The figures – applicable from December 2010 to January 2011 – show that Chrome made a 7.2% gain, reaching a 10.7% total market share. Chrome’s current height of a 10.7% is more than double its 5.22% total market share in January 2009, and the browser is the only one that is consistently making increased, market gains.

Google’s selling of Chrome has been extensive, with many opportunities for the search giant to advertise given its internet dominance. But away from the virtual domain, it has even been rumoured that there will be an advert for Chrome within the next Super Bowl. The company has also run extensive promotions at major shopping centres, such as Westfield in London.

Chrome’s fast upgrade cycle – the browser started 2010 with its 3.0 version, but finished the year with version 10.0 – could also explain its market growth.

Internet Explorer’s (IE) global browser market share is down overall by 1.9% in the last month, despite the increase in demand for its latest browser IE8. However, the defection of users from IE6 and IE7 – both falling by 1.63% and 0.47% respectively – is likely to have boosted Chrome’s all-time high figures.

Here at NSDesign we already started to give it a look and discovered many new interesting features. Apart from a few problems when opening up many tabs together, the browser seems to work pretty well, and the navigation interface, even with the addition of new functionalities, is simple to understand and doesn’t create so much confusion about how to use it.

Two functionalities that we found quite interesting are the crash recovery and the highlighting of the visited URL (to provide more security especially in the case of complex domain names that can trick the user).

These are not only the only new features, there are even more new features that developers can discover, in fact Microsoft, quite late (but never to late for something important like this), decided to pay more attention to the web standards making Explorer strictly standard compliant and other interesting features for developers.

Due to the fact that IE is the most used browser, this is a great news, in the future we are going to see more and more websites developed properly, providing completely accessible information contents. But not all good news come by their own, from another point of view a stricter browser can create some inconveniences to those people who own an old websites or those who have a website structured with not standard code, breaking their websites on the new browser. Explorer 8 offers versioning (backwards compatibility to make a website work like on older browsers versions, like Explorer 7, Explorer 6 and Explorer 5), it is an interesting functionality for a short term solution, but it doesn’t have to be considered a definitive solution to compatibility problems. The best way is always to use the correct standard codes, keeping separated content, structure and style.

Definitely the new Microsoft browser is optimum and can compete with other major ones like the new Firefox 3.