Chrome overtakes Firefox, gains on Explorer in browser wars

Google’s Chrome web browser has overtaken open-source darling Firefox as the world’s second most popular browser. That’s according to web analytics company StatCounter.

The findings, first reported in the Wall Street Journal, suggest that Chrome now holds 25.7% share of the global market, up 4.7% from the same figures in 2009. Mozilla Firefox’s share, meanwhile, fell to 25.2% from 32.2%.

Firefox was the first browser to make any kind of dent in Microsoft’s market dominance. Continuing improvements to the browser — Mozilla claims the current iteration of the browser is some 32 times faster than Firefox 1.0 — and thousands of downloadable add-ons have been unable to stop it losing market share.

“Firefox is holding its own in the face of increased competition, with hundreds of millions of users worldwide choosing a web browser that answers only to them,” a Mozilla spokeswoman said in a statement.

While Google and Mozilla are in competition for browser market, the relationship between the two remains close. Google has, in the past, helped fund Mozilla. Since June , Google has also been the default search function provider in Firefox.

Microsoft’s native browser, Internet Explorer, still holds top spot in the browser wars, with a worldwide market share of around 40.63%.

Explorer has dominated the browser market since the late 1990s when it eclipsed Netscape Navigator. It has, however, dipped nearly nine percent since November 2010.

The other players in the browser wars, Norwegian-based Opera and Apple’s native browser, Safari, are at the bottom of the pile with less than 6.7% of the market combined.

Speaking to Journal, Gartner analyst Brad Mitchell Smith said he believed the change was largely due to the fact that “People have discovered there is a difference in browsers.”

Microsoft, it would seem, is paying increasing attention to Google’s web efforts. For instance, Explorer now directs users to its own search engine Bing, in much the same way as Chrome has built-in Google search capabilities.

A night at the Opera

In direct contrast to its desktop numbers, Opera is the world’s leading mobile browser, with 22.49% of global market share.

Reflecting the increased number of number of Android-powered smartphones in the market, its native browser now has 20.41% of global market share, up from 12% in November 2010.

In another reflection of global device-buying trends, Nokia’s native browser has fallen from just over 16% of market share in 2010 to just under 12%.

The biggest fall, however, has been that of BlackBerry. It went from holding 19% of the global browser market a year ago, to 8.2% now.