Chrome # 2

New No. 2 in Browser Battle

Excerpt:

Chrome moved past Firefox, an offering by the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation that Google has helped support, according to the website analytics company StatCounter.

Google's success with Chrome, aided by the product's speed, underscores the shake-up in the browser market—once considered all but locked up by Microsoft, which includes Internet Explorer with its Windows operating system. It also has added to the company's clout because as a browser maker it can help define the kinds of new graphical features that can be used by sites across the Web as well as helping Google funnel Web surfers to its dominant Internet-search engine, the top driver of Google's revenue.

"People have discovered there is a difference in browsers," said Brad Mitchell Smith, an analyst at research firm Gartner Inc.

Browsers have become more important as more software development shifts to the Web and away from applications anchored to personal computers and their operating systems, like Windows. Google has used Chrome to push new Web technologies such as HTML5 that help websites have richer graphics, in hopes of spurring greater usage of the Web—as well as Google's own websites and online software.

Google CEO Larry Page said earlier this year that while it might not be clear how Google can make money from Chrome, "emerging high-usage products can generate huge new businesses for Google in the long run, just like search."

Google's effort to build a new browser, which started in 2006, was partly born out of concerns existing browsers would fail to support its Web services or steer users away from its search engine. Today, for instance, Microsoft uses Internet Explorer to channel people to its Bing search engine.

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