At time of writing the market share of Safari and Google Chrome is around 5% each.
Firefox is around 30% and the rest is IE and Opera and some other browsers with a small market share.
The rising stars
Safari’s market share has risen quite fast.
From around 3% in June 2009 to 5% around January 2010
Chrome did it’s thing even faster.
Going from 0,5% in mid 2008 to 5.5% around January 2010
Off course Firefox has also been increasing in market share but not by as much.
Going from 20% in mid 2008 to 25% around January 2010
Firefox’s market share is off course a lot larger then that of Safari / Chrome.
But it’s growth is slowing down and I think it will stop growing soon I think.
The why they will keep rising
Safari is the default browser for Macs and also the default browser for iPhones, iPads and it’s also available on windows.
Apple is a premium brand at the moment, most of the hardware products coming out of Apple are sexy and that will probably help pushing Safari a little bit on other platforms.
Chrome on the other hand has something else pushing it, Google is putting quite a bit of muscle behind it. It has been doing ad campaigns it’s been putting advertisements on Gmail to migrate people away from IE and will probably be doing a lot more of this.
Google is also a company people respect and it’s a brand which inspires confidence.
Google won’t stop pushing it’s browser, because it makes sense for them to get as many people on the internet using it a lot more internet applications watching more videos online etc etc.
This is because their main business is selling ads and their main brand is internet search.
The best way to push these things is getting the web surfing experience as good as possible.
Google is also putting out 2 OS’es Android and Chrome OS, which might also provide a larger market share for it’s browser.
Conclusion
Together the current market share of Safari / Chrome is now around 10 – 11% I think in 2 years this will be at least 30%
This market share will probably be coming out of Firefox’s market share.
Together with market share from IE6.