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Google's new Chrome browser grabbed 1% of the browser market in its first day out in public, say web metrics providers.
Both Net Applications, a US-based tracking company, and Irish vendor StatCounter put Chrome's total market share at around 1% less than 24 hours after its launch, passing rivals such as the current Opera and the ancient Netscape in the process.
"This is a phenomenal performance," said CEO Aodhan Cullen in a post to StatCounter's blog on Wednesday. StatCounter, which provides free visitor statistics tools to web developers, monitors traffic on the sites run by its 1.5 million members.
Net Applications also tracked Chrome's debut, and echoed StatCounter's numbers. "We saw them peak at 1.48% last night, and they're hovering around 1% currently," said Vince Vizzaccaro, the company's executive vice president of marketing at Net Applications.
According to Net Applications, which is tracking Chrome's hourly numbers, Google's browser jumped from zero to 0.4% during the hour it was released yesterday. Nine hours later, at midnight EDT, Chrome accounted for 1% of the browsers used to visit the 40,000-some sites that the company monitors for clients.
As Vizzaccaro noted, Chrome peaked at 1.48% early Wednesday — 4am EDT, 1am PDT — and as of 11am EDT, held a 0.98% share.
"I'm certain usage will increase at night and on weekends, as companies won't want people testing Chrome at work," Vizzaccaro said.
Net Applications typically sees the same cyclic behaviour from Mozilla's Firefox, which jumps in share on weekends and during off-work hours.
Vizzaccaro wouldn't speculate on what browsers Google Chrome's users may be leaving. "We won't know that for a couple of weeks, as most people will test it along side of their normal browser for a while," he said.
With 1% of the market, Chrome immediately overtakes Opera Software's Opera, which Net Applications pegged with 0.74% at the end of August, as well as the moribund Netscape, which the company said accounted for 0.72% of all browsers used last month.
AOL, Netscape's owner, killed it last February when it issued the venerable browser's last update and urged users to switch to Firefox or Flock.
Microsoft's Internet Explorer held 72.2% of the browser share last month, said Net Applications earlier this week, while Mozilla's Firefox and Apple's Safari owned 19.2% and 6.4%, respectively.
Google launched Chrome on Tuesday around 3pm EDT. Currently, a version for Windows XP and Vista is the only one available for download. Chrome, which is built on the WebKit rendering engine — the same open-source code used by Apple's Safari — features a privacy mode, a combination address-and-search bar, and runs each tab as a separate process to prevent a single site from crashing the entire browser.
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