Google Chrome Pushes Past Microsoft's Internet Explorer
According to the latest stats, Chrome is King.
Google's Chrome browser is just pushing three and a half years old but already it's surpassed Internet Explorer, which has been around since 1995. According to StatCounter, Google's Chrome browser now accounts for nearly 33 percent of the market, while Internet Explorer sits just behind at a smidgen under 32 percent.
StatCounter has just released figures for Week 20 of 2012. The site puts Google's Chrome browser at precisely 32.76 percent market share. This is just a hair ahead of Internet Explorer's 31.94 percent. The Mozilla Foundation's Firefox appears at number three with 25.47 percent. Rounding out the top five are Apple's Safari (7.08 percent) and Opera (1.76 percent).
If you were to look at the same numbers from the same week in 2011, you'd get quite a different picture. Internet Explorer sat in first place, miles ahead of its closest competitor, Firefox. It's market share for Week 20, 2011, was a whopping 43.95 percent. Firefox had 28.18 percent. Google Chrome was in third place with 19.37 percent. This represents significant market share loss for IE, which fell just over 12 percent, while Firefox also fell, losing 2.71 percent compared to last year. The only browser to make it through the year unharmed was Safari, which grew from 5.04 percent to 7.08 percent. Opera fell from 1.83 percent to 1.76 percent.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2404714,00.asp
This brings to question any accuracy to any of these numbers. It is much more that Firefox and Chrome users spend more time on the internet and view a wider variety of web pages than IE users or vice versa skewing the results greatly. I can attest that the vast majority of households I visit for repairs use IE. Though this leads to it's own incomplete data.
Most of those with Chrome got it because it was checked by default to install with some other program they bought or downloaded and have no idea how it got there. They don't use it though. That is until I teach them how to and explain why it is better and safer. These people just go to their e-mail from their homepage which is either Yahoo, AOL or their ISP's page. They visit very few other sites.
I doubt these stat counters take these people into account. This group probably accounts for somewhere between 60% to 80% of people online. Those with very little use for the internet and see it as a daunting and scary place. A place where viruses, hackers lurk in shadows everywhere waiting to strike to steal their money and identity.
I have to agree with this. Look at when you download Flash player, Divx, Foxit Reader...they all have Chrome included with their program. I have used Chrome for a year and then removed it. I don't like the very spartan look and feel to it. While it has a clean look, somethings can be hard to find and the options are very minimal at best. I use IE 9 for my class work simply because it works with the schools sites I visit, FF with all it's updates is not supported or doesn't display properly. For everything else I use FF. Both FF and IE offer many more options when it comes to controlling their behavior than Chrome does out of the box, although Chrome and FF allow the installation of 3rd party addons.
I have used the 64bit version of FF and I love it, I just wish they would take it out of the development phase and just release it as a finished version. The only 2 64bit browsers currently (that I know of) are IE9 and FF. Unfortunately I am stuck on a POS 32bit Win 7 Laptop. If FF really wants to gain market share they would include the addblock and a few other popular security addons as part of the standard package. I don't see why it would be hard to make agreements with these addon makers to have their apps included, it would be a big boost to both.
- Do not forget the Piriform softwares and Skype, they're also popular.
- Opera x64 is being worked on, first beta is already out.
- Including AdBlock Plus would immediately cut them off from the money they got from Google (who gains many of it's money from ads).
Mac I can understand, but Linux doesn't come anywhere close to a viable user base.
... and not just in the size of it's user base.
By your logic then, IE should have 95% market share. These statistics are based on page hits which means that people are actually using the browser being ranked. I have IE, FF, Safari, and Opera, as well as Chrome installed on my laptop: Chrome for everyday use, IE for certain poorly-designed sites that were written as though IE6 would be the only browser the world would ever need, and the others mainly for comparison use or to troubleshoot pages that don't render properly in Chrome. Since the statistics in the rankings only add up to 100%, it's obvious that the browser in use and not every browser lost in some deeply-buried folder on the hard drive is being counted.
While it is true that the overwhelming majority of IE users do little but browse Facebook and check email, Chrome and FF are more strongly represented among users who actually exhibit a preference for a browser with specific features like Chrome's superior stability and smaller memory footprint or FF's extreme customability and rapid updates.