Google's Chrome overtook Apple's Safari to become the world's third-most popular browser just 16 months after its debut, a Web metrics company said Friday.
Internet Explorer (IE), meanwhile, lost almost a full percentage point in December, the latest slip in a decline that accelerated during the second half of 2009.
Chrome ended December with a share of 4.63%, according to California-based measurement firm Net Applications. Apple 's Safari, which dropped into fourth place for the first time, posted a share of 4.46%. The swap in positions came a month earlier than Computerworld 's December prediction, which had been based on a three-month gain-loss trend of the two browsers.
Chrome's December increase of 0.7 of a percentage point, the largest since Google launched the browser in September 2008, may have been partly fueled by the release three weeks ago of beta editions for Mac and Linux .
Although it fell to the No. 4 spot, Safari didn't stand still last month: It picked up 0.1 of a percentage point. Opera Software's flagship browser also gained ground in December, and accounted for 2.4% of all browsers used in the month, a record for the Norwegian-made program. However, Mozilla's Firefox lost 0.1 of a percentage point, finishing with 24.6%, delaying for at least another month the No. 2 browser's move past the 25% milestone.
As has been the trend for years, Microsoft 's IE again made the biggest move of any browser: It dropped 0.92 of a percentage point to 62.7%, a new low for the application that once held a share well north of 90%.
Even more troubling for Microsoft is IE's quickening decline. IE lost an average of 0.94 of a percentage point in each of the last six months of the year, nearly triple the 0.36 of a point average during the first six months. Notably, the slump came in the face of the availability of IE8, which went final last March, showing that -- at least so far -- Microsoft has been unable to stanch IE's losses.
Microsoft continues to make headway in its campaign to convince users to abandon the eight-year-old IE6 for IE8, however. When Net Applications accounts for IE8's "compatibility view" -- a feature that lets users display sites as rendered by the older, and often Web standard-incompatible IE6 and IE7 -- Microsoft's newest browser owned a 23.7% share, compared to IE6's 21% and IE7's 15.5% shares.
December marked the first time that IE8 was the most-used Microsoft browser. When the compatibility view data is included, IE8 accounts for 37.8% of Microsoft's total browser usage share. IE6, previously Microsoft's No. 1 edition, fell to the second spot with 33.5% of IE's total.