For the first week in history, Google Chrome is the most-used browser in the world, according to Statcounter. While Chrome has been leapfrogging the incumbent Internet Explorer on weekends for some time now, the week of May 14th–20th marks the first time Chrome has averaged a higher traffic share over a full seven-day stretch.
We’ve mentioned before that Chrome is the most popular browser visiting The Verge, but that’s far from the case in the rest of North America, where Internet Explorer still has the lead — 37 to 26 percent. So which regions are responsible for Chrome’s worldwide lead? In Europe, Chrome has been ahead of IE for the past two weeks, but only by a percentage point, and Firefox is ahead of both. Also, IE has a massive lead over second-place Chrome in Oceania, and Firefox is dominating both IE and Chrome in Africa.
It turns out that the worldwide numbers are skewed by two regions: Asia and South America, and even still the numbers aren’t necessarily what you’d expect. IE is in the lead in Japan with a more than 50 percent share, and things are even more skewed in China and South Korea, where roughly three quarters of traffic comes through Microsoft’s browser. Chrome is in the lead in India, but it’s only by 8 percent. The real difference is in South America, where Chrome has a nearly 50 percent share overall. Some believe that the reason for its large share in that region is the popularity of Google’s Orkut social networking service. Whatever the case, we can see that while Chrome might be the most popular browser at the worldwide level, and is clearly trending upward, in many of the world’s biggest economies, Google’s browser is a way off from the number one spot.