of its users in June and Mozilla’s browser has been hovering around that mark for about a year and a half now, while Chrome has kept on growing.
For a more global view, we can turn to StatCounter. Using data from the websites that use its analytics services, StatCounter also shows Google Chrome slowly rising at the expense of both IE and Firefox. Chrome had a 9.24 percent market share in June and is already at 9.64 percent for July. It started the year with about 6 percent and had a 2.82 percent market share in June 2009, so that should give you an indication of just how much it grew.
Finally, stats from Net Alliance show Google Chrome commanding a more modest 7.24 percent in June, but also a rise from the previous month when it had 7.04 percent. According to the same source, Chrome had 2.4 percent market share in June 2009 and 5.22 percent at the start of this year. The numbers differ, thanks to varying methodology, but the picture is clear, Google Chrome shows no sign of stopping. And with Chrome 6 promising to be a solid release, it’s likely that this trend will continue at least in the short term.