The latest browser-related stats from Net Applications are out, and October represented more of a trick than a treat for Internet Explorer and Firefox. But in terms of market share, Safari gained a tiny bit of ground, and Chrome definitely came ahead.
On a month-over-month basis, Net Applications believes Chrome’s market share increased from 7.98 percent to 8.47 percent. And pitted purely against itself, that gain represents an improvement of 6.14 percent, which is quite good for that short a period.
Safari, meanwhile, eked out a less-impressive increase from 5.27 percent to 5.33 percent between September and October.
As for Internet Explorer, its market share dipped from 59.65 percent to 59.26 percent, which extends a pattern that the IE team at Microsoft must find worrying. Even if IE9 is great, there’s now a smaller pool of people likely to just upgrade to it.
Firefox saw its popularity slip a little, too, with its market share decreasing from 22.96 percent to 22.82 percent on a month-over-month basis. And in this highly competitive environment, that makes the delay of Firefox 4 look like a potential problem.