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A fierce competition exists among the different web browsers for market share and right now Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome are in the top three.
According to a report published by Net Applications, Microsoft Internet Explorer still maintains the lead with a significant 52.84 percent of the market but it is in the fight for second place that things get interesting. [Read more…]
Google may be losing the smartphone wars against Apple, but as far as the browser wars go it looks like Google Chrome may have displaced Apple’s Safari as the third most popular browser in the US.
Google’s internet browser Chrome has overtaken Apple’s Safari in the US for the first time on a weekly basis according to StatCounter, the company which provides free website analytics. The firm’s research arm StatCounter Global Stats reports that for the week beginning 21 June Chrome overtook Safari to claim third place in the US browser market. (Business Wire)
Currently Google Chrome ranks third globally, with only the mighty Firefox and IE ranking ahead of the nimble browser. [Read more…]
How does web page loading speed of 2700 frames-per-second sound to you? If you don’t think its fast enough, I don’t know what else is.  That’s actually the speed that  the new Google Chrome Beta Release promises to give. And while the Google Chrome folks are still busy preparing the results of their speed test you might want to start downloading the new release now, either for your Linux, Windows or Mac machines.
And to encourage you some more, the Official Chrome blog tells us:
Today’s new beta release incorporates one of Chrome’s most significant speed and performance increases to date, with 30% and 35% improvement on the V8 and SunSpiderbenchmarks over the previous beta channel release. In fact, looking back in time, Chrome’s performance has improved by as much as 213% and 305% on these two benchmarks since our very first beta.
If browser speed is not really a big thing for you, Google Chrome Beta’s new features might entice you to get the browser. This new release offers not only bookmark synching capability also browser preferences such as themes, homepage and startup settings, web content settings and language. This means that you don’t have to do all those stuff again in all your installation of Google Chrome on various machines.
For current Chrome users, if you loved Chrome extensions and Incognito mode, well you can now use extensions while in the said browser mode.
Other new features of the new Google Chrome Beta release include geolocation APIs, App Cache, web sockets and file drag-and-drop capabilities. Â Chrome also welcomes Adobe Flash Player plug-in into the fold – allowing you to browse rich, dynamic websites.
If you haven’t switched to Google Chrome yet or if you’re still using IE, now is the best time to join the world. Grab the new Chrome Beta Release now.
So aside from gaining market share, Google Chrome which is currently in beta 4 is also busy improving itself. Â It’s latest feature as announced by the Google Chrome blog is a tool for translating a foreign language webpage plus additional privacy settings to make your browsing experience even safer.
Google Chrome Beta’s translate feature now sits  on top of every webpage which are in a language other than your own preferred language setting.  All you need to do is to click on the translate button and Chrome will translate the webpage into your preferred language. This is very useful if you visit a foreign website often. Now, you don’t have to load Google’s translation page – http://translate.google.com on another browser tab, paste the URL of the webpage you want to translate to read the translated text.
If you’re a blogger or writer who source your materials from international sites, specifically those written in languages other than English or your own native language, this feature is also useful. If you noticed when you use Google’s translation tool, the translated webpage takes a new URL. If you copy and paste that on your site and somebody clicks it, the link will return an error page.
With the new Google Chrome feature, the translation happens right on on the browser tab where you load the webpage in foreign language. The URL does not change, so you can copy and paste it to link to your site.
Another new feature of Google Chrome beta is the new privacy settings under the “Privacy” section of Chrome’s Options dialog. This lets you control how browser cookies, images, Javascript, plug-ins and pop-ups are handled on a site-by-site basis. This is in addition to Chrome’s incognito mode which lets you browse websites without leaving a trace of which sites you visited.
With these enhancements, Google is really prepping up its web browser to become a major contender in the web browser market.
Although it’s only for February, still we could not discount the fact that Google is slowly gaining grounds in the web browser market with the continously improving Chrome browser. Want proof? The latest data collected by Net Applications, a web metrics company is showing that for Google Chrome is the only browser that made some gains in February.
Google Chrome registered an increase of 5.61% in market share from January’s 5.22%, up by 0.39%. Although it’s market share is still not big enough at 0.96% share, still this quite an achievement for Google Chrome, considering that it came late into the web browser party.
Even more interesting is the fact that all of its rival showed a slight decrease in market share during February. Internet Explorer, the top no. 1 browser to date got a decrease in market share of 0.54% from January with 61.58% share in February. Firefox, Safari and Opera also have their market share falling down to 0.20%, 0.08% and 0.03% respectively. Firefox market share is now at 24.23%, Safari at 4.45% and Opera at 2.35%.
Again, it’s a minimal increase and Google has a long way to go to make Chrome browser overtakes or even be at par with both IE and Firefox, but given Google’s marketing strategy plus its continuing effort to enhance Chrome browser, it will just be a matter of time before it becomes a powerful contender in the web browser wars.
