Chrome makes Safari take a back seat
is reporting that Chrome has surpassed Safari as the third-most popular browser.
According to Net Applications, which tracks the browser habits of 160 million unique visitors each month to the 40,000 sites it monitors for customers, Chrome's share jumped to 4.4% for the week of Dec. 6-12, an increase of 0.4 percentage points over Google's slice of the browser pie for the month of November.
Chrome's share during the week topped Safari's 4.37%, said Vince Vizzaccaro, executive vice president of Net Applications. "It appears that Chrome has made a substantial surge in usage market share," Vizzaccaro said in an e-mail.
Not surprising considering how muchGoogle ispushing it. In the last two days I've seen dozens of Chrome ads on Facebook and (more surprisingly) the Amazon.co.uk home page.
Chrome is based on WebKit – an open source web browser engine. WebKit is also the name of the Mac OS X system framework version of the WebKit browser engine that's used by Safari, Dashboard, Mail, and many other OS X applications. I've only played around with Chrome for a few days, but I'm happy to stick with Safari for now (I love my MobileMe sync).
Here's how the top four browsers play out in market share:
Internet Explorer 63.6%
Firefox 24.7%
Chrome 4.4%
Safari 4.37%
What about you guys? Firefox, Chrome, IE (if you're on a PC) or Safari? Tell us what you use in the poll!
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