Google"s Chrome browser seems to be expanding in both features and users day by day. It"s a popular solution for those using Windows, and is currently in beta on Linux and Mac OS X. Now, it"s being reported that the browser has overtaken Safari in market share.
According to Computerworld, the release of the Mac and Linux betas for the software helped push it into third place, past Apple"s Safari browser. The week of December 6-12 saw Chrome hitting 4.4% market share, an increase of 0.4%, beating out Safari, which held 4.37%; to show how important the browser hitting beta on Mac OS X was, before the release, Chrome held 0.32% of the share on the OS during November, which shot up to 1.3% afterwards. It was said that the split between people switching to Chrome was evenly divided between Safari and Firefox.
Interestingly, the jump was even bigger on Linux; after the beta was released, the browser saw a 6.34% market share, which is a fairly substantial increase from the previous 3.81%. Vince Vizzaccaro, the executive vice president of Net Applications, stated, "I believe Linux will be the more intriguing arena to watch. Firefox currently dominates browser usage on Linux the way that IE dominates Windows systems and Safari dominates Mac systems. With the emergence of Chrome, I"ll be curious to see if Chrome will be to Firefox on Linux what Firefox is to IE on Windows... a forceful competitor." It will be interesting to see how Google"s browser does on Linux, as it seems to show the most room for growth.