Net Applications: Google Chrome's market share approached 30% in August 2015

Market research firm Net Applications said on Tuesday that Google Chrome's market share in August was close to 30%. No other browser has posed such a big threat to IE's dominance in the browser market since Microsoft defeated Netscape in the early 2000s.

Chrome’s share of browser users averaged 29.5% in August, according to Net Applications. Chrome’s market share grew 1.7 percentage points, the largest monthly gain since December 2014.

Changes in Chrome browser market share over the past 12 months

Chrome celebrates its 7th birthday today. On this day in 2008, Google released Chrome for Windows, and later for OS X and Linux. Over the past year, Chrome's market share has grown by 9.9 percentage points, the highest growth rate in any 12-month period. Another browser that has grown its market share over the same period is Opera.

Chrome has mainly eaten into the market share of Firefox and Internet Explorer, which have lost 3.6 and 6.3 percentage points respectively in the past 12 months.

A year ago, Microsoft announced that it would stop supporting most IE versions except IE 11, forcing the vast majority of IE users to switch to other browsers. Net Applications data reveals the causal relationship between Microsoft's decision and the sharp increase in Chrome's market share: if users have to upgrade from IE 8 to IE 11, they are more likely to switch to other browsers such as Chrome.

If the current growth trend can be maintained, Chrome's market share will exceed 30% by the end of September and will exceed 35% in March next year. IE's market share will fall below 50% in January next year.

Other browsers also performed poorly last month. Firefox had an average market share of 11.7%. Microsoft's new Edge browser had a market share of 2% in August, but given that Windows 10 had a market share of 5.2%, this means that only 38% of Windows 10 users use Edge as their preferred browser.