Surfers are slowly abandoning the Google Chrome browser and returning to the big two, Firefox and Internet Explorer, according to the latest data.

Read Web User's review of Google Chrome

Web-monitoring firm NetApplications said that by the end of Chrome's third week in beta testing it had slipped from 0.77 per cent to 0.85 per cent of visits to the 40,000 sites it tracks.

"The trend line on Chrome still has a slight downward angle and these weekly numbers reflect that," said Vince Vizzaccaro, Net Applications' executive vice-president of marketing.

By mid-September, Chrome had overtaken Safari, Apple's browser product.

Despite its early success, the new browser only manages to surpass the one per cent mark in the middle of the night US time, which is early in the morning in the UK.

Chrome's numbers typically rise after work hours and fall again when the working day resumes.

This could be down to many companies and businesses only allowing the use of Internet Explorer in the workplace, Net Applications theorised.

Chrome's descent may also be down to marketing, according to Vizzaccarao. "The only marketing effort I've seen from Google is in sponsored links on search results for 'browser' or 'browsers' search terms," he said.

"On Google, Chrome is naturally the top sponsored link. On Yahoo, it was second. And on Windows Live, I couldn't even find it in the first five pages of organic results," he continued.

www.netapplications.com
www.google.com/chrome
www.microsoft.com/ie8
www.mozilla.org

Back to index