It was only a matter of time. Google Chrome, the internet browser they introduced in 2008, has been growing like crazy, passing Firefox to become the 2nd-most popular browser worldwide in the last quarter of 2011. Last week, it took the top spot from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, which has held that position for what seems like decades.
Global traffic analytics company StatCounter has been tracking the data for years. Following Firefox are Safari at #4 and Opera at #5.
One asterisk on the numbers: Firefox allows users to block their usage data making it invisible to StatCounter. With some estimating that up to 10% of their users taking advantage of these privacy settings, it’s not enough to move them up on the list but it makes it as close to a 3-way tie as possible with all three likely holding around 30% of the worldwide non-mobile browser web traffic.
Last month, we reported that Chrome is already dominant in South America and in the lead in Asia.
Chrome is the perfect browser for simple minded people, of course it will overtake IE. I’ll stick with Firefox for now.
a lot of people want a simple, fast-starting browser that doesn’t check for updates for half an hour BY DEFAULT before loading a webpage at startup…Bob…
chrome is really good
And there was much rejoicing.
Chrome is perfect for mining ‘your’ data.
If not now, when? Keep reading your EOL.