Chrome bumps Safari from No. 3 browser spot

Last week's release of Google's Chrome for Mac OS X and Linux gave the upstart Web browser a major boost in marketshare according to Net Applications, which tracks the browser habits of 160 million unique visitors each month to the 40,000 sites it monitors for customers.

Chrome's marketshare jumped to 4.4% for the week of December 6-12, an increase of 0.4 percent over November. The boost was enough to best Safari's 4.37%, even if only by 0.03%.

During November, IE had a 63.6% share, while Firefox's was 24.7%.

Since the debut of the Chrome beta for the Mac the scrappy browser accounted for 1.3% of all browsers used on Mac OS X, up from just 0.32% during November. Vince Vizzaccaro, Executive Vice President of Net Applications, said that Chrome appears to have stolen marketshare equally from both Safari and Firefox.

Tip: ComputerWorld