In the past two years, Microsoft's Internet Explorer has bled 12 percentage points in market share, from 78.28 percent to 66.82 percent, according to data from Net Applications, while the open-source Mozilla Firefox browser has leaped nearly 7 percentage points, from 15.49 percent to 22.05 percent. Meanwhile, Apple's Safari has nearly doubled its market share, to 8.23 percent, and Google's Chrome has grown to 1.23 percent.
Microsoft can't be happy, the more browser market share Microsoft loses, the easier it becomes for it to also lose operating-system market share. Indeed, over the same two-year period, Microsoft Windows has lost five percentage points in market share while Apple's Mac OS X has gained more than three percentage points and Linux has more than doubled its share. The browser, quite simply, makes the operating system much less relevant to the computing experience. This is why Apple and Google continue to invest heavily in their respective browser initiatives: the browser is the key to operating-system disruption.
For this same reason, however, both would do better to invest in Firefox, the "Linux of browsers." In some ways, the browser efforts of Apple and Google are much like the Unix efforts of IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Sun Microsystems: they threaten to splinter the browser counterattack on Microsoft rather than solidify it. Common investment in Firefox, however, would leave the industry better off, just as common investment in Linux has. Firefox, for its part, is thriving on its own. IE lacks the community flair that makes Firefox so appealing. Just imagine what it could do with the resources of Apple and Google behind it. Microsoft probably has had, and still has, nightmares about that scenario.
Despite the release of Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 two weeks ago, Microsoft continues to lose browser market share to Mozilla's Firefox.
According to the latest data from Net Applications, the global market share for all versions of Internet Explorer slipped from 67.44% in February to 66.82% in March.
Firefox's global market share meanwhile rose from 21.77% to 22.05% during the same period.
Google (NSDQ: GOOG)'s Chrome browser and Apple's Safari browser also showed small gains, the former rising from 1.15% to 1.23% and the latter rising from 8.02% to 8.23% from February through March.
While relatively small shifts in market share may be attributable to data collection errors, Net Application's March statistics continue a longstanding downward trend for Internet Explorer, one that Microsoft presumably hopes to reverse with IE8.
IE8 has been doing fairly well, having risen from a market share of 1.26% on March 2 to 3.07% on March 31.
Those figures are based on Net Applications' hourly tracking numbers for IE8. The company's monthly numbers show IE at 1.17% at the end of February and 1.83% at the end of March.
Perhaps just as significant as Internet Explorer's continuing slide is the inability of Google's Chrome browser to make significant gains. With IE8 already more widely used than Chrome, which has been available for about six months, it's clear that Google will have to engage in more aggressive promotion if it wants to build a significant user base for its browser.
Chrome may become more appealing once its plug-in architecture matures -- there are a lot of potential users for whom the inability to use AdBlock Plus with Chrome is a deal breaker.
Given that Microsoft can expect significant gains for IE8 when Windows 7 finally ships, Google may have to put a link to Chrome on its home page and leave it there for quite a while to match Microsoft's distribution advantage.
Google Chrome Web2.0
Google Chrome is the newbie in the browser market which has been dominated by Firefox and Internet Explorer along with Opera and Safari. Where Internet Explorer was leading followed by Firefox till now, this could change soon with the arrival of Google Chrome.
We could compare how Gmail changed the way we look at free emails, similarly Google Chrome could do the same when it comes to browsers. And similarly Chrome could become market leader when it comes to browsers soon, very similar to how Gmail reached the top spot in the category of free emails.
But since this is an entirely different category and hence Google will really need to work hard to reach the top spot particularly they had compete with Firefox which has been of late spreading like wild fire with its marketing tactics and its credibility.
One advantage that Google Chrome has right now is the fact that it has now entered the market with the great advantage as an open source browser, just like its predecessor, Firefox. This could either turn out to be the positive side of things to come or could turn out to be the other way around for Google.
Google Chrome’s success would really depend on the fact that how well it corrects the bugs and come out of the beta version, as quick as possible. There have already reports going around everywhere on Google Chrome crashes. This, they will have to rectify it quickly and make it near perfect if they really want to at least go near the top spot which has already been taken over by Internet Explorer with ease.
But similarly the sheen of Internet Explorer faded away when users experience “n” number of crashes and bugs with IE.
But as per Google’s introductory comic book, they have created a browser which would hardly crash at all. Even if a particular tab crashes, this will not affect the entire browser but only that particular tab, this feature was not even found with Firefox.
Adaptability also plays a key role here. Being an open source browser, we will still need to see how well it is being received with features like add-ons and customization. Google gears could just solve this issue, but we will need to wait and watch on this front.
Another important feature that Google Chrome could score over its predecessors is safety. The stiff competition will come from Firefox in this front as being the most safest browser so far.
Google Chrome is said to be the fastest among the other browsers, as claimed by Google. But even in this very short period of usage there were very huge differences when it comes to speed has been detected except on odd occasions where the pages loaded faster than the other browsers.
With Google Chrome’s entry we can expect a more faster and safer browsers from its competitors as well as from Google. This is good news for us, the users. The time will definitely tell us the answer, soon
In the past two years, Microsoft's Internet Explorer has bled 12 percentage points in market share, from 78.28 percent to 66.82 percent, according to data from Net Applications, while the open-source Mozilla Firefox browser has leaped nearly 7 percentage points, from 15.49 percent to 22.05 percent. Meanwhile, Apple's Safari has nearly doubled its market share, to 8.23 percent, and Google's Chrome has grown to 1.23 percent. 
