IE: 53.46%
Firefox: 38.89%
Google Chrome: 4.02%
Opera: 1.88%
Safari: 1.20%
Mozilla: 0.38%

In February, the winners were Firefox, which gained 0.68% versus January, and Google Chrome, which broke 4% market share for the first time.  Clearly IE8 has not stopped the exodus to Firefox and now Chrome.  On February 24th, Apple announced Safari 4, which the company claimed to be the world’s fastest browser.  March numbers should give us an indication whether Safari 4 will increase Safari’s so-far-small browser market share.

IE: 54.38%
Firefox: 38.21%
Google Chrome: 3.50%
Opera: 2.18%
Safari: 1.13%
Mozilla: 0.46%

In December, Chrome, Opera, and IE all saw small gains, mostly at the expense of Firefox.  This is the first time since September that Firefox lost market share.  Google Chrome appears to be pretty firmly entrenched as the #3 browser on the market.  Its market share, though, is still less than 10% of either of the top two.

IE: 54.28%
Firefox: 38.69%
Google Chrome: 3.22%
Opera: 1.97%
Safari: 1.16%
Mozilla: 0.53%

IE lost 1.16% in November, with most of that going to Firefox (+1.04%).  Google Chrome essentially stayed flat at 3.22%.  Market appears to be telling us that ther IS no need for two alternatives to IE.  I expect Google to either try to increase Chrome’s market share by integrating it more tightly with other Google services, or Google may decide to shut it down as it did with Lively, since this appears to be one of the things that did not stick on the wall.

IE: 55.44%
Firefox: 37.65%
Google Chrome: 3.24%
Opera: 1.98%
Safari: 1.11%
Mozilla: 0.44%

IE lost 1.63% in October, while all 5 other browsers gained share, led by Firefox at +1.33%.  Google Chrome’s share increased very slightly from 3.21% to 3.24%, a sign that Google Chrome isn’t really gaining traction.  Perhaps the market really doesn’t need to have that many alternatives to IE?

IE: 57.07%
Firefox: 36.32%
Google Chrome: 3.21%
Opera: 1.83%
Safari: 1.03%
Mozilla: 0.39%

The big news in September was the release of Google Chrome.  From the table above, we see that Google Chrome ate into both IE’s and Firefox’s market (IE’s share decreased by 1.79% from August to September, while Firefox’s share decreased by 1.25% during the same time period).  However, Google Chrome actually lost ground since the first few days, when its share reached high 3’s.  So, early returns seem to indicate that Google Chrome isn’t making much impact to the browser world, at least at this early stage.

9/2/2008:  0.74%
9/3/2008: 3.92%
9/4/2008: 3.54%
9/5/2008: 3.82%

By 9/3/2008, Google Chrome has overtaken Opera as the 3rd most popular browser, and has apparently settled in the high 3% range. As far as whether it’s Firefox or IE that’s losing share to Chrome, data so far is not conclusive.

We know Google is serious about Chrome, as evidenced by putting a link on the home page pointing to Chrome download. This is not just www.google.com, but also the home page of google sites in other languages. It will be interesting to monitor how Google Chrome performs the rest of this month.

So how is the product? Just because Google releases something doesn’t mean it will be a hit. Therefore, I downloaded Google Chrome and tried it out. Below are my first impressions of this product:

What I liked

Incognito Browsing:  This presents a copy of the browsing history to be kept in the browser.  This is a handy function if you share your computer with anyone else.

Easy Bookmarking:  To bookmark a site, simply click on the star button right next to the address bar.  It can’t get simpler than that.

Crash control:  When something crashes, only the tab, and not the entire browser, will be affected.  This is particularly handy as some people like to open many pages at the same time.

No problem with double byte input:  When Safari was first released for Windows, I had problems inputting double byte characters.  This is not an issue with Chrome.

What I disliked

Download management:  One of the features of Chrome was supposedly its superior handling of file downloads.  However, I found this to be one of the drawbacks.  When I tried to download files, I was greeted by a blank screen for an extended amount of time — during which I had no idea whether the download was occurring, and if so, how much of the file has been downloaded – apparently until the file was downloaded. 

Will Chrome be an IE killer?  Not necessarily, at least not at the beginning.  People who will try Chrome are likely to be the Firefox crowd, who are more open to try new browsers.  How Chrome will do long term depends a lot on how much marketing Google is willing to put behind it. For example, will there be a link to the Chrome download page from Google’s home page? If so, we can expect Chrome to be a serious player in the browser market. If not, then Chrome will just be another niche browser like Opera. 

IE: 58.86%
Firefox: 37.57%
Opera: 1.97%
Safari: 1.06%
Mozilla: 0.44%

In August, Firefox built on to the 1.19% gain in July, adding another 0.16%.  IE continues to see a download trend, although it lost only 0.2%, compared to a 0.88% loss in July.   None of the smaller browsers showed any significant changes.

It has been over a year since Apple released Safari for Windows.  Judging from Safari’s distant #4 ranking, we can safely say that Apple’s efforts in broadening its Safari reach into the Windows market have failed.

IE: 59.06%
Firefox: 37.41%
Opera: 1.90%
Safari: 1.07%
Mozilla: 0.45%

In July, Firefox gained 1.19% in market share, at the expense of the other 4 browsers.  IE was hit particularly hard, losing 0.88%.  Last month I had mentioned that it was somewhat surprising that Firefox did not gain share despite releasing Firefox 3.  It appears the word has finally gotten out this month, and more people are trying the latest Firefox browser and are sticking to it. 

IE: 59.94%
Firefox: 36.22%
Opera: 2.08%
Safari: 1.12%
Mozilla: 0.51%

Firefox 3 was released in the middle of June, and it did not have much impact on the browser share for June.  In fact, none of the browsers moved more than 0.1% in either direction.  This was slightly surprising to me initially as I expected Firefox to gain some market share given all the buzz around Firefox 3.  However, going through the data, it appeared that a fairly significant amount of people had already been using Firefox 3 prior to its official release, so the release itself did not generate much additional usage.