Chrome takes the spot of third most popular browser

Passing up Safari, Google’s Chrome internet browser has been named third most popular internet browser with a 4.63% share compared to Safari’s 4.46% according to California-based measurement firm Net Applications. This is the first time that Safari has been in fourth place but I doubt it will be there for long.

Only 16 months into its career, Chrome is becoming more and more prevalent on our computers. It increased 0.7% in December, most likely because of its recent release of beta version for Mac and Linux. December has been a big month for Chrome; those beta releases along with Chrome extensions have marked a big milestone in Google’s venture past search engines. I have personally been using Chrome for probably 13-14 months of its 16 month lifetime and find it to be a browser with great potential.

Probably the biggest contributor to the growth of Chrome is the decline of Internet Explorer. IE has had an average decline of 0.94% for the past six months compared to the average of 0.36% in the six months before that. Things are not looking good for IE8 and it is not entirely their fault. A lot of the problem seems to be people’s reluctance to move from the eight year old IE6 to anything newer. IE6 still holds a 21% share which is larger than IE7′s 15.5% share and interestingly close to IE8′s 23.7% share. And this is the first month that IE8 was the most popular browser, most likely attributed to its compatibility view that allows users to view things in the IE6-7 way of things.

Chrome is a great internet browser. The only downside I have ever found is that I just can’t seem to get it to read .pdf files directly in the browser. Otherwise, the ability to reopen tabs that I accidently closed, having my top six most viewed browsers on the home page, and just the overall smoothness of the browser make it the perfect one for me.

Read [PCWorld]