Google’s Chrome is steadily making the climb in the Web browser market with a 12% market share, denting Internet Explorer’s popularity.
Net Applications told T3 that Chrome had a market share of 11.9% in April, up 0.4% from March. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer slipped to to 55.1% in April from 55.9% in March. Mozilla’s Firefox also dropped to 21.6% from 21.8% in the same period. However, Apple’s Safari increased its market share to 7.1% from 6.6%.
The rising popularity of Google is connected to the search engine’s reach which has embedded ads for the Web browser.
According to a study by research firm comScore, Google topped the US explicit core search market in March 2011 with 65.7% market share. Yahoo came a distant second with 15.7% (down 0.4 percentage points). Microsoft was third with 13.9% market share.
Google has also improved its browser with new features.
Recently, Google said that it will add a new security feature to its Chrome Web browser to guard users against malicious downloads.
With the new feature, Chrome will leverage Safe Browsing’s list of dangerous sites to alert users when they may be downloading suspicious executables.
The safety feature will run downloads through the same database of blacklisted files, ensuring that users don’t accidentally open the door to rogue applications, said the company.
For the first quarter, Google posted net income of $2.3bn, or $7.04 a share, up from $1.96bn, or $6.06 a share, in the previous year’s first quarter. It earned $8.08 a share.
