Google Chrome Share Hits 13.5%, Apple Safari Tops 8%

Google Chrome and Apple's Safari Web browsers both gained market share through July, according to Net Applications. Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox lost share.

Google's (NASDAQ:GOOG) Chrome Web browser market share rose from 13.1 percent in June to 13.5 percent through July, while Apple's (NASDAQ:AAPL) Safari continued its good growth for the first full summer month.

The rise of Chrome and Safari appear to be impinging market share for Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, which both lost points in July, according to Net Applications.

IE dropped almost a full percentage point, from 53.7 percent in June to 52.8 percent in July. Firefox dipped from 21.7 percent to 21.5 percent.

Chrome has gained steadily for nearly three years, coming from out of nowhere in September 2008 to render Web pages in speedy fashion on Windows PCs and Macs.

There are many reasons for Chrome's upswing. Start with its hip factor from being a stealth Google product with which the company shocked the world, then move on to the speedy V8 JavaScript engine and accelerated release cycles.

Since 2010, advertising and marketing for the browser and Chrome operating system have also been playing their parts in the growth.

Google last year began advertising Chrome on ESPN.com, The New York Times and other high-profile Websites for a year.

In May, Google began pushing Chrome as the center of users life experiences, planting a marketing seed for Chrome OS notebooks.

The first Samsung Series 5 Chromebook launched June 15, while the Acer AC700 machine shipped late.

However, it is the rise of Safari that has become more interesting of late. Consider that Safari's share was languishing around 4.5 percent when Apple launched its first iPad in April 2010.

Since the iPad launch Safari share has nearly doubled. Safari on Macs are certainly accountable for some of this, but eWEEK expects the main contribution in share comes from the nearly 30 million iPads sold in the last 16 months or so.

No one is claiming users will overthrow IE or Firefox en masse, but Chrome and Safari's gains at the expense of the market incumbents make for an interesting story line provided they can continue to ascend.