According to StatCounter, Chrome finished October with 24.99 percent share, behind Firefox with 26.39 percent and IE with 40.19 percent. During the month, IE lost 1.47 points, Firefox lost 0.4 points and Chrome gained 1.38 points. Apple's Safari climbed by 0.33 points to 5.93 percent share.
While some predicted that Chrome's growth will be flattening at some point, they are still accelerating at this time. The browser gained 10.1 points of share in this year alone and has just posted the strongest 6-month gain in its short history (6.7 points). At the current speed, Chrome will be surpassing Firefox market share on an average basis sometime this month and catch up with IE by mid-2012. For the past week, Chrome's market share averaged 25.43 percent, behind Firefox with 26.03 percent, according to StatCounter.
Microsoft isn't seeing this development quite as dramatic, at least not publicly. The company only quotes Net Applications data and only IE9 market share on Windows 7. According to Microsoft, IE9 now has about 22 percent share on Windows 7 systems globally, just ahead of Chrome and just behind Firefox. Microsoft's interests in browser share appear to be very different from Google's interest. While Microsoft is trying to claim the browser crown on Windows 7 with IE9 to prepare for a successful launch of the HTML5 application model for Windows 8, Google is aiming to gain overall market share to support its core revenues that are still created through its search engine.
