According to a report published on October 25th, Beijing time, by social analytics company Shareaholic, Google's Chrome browser usage quickly rose to the top of the industry in September this year.
According to Shareaholic's data, Chrome's usage in September surpassed the combined total of Firefox, IE, and Opera. If Chrome and Android are counted together, the share of Google's browser usage even exceeded the combined total of Firefox and Safari.
Here are the three key points from Shareaholic's report:
—— The combined market share of the four major browsers exceeds 80%. Last month, Google Chrome topped the list with a 34.68% market share, which is twice that of Firefox (16.60%), ranked second. Following closely were Safari (16.15%) and IE (15.62%).
—— Only Android and Chrome achieved double-digit growth.
—— Half of the browsers included in the report showed declines, with IE experiencing the largest drop, followed by Opera, Firefox, and Opera Mini.
Since the latter two points calculate percentages of percentages, they may not be the best indicators of growth trends. However, from Shareaholic's data, Chrome is indeed the biggest winner, while IE experienced the largest decline in share. On the other hand, data released earlier this month by another market research company, Net Applications, showed that IE remains the world's most popular browser.
Over the past nine months, Shareaholic has tracked 200,000 websites visited by 250 million users. Net Applications tracks the visits of 160 million unique users across 40,000 websites each month. It is worth noting that Shareaholic's report includes mobile browser data, whereas Net Applications separates desktop and mobile data for statistics.
Additionally, Shareaholic's data measures browser usage, i.e., the number of web pages viewed by each browser. Net Applications counts the number of users for each browser. For example, if five people use IE to view one webpage, and one person uses Chrome to view 25 webpages, Net Applications would show a larger share for IE, while Shareaholic would display the opposite result.