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'Google Chrome increases lead over Safari in Europe - study'May 06, 2010 (DMEUROPE via COMTEX) -- Google Chrome has widened its market share lead over Apple's Safari in Europe as Microsoft's Internet Explorer continues to decline, according to AT Internet Institute. Its analysis of visits to websites, excluding mobiles, in 23 European countries found that Explorer lost more than 7 percentage points of visit share over one year to 57.1 percent at the end of March. Google Chrome took advantage of a strong sales campaign to take a 5 percent in visit share in March, a gain of 4 points in one year, and stretched its lead in third place vis-a-vis Safari by a narrow margin, 5.3 percent, compared to 1.4 percent in March 2009. Mozilla/Firefox attained 29.6 percent of traffic to a website in a European country, up by 1.8 points on March 2009. Safari, now in fourth place, gained almost 2 points and exceeded 5.2 percent of visit shares in March. Opera remained in fifth position with a stable share over the year. On average 2.2 percent of visits to a European website were made through Opera last March, the same level as in March 2009. Since the 1 March, the European Commission has obliged Microsoft to offer the "ballot screen" which gives users the choice of twelve browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, Avant Browser, Flock, GreenBrowser, K-Meleon, Maxthon, Sleipnir and Slimbrowser. Yet according to AT, one month after its arrival, it is still unclear whether the Ballot screen has accelerated Explorer's loss. The Microsoft browser's visit share dropped steadily for 6 months (-4.1 points) without a significant loss between February and March 2010. The big gainer, Google Chrome, has experienced an upward trend in Spain, Italy, Belgium and the UK, four countries where Explorer's share is still above the European average. Distributed for DMeurope.com via M2 Communications (www.m2.com) [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] |