Google celebrates the 2nd anniversary of its foray into the browser war with Release 6 of Chrome and increased market share

Google Chrome browser

At the relatively young age of two years old, Google can be plenty proud of it’s entrant in the Internet browser wars with Chrome.

It is shipping release 6 and steadily gaining market share on all competition.

Chrome 6 is slightly faster than Firefox and IE and benefits from a simple interface.

The address bar and search bar are the same. Type in what you are looking for and it will suggest sites or allow you to use the Google Search page. That took a few minutes to get used to. I kept looking for a search bar.

Chrome is quicker to start than either Internet Explorer or Firefox. When I tried it last year, quicker meant fewer features. Now it’s just faster.

Organizing work is intuitive. Within a few minutes of installing Chrome 6 yesterday, I had imported bookmarks, set up the bookmark bar and organized my workspace. Chrome didn’t import all my passwords so there is a bit of work to enter them as I go to along.  

Chrome got on my installation list to view the HTML interactive Arcade Fire video. HTML is also available with the Firefox 4 beta but works smoother in Chrome.

If you like to jazz up your workspace, Chrome has 70 free themes for your page.

I’ll stick with Chrome for awhile and report back. I like it but don’t want problems. It works quite well in all the the places I’ve been so far. WordPress use is quite smooth.

Gaining market share

The latest numbers from StatCounter Global Stats gives Chrome the lead at 9.33% market share at the end of August. That’s 155% growth in one year. All things are coming up Google these days.

That puts it ahead of Apple’s Safari for the third month in a row. That’s simply amazing considering the number of iPod, iPad and iPhone devices that Apple is shipping.

Microsoft Internet Explorer still leads the pack with 52.2% down 2.2% from 54.4% a year ago.  Firefox is losing ground as well, at 27.6% down from 31.58% last year a drop of almost 4%.

Source – StatCounter Global Stats