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Google yesterday announced their Chrome browser has come out of Beta. This is one of the fastest Google services to come out of beta tag. It has taken just over 3 months while some of the other Google services seem to be in Beta phase for a very long time. For example, Gmail is still in Beta even though it was launched in 2004.

Google claims to have improved Chrome’s security and stability features as well as increased its speed. Now we believe this is going to be more of a competition to Internet Explorer than Firefox. Firefox has its own fiercely loyal set of users who will not switch to any other browser. The same cannot be said of IE users. We, at site24×7, have seen an increase in the number of users accessing Site24×7 through Chrome browser.

Below is a snapshot of visitors stats to www.site24×7.com in June 2008. As you can see, close to 49% of visitors used Internet Explorer whereas around 46% used Firefox.

Cut back to Nov 2008 and this is what you see.

Internet Explorer has gone down to second place with 43% visits. Firefox has managed to retain the percentage of visits. Chrome has suddenly come to third in the list with close to 5% visitors. So at least in Site24×7’s case, we can say Chrome has eaten into IE’s share.

We should add that these stats does not reflect the overall browser market share in anyway. IE is still the leader by a huge margin. Its just that Site24×7’s website monitoring service caters to a more techie crowd who are more likely to use new browsers such as Chrome or the developer-friendly Firefox to access Site24×7.  And now with Chrome stepping out of Beta, these numbers might increase further.

Author: Arun

Mozilla’s Firefox browser touched 20% browser share worldwide for the first time ever in Oct 2008. In fact, it broke this mark twice during October. These numbers were provided by Net Applications, a service which tracks market share for browsers, search engines and operating systems across the globe. These were also reported by Mozilla developer center site.

This is a significant development for Mozilla as its browser continues to make significant inroads into Microsoft’s Internet Explorer’s market share. IE is still the most widely used browser across the world. But its usage has been steadily coming down in recent years as Firefox continues to build more competitive features into it. Will the final version of IE 8 due for release in late 2008 reverse this trend? We’ll have to wait and watch.

Found via Webmonkey