Chrome Again Beats Firefox in Browser Gain Race

From PC World: Chrome was the only browser to gain significant usage share last month, and again trounced rival open-source Firefox.

By the end of April, Chrome accounted for 6.7% of the browsers that surfed to the sites that California-based NetApplications monitors for its clients. Chrome boosted its share by 0.6 percentage points, by far the largest increase of any browser for the month, and the second-highest increase since Google launched the program in September 2008.

Virtually all of Chrome's April expansion came at the expense of Microsoft 's Internet Explorer (IE), which dropped 0.7 percentage points to finish the month at 59.95%, the first time that IE has fallen under the 60% mark. IE's decline was less than the previous month -- it lost nearly a full point of share in March -- but was still above its average monthly decline.

Mozilla's Firefox, on the other hand, was up last month, albeit by only 0.07 percentage points to 24.6%. April was the second month in a row that Firefox trended up, a victory of sorts after losing ground for four straight months starting in November 2009.

Once considered a lock to make, then move beyond the 25% bar, Firefox has yet to reach the milestone. Last month, Vince Vizzaccaro, executive vice president of NetApplications, noted that Firefox was "just holding steady," and gains that had once come easily to it were instead heading Chrome's way. That appeared to be the case again in April.

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