Google Chrome increased its browser market share for the fifth straight month in May. With this, the browser is now at an all-time high of 69.8 percent market share. It is still lower than the nearly 90 percent market share that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer had in 2005, just before Mozilla Firefox started climbing the charts. Chrome is on track to breach the 70 percent mark in June. In that case, it will become only the third browser after IE and Netscape Navigator to hit the landmark.
According to Net Applications, Microsoft Edge sits pretty at number two with 7.9 percent market share ahead of Firefox. Mozilla’s open-source browser is at number three on the list with 7.2 percent, having lost the second place to Microsoft Edge earlier this year. Safari and Opera rounded out the top-five with 3.9 percent and 1.1 percent market share, respectively.
As for Internet Explorer, the once market-leader now accounts for only 4.6 percent of the global desktop browser market. The browser has long been deprecated by Microsoft in favor of Edge, which, in its Chromium avatar, is picking up users in a way that should be a major cause for concern for rivals like Mozilla and Opera Software.
Even as Chrome continues to gain market share, it just doesn’t seem to shake off concerns regarding privacy. Google earlier this week was sued by Chrome users in the US over allegations that the browser collected user information even in Incognito mode. The lawsuit claims that Chrome gathers data regardless of Incognito mode being enabled or not.
