Data source: Net Applications

Chrome is on a roll. It's the fastest-growing browser in terms of market share we've seen in a long time. And its rapid growth corresponds with Internet Explorer's steady decline. Keeping that in mind though, data from last month shows that IE8 has managed to grab 25 percent of the browser market, beating all versions of Firefox to the punch. In January 2010, only Chrome and Safari showed positive growth.

Between December and January, Internet Explorer dropped a significant 0.51 percentage points (from 62.69 percent to 62.18 percent) and Firefox slipped 0.20 percentage points (from 24.61 percent to 24.41 percent). Chrome jumped a sizeable 0.57 percentage points (from 4.63 percent to 5.20 percent) while Safari moved up 0.05 percentage points (from 4.46 percent to 4.51 percent). Opera, on the other hand, dipped 0.02 percentage points (from 2.40 percent to 2.38 percent), though we're still hoping version 10.5 will turn things around for the little guy.

Data source: Net Applications

As you can see from the chart above, Chrome's progress is remarkable. Google released its browser in December 2008, meaning the above shows you the month after its release to last month. The month prior to that it passed Safari, taking third place overall in the browser market. Looking back over this past year, it seems that Chrome is stealing users from Internet Explorer primarily, despite the belief of some that it would convert mainly Firefox users. This is because Google advertises Chrome on websites that Joe Internet uses: Google.com, YouTube.com, and so on. Furthermore, Google struck a distribution deal with Sony in September 2009, and it will likely try to sign similar ones with other OEMs this year. What's really interesting is that Chrome's gains seem to be accelerating, though this is likely because the browser is just starting to mature in terms of features.

Data source: Net Applications

In stark contrast to the success story of Chrome, Internet Explorer's decline is easily the most noticeable trend. Nevertheless, IE is still used by more than half of all users and IE8 is now used by one in four users on the Web. The importance of having a default browser on the dominant operating system is still the biggest factor in browser adoption. It seems that Firefox has stalled just below the 25 percent mark (we're wondering if the release of version 3.6 will make a difference in February). In any case, IE8 finished 2009 by passing IE6 and now it has started 2010 by crossing the 25 percent mark. Not too shabby.

You can see the market share pie for January 2010, according to Net Applications, at the top of this post. The graph just above shows how things at Ars are very different: Firefox continues to dominate, but the default browsers for Windows and Mac OS X still show their strength, and Chrome's lead over Opera is much more significant at Ars. Compared to last month, Firefox lost share, as did Safari ever so slightly. Meanwhile, IE gained, as did Chrome, but Opera fell back a bit. Once again, Chrome's gain was the biggest change.

Taking a look at Ars browser trends over the same time period as we did above, there's a few interesting points. First off, Chrome started off at a much higher market share, as our readers are much more likely to try out early builds than the general population. That said though, its huge jump in recent months is a lot more noticeable. On Ars, Chrome is making gains at the expense of both Firefox and IE, as opposed to just IE on the Internet as a whole, which means that the predictions that Chrome would steal away Firefox users is at least partially true in the tech-savvy world.