Google’s Chrome Passes Safari in US Browser Share

Google Chrome is now the third-most-popular browser in the U.S., behind Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox, but ahead of Apple’s Safari for the first time, according to a study by Web analytics company StatCounter.

Chrome overtook Safari during the week ending June 27, and now has a share of around 8.97 percent of the U.S. browser market, just ahead of Safari at 8.88 percent. Internet Explorer and Firefox still dominate with shares of 52 percent and 28.5 percent respectively, all versions combined, StatCounter said.

Outside the U.S., Chrome passed Safari some time ago, and now has a 9.4 percent share, compared to Safari’s 4 percent. That may be down to the two applications’ support for different languages: Safari is available in 16 languages, while Chrome covers more than three times as many.

StatCounter said it based its statistics on an analysis of 3.6 billion page views, 874 million of them in the U.S., captured from its network of counters embedded in the pages of 3 million Web sites.

Peter Sayer covers open source software, European intellectual property legislation and general technology breaking news for IDG News Service. Send comments and news tips to Peter at peter_sayer@idg.com.