Google‘s own Chrome browser has had incredible growth in 3 short years. After being announced in December 2008, the lean and mean browser has taken the web by storm, and has now officially overtaken Mozilla’s open-source Firefox browser.

Chrome now has 25.55% of the web browser market compared to Firefox‘s 25.42%. That is hardly any growth, but what makes this significant is that Firefox has actually started declining in market share, where it once held 30% of the market. Internet Explorer is also continuing to lose market share, and this week it fell below 40% for the first time. This is probably due to users of old machines finally upgrading from Internet Explorer 6, but instead of upgrading to IE8 or 9, going directly to another browser like Chrome. And any self-respecting “tech-guru” will tell their luddite friends to switch to another browser, which updates itself and leads to less maintenance.

But it looks like South Africa is a little behind worldwide trends for browser usage – Internet Explorer has taken a very recent up-tick in usage, and Firefox has only steadily been declining over the last few months. Google Chrome is clearly growing the fastest, and it looks like it will overtake Firefox within the next 90 days: (click graph to enlarge)

The question is now how quickly Google Chrome will be neck in neck with Internet Explorer in worldwide traffic. At the current pace of growth, it looks like 2012 might be the year Google Chrome becomes the most popular browser on Earth.

The folks over at Pingdom put together this great infographic which details the growth of Firefox, the great alternative browser which is becoming the mainstream now. At present Firefox has a nearly 30% market share, and growth seems to have levelled off now – we are looking at you Google Chrome. Where Firefox was always a lightweight secure browser, it has quickly become very powerful, and the number of add-ons are mind boggling.

Looking at worldwide stats, South Africa is not doing to well adopting Firefox (or any modern browser for that matter). Like we mentioned before, SA is still one of the top countries still running IE6, and that is not a good thing. And remember – friends dont let friends use IE6. Get them on Firefox, Chrome, hell, even Internet Explorer 9 if they are Microsoft only…

Seriously – the amount of attention this insane actor is getting is spiralling out of control. Everywhere I go online I have to read about what he said and did. If you are like me, and you want to rid your own webpages of the scourge of Sheen, you will be happy to know there is a plug-in available for Firefox and Google Chrome which removes all mentions of Charlie Sheen, and all the current internet memes that surround him, including his hashtags.

Its pretty easy – just go and download the “Tinted Sheen” plugin here.

You can thank me later.

So who would say such a thing? Microsoft. Clearly they are also tired of supporting people on older web browsers which are non-standards compliant. In a bid to encourage people to shift to newer versions of IE (or another browser, depending on how you interpret it), Microsoft set up the IE6 Countdown website, which shows worldwide usage statistics of IE.

“10 years ago a browser was born.

Shockingly, South Africa is one of the worst off in the list – which was surprising to me. Who are these people still running on IE6? The Department of Communications? So why do we need to stop using IE6? The oversimplified version is that up until now web developers had a uphill battle with IE6 – they had to either follow official W3C standards which would not render well on IE6, but function perfectly on other browsers; or they had to develop only for IE6, which resulted in websites with poor functionality. Only until IE8 did Microsoft try to follow the latest web standards which resulted in much better websites which are approaching platform level of functionality – just look at a product like Gmail as an example. The other major advantage is in the area of security – IE6 shipped with Windows XP back in 2001, which did not have a very good security record. Those machines are very susceptible to malicious code, and IE6 is not geared towards modern threats like phishing. In fact – IE6 has such a poor security record that I reckon banks should reject users who still use IE6, and force people to upgrade to a later version.

So why is Microsoft bad-mouthing their own ol’ browser? It comes down to marketshare – users must rather upgrade to the latest IE, than to an alternative browser like Firefox or Chrome, which is rapidly gaining in marketshare. Everybody has their own favourite browsers. I personally like Chrome because of its speed and simplicity, but there is always the crowd that believes the blue “e” icon means internet. Please help that crowd to quickly get on the latest IE. Be a helping hand…

If you would like to help, check out http://bit.ly/ie6countdown