Chrome continues usage gains over rivals
Chrome rose 0.3 percentage points to 7.1 percent of share, said Net Applications, which monitors browser usage on a network of Web sites. The statistics reflect activity, not the number of people using a browser, as people load up about 160 million pages each month on sites Net Applications monitors. Because Web usage is increasing, the absolute number of people using a browser can increase even as its fractional share of usage drops. The share losses came from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, which dropped 0.3 percent to 59.7 percent, and Mozilla’s Firefox, which dropped 0.2 percentage points to 24.4 percent. Fourth-place Safari from Apple rose 0.1 percentage points to 4.8 percent, and Opera rose 0.1 percentage points to 2.4 percent.
The browser market has become hotly competitive with new features being built in to support new Web standards. Even Microsoft, long considered a technology laggard even as its browser dominated, is back in the game with aggresive work developing IE9.