Internet Explorer Market Share will Drop Below 50% by 2011. Chrome Growing Strongly!

Browser market share data for the month of January was released today. As expected the top 3 browsers based on the market share are Internet Explorer with 62.18%, Firefox with 24.41% and Chrome with 5.20%.

Chrome made its place in the top three by pushing Safari down in the month of December, 2009 and has been gaining market share ever since it was launched.

Firefox has shown a positive growth to 24% market share except for the last 2 months where the browser has been losing market share slightly.

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has been losing market share at an average of 1% a month for the last six months. Keeping the current trend in view, Microsoft will no longer hold the 50%+ share in the browser market by early 2011.

The following graph shows Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome’s trend in the last six months.

The following chart shows loss/growth of each of the browser in the last 6 months

Google is consistently pushing Chrome through advertisements on the web which shows a positive effect on the browsers market share. Even otherwise quite a few people are moving from Firefox and IE to Chrome for its lightning fast performance.

Google recently enabled chrome extensions for public use, whether it affects the browsers performance or not remains to be seen.

I have been using Chrome extensions for a while now and I am yet to see any major performance issues and I hope I won’t encounter any.