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Chrome squeaks past Safari in US

Battle of the also-rans

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Google Chrome and Apple's Safari have swapped spots in their skirmish to determine which browser can capture one-third the US market share of Firefox and one-sixth that of Internet Explorer.

"There is a battle royal going on between Google and Apple in the internet browser space (Chrome v Safari) as well as in the mobile market (Android v iPhone)," said Aodhan Cullen, the CEO of StatCounter, which issued their report Monday.

There's a "battle royal" in the mobile space, to be sure, but the tiff between Chrome and Safari is merely a squabble over which browser can claim the role of also-ran to an also-ran.

Relative market share of top five browsers in the US

It could be worse for Google and Apple — they could be Opera

Chrome, according to StatCounter, has more than twice Safari's market share globally — 9.4 per cent versus 4 per cent — and so this new US market-share ranking, which was compiled from data obtained from 874 million page views last week, should come as no surprise.

"This is quite a coup for Google as they have gone from zero to almost 10 per cent of the US market in under two years," said Cullen.

Perhaps, but Apple is turning its eye in other directions these days. Apple sold sold 1.7 million iPhone 4s over the weekend, each of which will begin to be be stuffed with Apple's latest revenue stream, iAds, on July 1.

Odds are that Cupertino isn't worried about Chrome's 8.97 per cent US market share squeaking past Safari's 8.88 per cent. ®

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Anonymous Coward

Open apple sauce

Well if apple wanted to play the open source game with Safari instead of making their own from scratch (given the amount of work they've done, you have to wonder how much of the original KHTML project is relevant to it today), then this was the risk they always took.

It could have been a few hobbyists who took Webkit and played with it, or it could have been another organised corporation with a chance of making a successful spin-off.

I wonder if they ever guessed a company like Google would ever do this? They probably saw the hundreds of millions Google was putting into the non-profit Mozilla Foundation at the time and never gave it a consideration.

And the irony is, as control-freaking as Apple is... I wouldn't trust any piece of Google software to be installed on a computer of mine for fear of it sneaking up on me in the middle of the night, measuring the length of my shlong, taking a DNA sample, switching my bank account over to gBank and impregnating my wife with what it considers to be the most compatible semen from its database of other Chrome users.

It'll all end like the Tripods yet...

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Anonymous Coward

Many miss the point...

those who say it doesn't matter. Look at it another way.

See what the deafult search on many of these are (or will be). most users can't be arsed / don't know how to change this.

Kerrching for the browser maker.

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Great...

..where can I get my free Maserati?

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