Chrome Climbs As Firefox Slips In Browser Wars

New research from Net Applications has revealed that Google’s Chrome web browser nudged up to 10.9 percent through February. This was a modest rise from its January position of 10.7 percent market share.

Microsoft Internet Explorer rallied, growing from 56 percent through January to 56.8 percent in February, the market researcher reported 1 March.

Microsoft noted in a blog post that IE9, the company’s freshest browser iteration, reached 0.66 percent market share across all Windows operating systems, with over 2 percent share on the Windows 7 platform.

Firefox Slip

Moreover, the browser has been downloaded over 36 million times since its September 2010 launch, Microsoft said in a blog post.

Apple’s Safari also grew a touch, to 6.4 percent from 6 percent for the month.

Chrome, IE and Safari appeared to gouge Mozilla Firefox, which dipped an entire percentage point, from 22.8 percent in January to 21.7 percent this month.

While Chrome’s growth to almost 11 percent market share since its inception in September 2008 would normally be the key story line here, Firefox’s fall takes that prize.

Hard At Work

It’s unclear why Firefox has dropped. Mozilla has been working feverishly to bring Firefox 4 to market releasing new beta versions of the build every few weeks across desktop and mobile platforms.

Firefox 4 revs start-up time, page-loading and accelerate web application and games. Mozilla’s Kraken performance benchmark shows it to be more than three times faster than the current Firefox 3.6.13 build.

Whatever the reason for Firefox’s fall, it’s clear Chrome, which Google is updating with a new stable release every few weeks, and IE9, which has won kudos from browser users worldwide, have been the hot browser builds.