“StatCounter’s monthly statistics for November show IE in the lead with 40.63 percent of the global market, followed by Chrome with 25.69 percent, Firefox with 25.23 percent, Safari with 5.92 percent and Opera with 1.82 percent.”
Source: http://www.infoworld.com/d/applications/chrome-takes-no-2-browser-spot-firefox-180579
I’m not surprised Chrome took 2nd place from FireFox. What that article doesn’t talk about is why this might be happening:
FireFox has made some HUGE mistakes this year:
One of which was trying to play catchup number-wise to Chrome which caused extension problems (Chrome didn’t take the standard approach to numbering so it started off 2011 at around version 11 and FireFox was just at version 4 even though FireFox has been around longer and had more versions. People make wrong assumptions about the bigger number.) The way extensions have typically worked has caused problems with FireFox’s sudden decision to play the number game and go from version 3 to version 8 in a year (even though there aren’t major differences between 4 and 8.)
The other problem for FireFox is a huge memory leak with recent versions(or a memory leak that got worse with each version since 3.6.) What that means is that the longer you have firefox open on your computer, the slower your computer gets because it keeps using more and more of your available ram.
FireFox also became annoyingwith asking to update every time they came out with a new version … which also meant you had to update your extensions and wait to find out which ones no longer worked. Most people don’t know how to downgrade because they don’t make that easy.
I started using Chrome as my primary browser around July.I still use an older version of FireFox because there’s one developer extension that isn’t on par in Chrome but everything else in Chrome is the same or better. And typically I test in two versions of FireFox still (3.6 and whatever is current.)
It’s frustrating but I see FireFox going the way of Opera which used to have more market share (though Opera never made as much headway on Internet Explorer as FireFox has.)