I’ve recently switched to Chrome from Firefox as my primary browser. I use a Mac, having switched 2 years ago after getting fed up with the long boot times on my PC. It is truly the only reason I switched to a Mac and quite honestly I don’t do anything on my Mac that I didn’t do on my PC but opening and closing my laptop all day, Microsoft failed me but I will save that discussion for another day. I’d been a Firefox user on the PC and then on the Mac for about 4 years. Mostly I had used Firefox because of Firebug a neat developer tool that allowed you to quickly understand and debug css, html and javascript. It really made development much easier for the sites that I tinker with and generally I was a Firefox fan and still am. I did find it to be slow and crashed on occasion but it served my browsing needs well for 4 years. When Google launched Chrome on the Mac I checked it out. It really is faster. It isn’t perfect yet. I find issues with Flash sites and some quirks like viewing an RSS feed so I still keep Firefox and Safari on standby for those times but Chrome is my browser of choice right now because it is faster.

Given my change in browsers I was curious to see the trends across browsers over the last 5 years. I used a few sites that I have access to the Google Analytics for and so this is not a gigantic sample but there is certainly enough data here across the millions of visitors to see some interesting trends. I also chose sites that are not techy focused as techies tend to skew the numbers so hopefully this is a representation of normal web users in the U.S. What is clear from these trends. Microsoft continues to lose market share. IE is still the most widely used browser worldwide but it is declining. Early it seemed they were losing to Firefox but more recently it is interesting to note that Safari seems to be taking a big share from the OS giant. Because Safari is the default browser on the Mac, this indicates that that Microsoft is not only starting to lose the browser battle, but also maybe at risk in the much larger OS war. Macs are still more expensive than PCs but with the $500 iPad on the market now, we may see more trends in this direction. Firefox has stayed relatively steady recently, losing some share to Chrome and chipping away some at IE but the bigger growth seems to be Safari. The numbers (again a small sample relative to the entire web) tell an interesting story.