According to a set of statistics published in NetMarketShare, a network that reports browser market shares by tracking unique visitors per day across more than 40,000 websites, Chrome has started showing its potential by steadily gaining a good market share across the past few months. Actually, it has even affected the usage of the Android default browser, whose usage has been declining ever since. This also emphasises the fact that more and more users have started moving to newer versions of Android, since Chrome is only available on the newer platforms after Android 4 Ice Cream Sandwich.
This has however, not yet challenged the Safari browser that still leads the pack by a wide margin owing to its presence on the iPhone and other iOS devices. Another well known product is the browser that is known to run on many older devices which are based on Java, and this is obviously Opera Mini. Assuming that these are mainly low end phones that use Opera Mini, it goes to show that there are still a sizeable number of people that rely on this browser that changed the way we see the mobile web today.
Coming to actual numbers, Chrome gained quite a good margin by rising from 0.34 percent in July 2012 to around 3.22 percent in May this year. The usage of Android default browser on the other hand has been largely the same, with only a minor difference between the market share within the past year. If we look at Safari’s numbers, we can surely notice that Android has taken a toll on it because even if its usage is much higher, the market share values have surely dropped from around 66.22 percent to around 59.98 percent. Internet Explorer has also gained a little bit of traction, although very less as compared to others, by rising from 0.76 percent last year to around 1.97 percent in May. The one surprising fact that comes out here is that Firefox still doesn’t have too much of a following when it comes to mobile market. This could also be because it isn’t yet used as a default browser in any popular mobile platform.
