Google Chrome briefly became the world’s most popular web browser, a title long held by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer ever since it beat out Netscape Navigator in browser wars of the late 90s. Apparently this happened for the first time in March according to data from Statcounter, an internet monitor and should be happening consistently now. Chrome ended the week of May 20 with 32.76 percent of the global browser market share, while IE came in at 31.94 percent.
It should be noted that not all stat trackers agree with Statcounter’s data. PC Mag points out that data from Net Application shows IE had 54.09 percent of the browser share as opposed to 20.20 percent for Mozilla Firefox and 18.85 percent for Google Chrome.
Other groups have criticized StatCounter’s data collection methods, questioning it’s methodology for not accounting for the different ways countries collect Internet traffic data. StatCounter data is collected from a sample of more than 15 billion page views on more than three million websites.
It seems that Internet Explorer is still in the lead in North America by about 11%. In Europe, Chrome has been ahead of Internet Explorer for a full two weeks, but only by a mere percentage point… with Firefox dominating them both. Internet Explorer is still ahead of Chrome in Oceania and both are being usurped in Africa by Firefox.
So where did Google Chrome get so many users to put it in first place? As it happens Asia and South America is where Chrome makes its significant gains. That said, Chrome is still fighting the browser war even on these continents.
Internet Explorer is still in the lead in Japan with more than a 50% market share. And in both China and South Korea about 3/4 of all traffic seems to come from Internet Explorer. Chrome is the most successful browser in India, but by a slim margin of 8%. It’s really in South America where Chrome takes a decisive lead, with almost 50% of total traffic share. One of the reasons attributed to Chrome’s massive success in the South American market has been the parallel success of Google’s social networking service Orkut.
So while Google Chrome may now claim to be the most popular browser in the world, when you take a closer look at the numbers, its still got its work cut out for it in many of the world’s larger economies. That said, the upward trend must be quite hard to ignore at the Firefox and Internet Explorer offices.