According to a recent article in CNN Money, Google Chrome recently overtook Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) as the world’s most popularly used internet browser. StatCounter, a firm that specializes in tracking internet data found that Chrome owns 25% of the market share, while IE holds just 22%.
This trend began towards the end of November when Google Chrome took just .1% more of the market share than Internet Explorer 8. However, since October, Chrome had been dominating the market during weekends. Initially it was favored for commercial and personal use, but recently offices are also opting for Chrome over Explorer.
IE8 is just one version of the explorer. About 10% of the people use an even more advanced IE9 and some people are even using version 6 which was launched in 2001. IE is automatically tied with Microsoft Bing, while Google Chrome and Firefox automatically open Google search. The shift in browser preference patterns will indirectly impact these search engines as well.
In an attempt to outdo each other, the browsers have been coming up with additional features related to privacy, synchronization, hardware acceleration and HTML5 support. A new version of Google Chrome is released every six weeks in order to stay on top of competition.