For the first time since the browser’s inception, Google’s Chrome has overtaken Apple’s Safari in percentage of U.S. market share. Web analytics company StatCounter reports Chrome grabbed 8.97% of U.S. market share while Safari had 8.88% for the week beginning on June 21st. For some time now, Chrome (~ 9% globally) has bested Safari (~ 4% globally); however, as we’re sure Google will tell you, it is nice to win on your home turf. We’ve got the full press release queued up for you after the break.  

Chrome Overtakes Safari for First Time to Claim Third Place in US Internet Browser Market – StatCounter

- Market still led by Internet Explorer

BOSTON & DUBLIN–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Google’s internet browser Chrome has overtaken Apple’s Safari in the US for the first time on a weekly basis according to StatCounter, the company which provides free website analytics. The firm’s research arm StatCounter Global Stats reports that for the week beginning 21 June Chrome overtook Safari to claim third place in the US browser market.

“This is quite a coup for Google as they have gone from zero to almost 10% of the US market in under two years,” commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter. “There is a battle royal going on between Google and Apple in the internet browser space (Chrome v Safari) as well as in the mobile market (Android v iPhone).” Chrome with 8.97% took third place in the US browser market ahead of Safari with 8.88%. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer still dominates the US Internet browser market with 52%, followed by Firefox (28.5%).

Globally Chrome has been well ahead of Safari for some time with 9.4% of the market compared to 4% for Safari. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has 53% of the global market followed by Firefox on 31%. The data is based on an analysis of 3.6 billion page views (874 million from the US) for the week 21 to 27 June 2010 collected from the StatCounter network of over three million websites.

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Hot on the heels of 2010′s WWDC keynote, Apple has announced an update to its Safari web browser. The code update, simply titled Safari 5, boasts, “a 30 percent performance increase over Safari 4,” according to the company’s press release. At time of publishing, Apple had yet to update their official Safari page (www.apple.com/safari) with the updated download information, but we’ve got the full PR Newswire release for you after the bounce.

Apple Releases Safari 5

SAN FRANCISCO, June 7 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Apple® today released Safari® 5, the latest version of the world’s fastest and most innovative web browser, featuring the new Safari Reader for reading articles on the web without distraction, a 30 percent performance increase over Safari 4,* and the ability to choose Google, Yahoo! or Bing as the search service powering Safari’s search field. Available for both Mac® and Windows, Safari 5 includes improved developer tools and supports more than a dozen new HTML5 technologies that allow web developers to create rich, dynamic websites. With Safari 5, developers can now create secure Safari Extensions to customize and enhance the browsing experience.

“Safari continues to lead the pack in performance, innovation and standards support,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “Safari now runs on over 200 million devices worldwide and its open source WebKit engine runs on over 500 million devices.”

Safari Reader makes it easy to read single and multipage articles on the web by presenting them in a new, scrollable view without any additional content or clutter. When Safari 5 detects an article, users can click on the Reader icon in the Smart Address Field to display the entire article for clear, uninterrupted reading with options to enlarge, print or send via email.

Powered by the Nitro JavaScript engine, Safari 5 on the Mac runs JavaScript 30 percent faster than Safari 4, three percent faster than Chrome 5.0, and over twice as fast as Firefox 3.6.* Safari 5 loads new webpages faster using Domain Name System (DNS) prefetching, and improves the caching of previously viewed pages to return to them more quickly.

Safari 5 adds more than a dozen powerful HTML5 features that allow web developers to create media-rich experiences, including full screen playback and closed captions for HTML5 video. Other new HTML5 features in Safari 5 include HTML5 Geolocation, HTML5 sectioning elements, HTML5 draggable attribute, HTML5 forms validation, HTML5 Ruby, HTML5 AJAX History, EventSource and WebSocket.

The new, free Safari Developer Program allows developers to customize and enhance Safari 5 with extensions based on standard web technologies like HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. The Extension Builder, new in Safari 5, simplifies the development, installation and packaging of extensions. For enhanced security and stability, Safari Extensions are sandboxed, signed with a digital certificate from Apple and run solely in the browser.

Pricing & Availability

Safari 5 is available for both Mac OS® X and Windows as a free download at www.apple.com/safari. Safari 5 for Mac OS X requires Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.8 or Mac OS X Snow Leopard® 10.6.2 or later. Safari 5 for Windows requires Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista or Windows 7, a minimum 256MB of memory and a system with at least a 500 MHz Intel Pentium processor. Full system requirements and more information on Safari 5 can be found at www.apple.com/safari. The Safari Developer Program is free to join at developer.apple.com/programs/safari.

*Performance will vary based on system configuration, network connection and other factors. All testing conducted by Apple inMay 2010 on an iMac® 3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo system running Mac OS X 10.6.3, with 4GB of RAM. JavaScript benchmark based on the SunSpider 0.9.1 JavaScript Performance test.

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According to French blog MacGeneration, Apple will unveil Safari 5 during Monday’s WWDC 2010 keynote. Not much is known about Safari 5, but according to a changelog that MacGeneration was able to get a hold of, the major new features brought forward will be Safari Reader, a 25% bump in JavaScript performance, option to make Bing the default search engine, 12+ new HTML5 features, developer tools, and hardware acceleration for Windows. There are also lot of enhancements alleged to be apart of the update, but for those we’ll have to ask you to hit the jump.

[Via TUAW]

Safari 5 Changelog

• Safari Reader: Click on the new Reader icon to view articles on the web in a single clutter-free page.
• Improved Performance: Safari 5 executes Javascript up to 25% faster than Safari 4. Better page caching and DNS prefetching speed up browsing.
• Bing Search Option: New Bing search option for Safari’s Search Field, in addition to Google and Yahoo.
• Improved HTML5 support: Safari supports over a dozen new HTML5 features including Geolocation, full screen for HTML5 video, closed caption for HTML5 video, new sectioning elements (article, aside footer, header, hgroup, nav and section), HTML5, AJAX History, EventSource, WebSocket, HTML 5 draggable attribute, HTML 5 forms validation, and HTML 5 Ruby.
• Safari Developer Tools: A new Timeline Panel in the Web Inspector shows how Safari interacts with a web site and identifies areas for optimization. New keyboard shortcuts make it aster to switch between panels.
• Smarter Address Field: The Smart Address Field can now match text against the titles of web pages in History and Bookmarks, as well as any part of their URL.
• Tab Settings: Automatically open new webpages in tabs instead of in separate windows.
• Hardware Acceleration for Windows: Use the power of the computer’s graphics processor to smoothly display media and effects on PC, as well as Mac.
• Search History with Date: A new date indicator in Full History Search shows when web pages were viewed.
• Top Sites/History Button: Switch easily between Top Sites and Full History Search with a new button that appears at the top of each view.
• Private Browsing Icon: A “Private” icon appears in the Smart Address Field when Private Browsing is on. Click on the icon to turn off Private Browsing.
• DNS Prefetching: Safari looks at the addresses of links on web pages and can load those pages faster.
• Improved Page Caching: Safari can add additional types of web pages to the cache so they load quickly.
• XSS Auditor: Safari can filter potentially malicious scripts used in cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks.
• Improved JavaScript Support: Safari allows web applications that use JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) to run faster and more securely.

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Browser market share data for January 2010 has hit the streets, and it looks like Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari have gained a little — and we do mean a little — ground. Chrome posted a 5.2% hold of market share in January, up from 4.6% in December of 2009. Apple’s Safari came in with a 4.51% share, up from 4.46% the previous month. Firefox and Internet Explorer both lost a tiny bit of ground in January; IE 62.2% which is down from 62.69%, Firefox 24.41% down from 24.62%. Opera was lumped into “other” on our chart, but registered 2.38% of the browser pie. Per usual, IE and FF still dominate the browser landscape with over 86% of market share. Anyone out there switch browsers recently? If so, which browser did you move to?

[Via ZDNet]

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Is Safari beginning to eat away at your patience? Firefox for Mac crashing and burning every time you’re in the middle of some important task? Well, you might want to give Google Chrome for Mac a shot now that it’s officially available for download. announced yesterday, it promises a lot of speed and efficiency, and if you’re a fan of all things Google, your digital life will be complete. Of course, it’s still in beta so it might be pretty rough around the edges and extensions are pretty limited, but these things will be smoothed out over time. It’s also only available for OS X 10.5 or later. Hit the jump for a video demonstration of the new browser.

Thanks, PR!

[Download link]

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As Opera continues to chip away at its competition and gain mobile market share, you can bet it’s not resting on any laurels. The software company has just released its 9.7 Beta version for Windows Mobile and promises to render pages faster and with better compression. The new version also includes Opera Widgets manager. Do note that this is still in beta and will have some issues:

• Opera Turbo in Opera Mobile is still a preview-feature;
  • Downloads don’t work while Opera Turbo is enabled.
  • Some settings (such as toggle on/off images) do not apply when Opera Turbo is enabled.
• On older WM 5.0 Devices with 480×800 resolution, switching between portrait and landscape may cause display errors. This is due to lack of support for this resolution in early versions of Microsoft’s driver.
• Some input method editors are known not to work well with Opera because they do not comply with Microsoft’s SIP and/or IME standard. When such an editor is detected by Opera, Opera will use a known (default) input method instead. An exception is EzInput v1.5, where the phone keypad and compact QUERTY, ABC mode doesn’t work, but the rest of the modes work fine. We recommend upgrading to EzInput v2.0 to avoid this.
• Only support for FlashLite 3.x. No Flash plugin included.

Still, it looks like a fine upgrade and a great direction for Opera mobile, especially with the new widgets manager. Check it out and let us know what you think.

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