Google Chrome Moves Past Apple Safari, Says StatCounter

StatCounter said June 28 that Google’s Chrome Web browser has leapfrogged Apple’s Safari browser in the U.S., with 8.97 percent market share to Safari’s 8.88 percent.

Chrome has been well ahead of Safari around the world, with 9.4 percent of the market compared with 4 percent for Safari, said the researcher, whose data is based on an analysis of 3.6 billion page views (874 million from the U.S.) collected from more than 3 million Websites June 21 through June 27.

“This is quite a coup for Google as they have gone from zero to almost 10 percent of the U.S. market in under two years,” StatCounter CEO Aodhan Cullen said.

I would agree that Chrome’s growth against Safari and Firefox has been great after following the rise of Chrome extensively here and on eWEEK.com since its September 2008 launch.

Net Applications informed us back in January that Chrome had lapped Safari worldwide, thanks to the launches of Chrome for Mac and Linux.

That researcher, whose latest figures for June will post July 1, put Chrome’s latest market share for May at 7 percent, with Safari at 4.77 percent.

Net Applications, which collects data from the browsers of 160 million visitors per month, notes Chrome’s rise in this chart:

I will have a separate report on the Chrome growth Thursday when I see Net Applications’ global market share data.

Anyone want to guess what Chrome’s market share will be? I’ll say 7.3 percent, thanks to some serious advertising on ESPN and the New York Times, among other popular Websites.