Chrome Leads in Browser Market Share Growth in September

September proved much of the same in the browser market as the top three browsers continued their trend, either upwards or downwards. The launch of the Internet Explorer 9 Beta didn't do much for the overall share of IE which slid below 60 percent.

Meanwhile, Google Chrome snatched another half a percent and Firefox saw pretty much no movement.

Data from Net Applications shows that the overall market share of IE, which has dominated the market for as long as anyone can remember, is now at 59.65 percent, down from 60.4 percent in August.

IE has been slowly losing share in recent months, but saw an uptake for a couple of months before that. Also, the difference is rather slim, one percent point for IE is not the same as one percent point for Chrome, for example.

Broken down by version, Internet Explorer 8 leads with 29 percent, followed by IE6 with 15.5 percent and IE7 with 10.4 percent. The IE9 beta had just 0.1 percent usage, but it has only been available in the last two weeks of the month.

Google Chrome managed to snatch up another half of percent of the market, reaching 7.98 percent. That's up from 7.52 percent in August, which in turn was also a half of percent rise from July.

Most of the users were running Chrome 6.0, over 5 percent, the most recent stable version. Also popular was Chrome 5.0 with almost 2.5 percent.

Chrome seems to be seeing some solid growth, but even at this rapid pace, it's not going to challenge Firefox any time soon, not to mention Internet Explorer.

Mozilla's browser has been hovering around the 23 percent mark for months now. September is no different as Firefox gained a measly 0.03 percent points with Firefox 3.6 being the most popular version at 17 percent.