With more and more Google Chrome apps and extensions coming out it's time to take a look on the war between the browsers. I know the apps are mainly made for the Google Chrome OS, but I can't see ChromeOS taking a major place in the OS market in the near future, which means most of the apps and extensions will be used on Google's browser , Chrome.
I've looked on W3Schools browser statistics for the past year, according to W3Schools five browser control the market Microsoft's IE, Mozila's Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari and Opera. Since Safari and Opera control between 2-4 percent, I won't be taking a look at them. According to W3Schools IE and Firefox have been loosing the battle mainly to Google's Chrome, IE has been dropping in a rate of 0.961 percent a month and Firefox 0.209 percent a month for the last eleven month, mean while Chrome has been climbing in a rate of 0.882 percent a month. In these rates Chrome will over take IE in less then six month and Firefox in less then twenty two month. The battle between IE and Chrome is close, six month is just over the corner, Microsoft is taking about IE 9, but looks like it's all ready too late. On the other hand twenty two month is a long time almost two years in this time Firefox can stop the it's dropping, probably with Firefox 4, but still it's hard to predict
A lot of writers, when writing about browsers, write on things like better support of CSS or how it works with HTML5 (hell, some people don't even know what a browser is). Most users don't care about those things, the two things that matter the most, in this order are speed and safty and in the meanwhile looks like IE is loosing and Chrome is winning, Firefox had developed a lot of speed problems but looks like version 4 had solved part of that.
Browser percentage (January-November 2010)
Change rates
Change rate crossing (November 2010-November 2012)
You can check the numbers at this Google Docs spread sheet.