Chrome Surpasses Safari In Global Browser Rankings

According to figures from StatCounter, Google's Chrome Internet browser has unseated Apple Safari for the first time and has become the third most used Internet browser in the United States. Considering the Chrome browser is less than two years old, this is quite the feat.

As StatCounter CEO Aodhan Cullen said, "This is quite a coup for Google as they have gone from zero to almost 10 percent of the US market in under two years." In the U.S., Chrome now holds 8.97 percent market share compared to Safari's 8.88 percent. Microsoft's ever-popular Internet Explorer still dominates the Internet browser market in the U.S. with 52%. Firefox follows with 28.5% market share.

Worldwide, Chrome passed Safari some time ago. The latest statistics show Chrome has 9.4 percent of the global market compared with 4 percent for Safari. This difference may be partially attributed to the two applications' support for various languages. Safari supports 16 languages while Chrome supports more than three times as many. Globally, Microsoft's Internet Explorer has 53% of the market followed by Firefox with 31%.

StatCounter's data is based on analysis of 3.6 billion page views collected from more than 3 million websites between June 21 and June 27. Of those page views, 874 million are from the U.S.