Google’s Chrome browser claims 20 per cent market share: report
02 Jul 2011
Seattle: Google Inc's Chrome Web browser has grabbed more than 20 per cent of global market share, even as market leader Microsoft Corp's Internet Explorer share has slipped below 50 per cent, according to Internet statistics firm StatCounter. Google, the world's biggest Internet search company, has for long been challenging the dominance of Microsoft's IE in the market place.
Launched in December 2008, Google's Chrome browser took 20.7 per cent of the global market in June, according to StatCounter, up from 2.8 per cent just a year ago. This near seven-fold increase in market share over the last 12 months comes as a major boost for Google, which is taking Microsoft on in the domains of operating systems and mobile software.
According to StatCounter, the market share of the various versions of the Internet Explorer has now dipped to 44 per cent, down from 59 per cent a year ago.
It said the share of Mozilla's Firefox had also dipped - to 28 per cent from 30 per cent.
In May this year, Google launched a direct challenge to Microsoft and Apple with its long-awaited Chromebook - a laptop that operates almost entirely on software accessed via the Internet, rather than installed on the machine.
Not so far back in time, in the early 2000s Microsoft had controlled as much as 95 per cent of the market. It has seen a steady erosion of its market share after disputes with antitrust regulators in the United States and Europe, which have prevented it from making Internet Explorer the default browser in its dominant Windows operating system.
Microsoft is currently developing the IE10 version of its famed browser.
StatCounter, based in Dublin, Ireland, says its statistics are based on data collected from a sample of more than 15 billion page views per month from more than 3 million websites.
