The recent beta launch for Mac and Linux seems to have had the desired effect and has pushed Google Chrome usage quite a bit from November. In fact, the launch seems to have increased Chrome’s market share by about 10 percent making it the third most popular browser in the world, marginally squeezing out Safari which moves to the fourth place.
According to numbers by Net Applications Google Chrome is now at number three with 4.4 percent of the market, hardly something to brag about but still a 0.4 percentage points jump from November. The 4.4 percent market share was observed for the December 6 to 12 week and was based on data collected from 160 million users and 40,000 sites. For the same week Apple’s Safari, still mainly used only on Macs, only managed to attract 4.37 percent of the users enough to slip behind Chrome in market share.
Even more interesting are the numbers broken down by platform, Google Chrome was used by 1.3 percent of Macs for the week in December, up from just 0.32 percent in November. This can be easily explained as Chrome was only available as an unstable dev channel release up till now on Mac. The rise was made at the expense of both Safari, which dominates the platform even more authoritative than Internet Explorer on Windows, and Firefox.
On Linux though, … (read more)