As Microsoft’s Internet Explorer falls to just under 60 percent of the browser market, Google’s Chrome has jumped ahead of Apple’s Safari, indicates a new survey released Tuesday. Although Mozilla’s Firefox took the largest percentage of the market lost by Microsoft, Google’s Chrome took 6.7 percent, versus 2.5 percent for Apple’s Safari.
Internet Explorer declined to 59.95 percent of the browser market, down from its high point of 80 percent in 2008, according to Net Applications, which analyzes Internet traffic trends. Firefox picked up about nine of those lost percentage points, with Google’s Chrome snaring 6.7 percent of IE’s share (up from 0 before 2009), and Safari took 2.5 percentage points for 4.72 percent of the browser market.
Another company, StatCounter, lists Chrome with 5.35 percent of the browser market and Safari with 3.63 percent.
In late 2009, Google’s Chrome pushed ahead of Safari, placing the Apple browser in fourth place. Even before Chrome made it out of Beta, reviewers said the Google browser was 34 percent faster than the Apple alternative.
[via AppleInsider and BusinessInsider]
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
