Chrome beats IE to become the world's most used browser

The victor of the browser war may be here, according to StatCounter, a service that records all kinds of information about browsers and other aspects of the Internet by monitoring data traffic trends. Google’s Chrome browser took to the spotlight a while back taking the second place from Firefox. Now, according to this latest StatCounter report, Chrome has taken down Internet Explorer by becoming the world’s most used web browser. The market share lines crossed ways in May. Google Chrome now has a market share of 32.43 percent, while Internet Explorer has a share of 32.12 percent. Firefox is trailing behind at a moderate 25.55 percent and is slowly recovering from the recent dip in usage. Internet Explorer has been falling steadily over the past years as well. Apple’s Safari is in the picture too, at a distance with a share of 7.09 percent and Opera far behind with a share of 1.77 percent.

Chrome is now, numero uno!

There are several reasons for the changing of places. Mozilla and Google have both adopted a rapid release cycle for their browsers, which means there are few improvements, but they are delivered quickly to their users. When Google first launched Chrome, there was a feeling amongst users that it was too basic and had almost no features. In comparison, Firefox had no dearth of features and plugins.  Firefox off late had become notorious for being sluggish in performance, but that phase seems to have passed after several memory efficiency tweaks were made to it. Firefox had the advantage of having add-on support, but Google over time has garnered enough support and it too has a big database of extensions for their Chrome browser.  Looking at the trends, it looks as if Firefox might be able to take the number two place from Internet Explorer in some time. 

StatCounter expected Google to take on Microsoft for the number one browser place in the past. StatCounter records the number of users per browser and not the number of downloads that each one has. Late last year, Chrome reportedly amassed a market share of 25.69 percent, as compared to Firefox’s 25.23 percent through the month of December 2011. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer still had a healthy lead of 40.63 percent, which was slowly, but steadily dropping. Internet Explorer has been known to be the most dominant browser for a very long time, much of which is likely because Internet Explorer comes pre-bundled with the Windows operating system.