It has been a good month for the ‘underdogs’ in the browser wars this month, with Firefox, Safari and Chrome all gaining ground.
Firefox has hit a fantastic milestone, now with over 20% of the web browser market, up 4% from last month. Apple’s Safari has climbed to just over 7%, up 8.5% from last month.
Even Google’s Chrome has crawled back some ground, after a steady drop off rate from the browsers first month. Chrome gained around 12% during the month, taking it’s total share to just under 1%.
The losers this month were both Opera and Internet Explorer. Opera lost 5% of it’s market, and is now 5th in the race, behind Google Chrome. November also saw Internet Explorer’s market share plummet below 70% for the first time since 1999.
You can view the full report at the Market Share website. Historical data can be sourced from Wikipedia. The browser wars are really firing up.
Browser Watch, Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari
Browser Share, Browser War, Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari
Google Chrome browser in action
Google has just thrown a huge spanner into the browser war with the release of their new web browser, Google Chrome. According to Google, “Google Chrome is a browser that combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the web faster, safer, and easier.”
Early testing seems very promising, and I have found the browser to be fast and responsive, even though it is still in beta at version 0.2. There still seem to be a few rough edges, but I would think we will see these ironed out as we see new releases.
Built on WebKit technology, Google Chrome includes some useful new features, including:
- Address bar under each tab
- Individual windows are in their own “sandbox”
- Thumbnails of your favourite sites
- One search bar for searching and typing URLs
In the next few days I plan to give a more indepth review of Google Chrome as I have more time to play with the browser. If you haven’t already, you can check Google Chrome out at http://www.google.com/chrome/.
How have you found Google Chrome so far?
Chrome
Browser War, Chrome, Chrome 0.2, Google Chrome