Browser Wars Update...

I just saw this at The Economist, and it took me by surprise:

The chart starts with Chrome's release in 2008.  In just four years, Chrome went from nothing to being the dominant web browser.  Firefox's popularity didn't change all that much.  Internet Explorer went from dominance to a distant second place, falling at almost exactly a linear rate.

Chrome and Firefox are open on my desktop all day long.  I like Chrome better for some web sites (especially Google's :), and I like Firefox better for handling tabs (which I use extensively).  Internet Explorer is not allowed on my computer :)  I do occasionally use Safari, though mainly that's for testing web applications.

Anyway, the rapid rise of Chrome caught be by surprise.  I had no sense of that happening at all.  I went to my blog's statistics and looked at browser share, and sure enough, Chrome is on top – followed, though, by Safari and Firefox (apparently an unusually high percentage of my readers are on Macs).  Internet Explorer is missing in action.

There's an interesting map of browser dominance by country at the link...