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.