You may have thought all the rumbling last week was about Facebook’s IPO, but part of it was the tectonic shift of the browsers. Google’s Chrome browser overtook Microsoft’s Internet Explorer in the top spot as the most used browser according to StatCounter. Chrome has been seen as the heir to Microsoft’s browser throne. There was a day in March when nerdy browser watchers noticed the two switch positions, but that didn’t last. I’d hesitate, with this latest data, to call Chrome the supreme leader, but if the stats stay like last weeks, this could be Chrome’s first month on top.
Measuring the Web is an imprecise science, very often based on scaling up small scale measurement surveys, but the gist of Statcounter’s data over the last year indicates that Chrome use is rising of Chrome at the expense of IE and Firefox, regardless of the exact precision of the data.
Chrome still has a ways to go to catch Internet Explorer in the U.S. In fact, StatCounter’s data shows that the week Chromeovertook Internet Explorer, Google’s browser held just 23.83 percent market share, compared to Microsoft’s 37.81 percent. Chrome’s success appears to have come in large part from Europe, where the browser outpaced Internet Explorer by more than 1 percentage point.
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