According to the free web analytics site, StatCounter, Google Chrome has overtaken Firefox as the World’s #2 most popular web browser. StatCounter has been tracking the web browser market for well over a year now, and had even predicted that Chrome would overtake Firefox by December 2011. Their most recent report claims Google Chrome currently owns 25.7% of the market, pulling just ahead of Firefox, who have a 25.2% share.
Chitika Insights has also been keeping an eye on the browser market via monthly reports, and has reported on Chrome’s impressive growth throughout the year. Our market share numbers differ slightly from StatCounter. Since September, Chrome’s share went up from 15.8% to nearly 18% of the market. Firefox, on the other hand, has dropped from 19.6% to 18.2%. In October’s report, we actually saw Chrome outperform Firefox by .3%, though Firefox has reclaimed its lead in early November.
We were interested in seeing if StatCounter’s latest claim held true within our own servers. To do so, we conducted an impression based study (only U.S impressions) where we analyzed the user agent distribution to determine the current market share of web browsers. We ran the same query normally run for our web browser reports, but aggregated the data differently to display a timeline rather than a pie chart. Our hopes were to pinpoint the exact hour when Chrome overtook Firefox, if it actually occurred.
Our numbers show that even when including mobile impressions, Firefox desktop traffic was still above Chrome’s in late-November, though Chrome was able to briefly surpass Firefox in the later stages of our study, as reflected in the graph above. The first time Chrome’s total traffic share overtook Firefox in our servers occurred in the early hours of Wednesday, November 30th. By 7:00 AM, Chrome’s desktop traffic (not including mobile impressions) had risen above Firefox traffic. However, Firefox soon reclaimed its lead during business hours on Wednesday.
It’s important to take into consideration that the time Chrome overtook Firefox was at a period of the day when all search traffic goes down significantly. Our data suggests that Firefox still has the edge over Google Chrome. That being said, it’s very possible that this fluctuation is a sign that Chrome is very close to officially overtaking Firefox’s share. However, we believe until Chrome shows daily, sustained growth over Firefox, they are still the leading browser over Chrome in the market.
As we are not clear if StatCounter is using worldwide impressions vs. U.S. impressions or the methodology they used to conduct the study, we cannot refute or corroborate their report. However, based on our analysis of hundreds of millions of U.S. impressions, Firefox is still the leading browser in the market. Chitika Insights will keep refreshing this report over the next few weeks to see if Chrome can grab the silver medal in the web browser industry.
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