According to web metrics company StatCounter, Google's web browser Chrome is now the second most popular browser in UK, ahead of Firefox for the first time. Precisely, based on the data collected, the website analytics company is giving Chrome the number two position in UK during the month of July.

The firm's research arm StatCounter Global Stats reports that Chrome took 22.1 percent of the UK market, up from 3.9 percent in July 2009. In the same period Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) fell significantly from 61 percent to 46 percent globally and Firefox dropped slightly from 27 percent to 22 percent.

In a statement, Aodhan Cullen, CEO of StatCounter commented, “Chrome continues to make significant gains in the browser market going from under 4 percent two years ago to over 20 percent today.”  

“Despite falling market share Internet Explorer still leads in the browser war but the next few months will be interesting to watch with Chrome and Firefox almost neck and neck,” added Cullen.

The research shows that Chrome is also performing particularly well in Ireland where it overtook Firefox in May to become the number two browser. In July it reached 27.7 percent, ahead of Firefox's 24.2 percent but still behind IE at 39.9 percent.

StatCounter Global Stats are based on aggregate data collected on a sample exceeding 15 billion page views per month (830 million from the UK and Ireland) from the StatCounter network of more than three million websites.

Although, Mozilla’s open source browser Firefox has been losing ground in the browser war, the company continues to upgrade Firefox at a rapid pace. Recently, Mozilla released a new version, Firefox 5, for Windows, Mac, Linux and Android. It comes on the heels of the wildly successful release of Firefox 4, which had more than 200 million downloads on Windows, Mac and Linux and millions of downloads in the Android market, according to the Mozilla blog.

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