Google Chrome Continues to Soar as Firefox and Internet Explorer Start to Fall

Latest stats on browser usage show that Firefox and Internet Explorer declined in number of users favoring Google Chrome. Internet Explorer remains at the prime spot, followed by Firefox, but Chrome is steadily gaining more users.

Chrome’s strength is very obvious with the data released by Net Applications. Other browsers like Opera and Safari still have their small population of users.

We rarely love numbers so take a look at the graph below to see the browsers’ usage shares:


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New Safari 4.0.4 is released with security flaw patch

11th November Apple has released an update to its Safari Web browser, addressing a vulnerability that could allow an image file to exploit Macs with older software.

According to Apple, the flaw allowed maliciously crafted images with an embedded color profile to execute arbitrary code, or unexpectedly terminate the application. The issue does not affect Mac OS X 10.6 systems, and was already addressed with Security Update 2009-005 for Mac OS X 10.5.8 systems.

The 36.2MB download is available via Software Update. In addition to the security patch, Safari 4.0.4 is said to offer:

  • Improved JavaScript performance

  • Improved Full History Search performance for users with a large number of history items

  • Stability improvements for third-party plug-ins, the search field and Yahoo Mail

The last update to Safari, 4.0.3, was released in August. It provided stability improvements for Web pages that use the HTML 5 video tag, and fixed issues that prevented some users from logging into iWork.com

 


[via Apple Insider]

Analysis: Safari 4 lifts Apple above 10% browser market share

Analysis – February turned out to be the month of the beta browsers, in a more significant way than we have seen in any other month before. While overall market shares remained relatively stable for the top 5 of browser developers, there were major shifts in beta browser market share. Microsoft saw strong gains for Internet Explorer 8 and Apple hit a home run with Safari 4. Mozilla does not promote its Firefox 3.1 and trails its rivals in beta browser adoption, but has the strongest adoption rate of its most current stable browser.

If February is any indication, then Mozilla’s wild ride may be over for now. Market share data released by Net Applications shows that Firefox still gained share in February, albeit at a much slower pace than in recent months. Internet Explorer still lost, but only marginally and Apple took a big hit in average browser share in February. According to the data, Internet Explorer dropped from 68.18% to 68.17%, Firefox gained from 21.75% to 21.96% and Safari dropped from 7.70% to 7.42%.

Google’s Chrome climbed from 1.13% to 1.16% and Opera gained 0.02 points from 0.68% to 0.70%. Eagle-eyed readers may notice that those numbers deviate quite a bit from the actual February average based on Net Applications’ daily numbers (IE: 67.26%; Firefox: 21.82%; Safari: 8.15%; Chrome: 1.15%; Opera: 0.71%), which is due to the correction of errors that may occur in daily reporting, the market research firm said.






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