It has been a good month for the ‘underdogs’ in the browser wars this month, with Firefox, Safari and Chrome all gaining ground.

Firefox has hit a fantastic milestone, now with over 20% of the web browser market, up 4% from last month. Apple’s Safari has climbed to just over 7%, up 8.5% from last month.

Even Google’s Chrome has crawled back some ground, after a steady drop off rate from the browsers first month. Chrome gained around 12% during the month, taking it’s total share to just under 1%.

The losers this month were both Opera and Internet Explorer. Opera lost 5% of it’s market, and is now 5th in the race, behind Google Chrome. November also saw Internet Explorer’s market share plummet below 70% for the first time since 1999.

You can view the full report at the Market Share website. Historical data can be sourced from Wikipedia. The browser wars are really firing up.

New Google Chrome builds are showing support for Greasemonkey, albeit very basic and still in early stages of development.

Until now, Greasemonkey has been a Mozilla Firefox extension that allows users to install scripts that make on-the-fly changes to most HTML-based web pages.

Martin from gHacks writes “Only scripts in c:\scripts are loaded and only if the user adds the parameter –enable-greasemonkey by appending it to the program’s shortcut.”

Support for Greasemonkey has been added as of build 3499, which can be downloaded from the Chromium build FTP.

With all the news that Google Chrome’s market share has droped since it’s release, I thought it was only fitting to add some more statistics to the fire.

On another technology site that I run, browser stats were as follows for the month of September:

Browser Market Share for September

Through the month of September, Chrome’s usage has dropped around 30% from its release. Usage seems to have stabalised since then.

Of interesting note, is that Google Chrome has still gained a larger market share than Opera. It should also be noted that Chrome is still only available on Windows. Perhaps it’s market share will again increase when offical Mac and Linux versions are released.

Perhaps Google Chrome hasn’t shaken up the market as much as everyone predicted. Did you try Google Chrome and are you still using it?

WebKit passing Acid3

The WebKit development team has just passed another huge milestone. The WebKit browser engine used in Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome now fully passes the Acid3 test.

The Acid3 test checks how well browsers comply with the latest standards, in particular JavaScript and the Document Object Model (DOM).

Maciej Stachowiak of the WebKit team attributes this feat to “recent speedups in JavaScript, DOM and rendering.”

Unfortunately, it will be a few months before we see this in Safari and Chrome, but while you wait you can download a nightly build of WebKit and test this for yourself.

Chromium on Linux

Thanks to the CrossOver Chromium project, it is now possible to download Google Chrome for Mac OS X and Linux.

The Chromium project is an open source effort, built using the same code as Chrome and “aims to build a safer, faster, and more stable way for all Internet users to experience the web“.

At this stage, the browser does not run nativly on systems other than Windows, but the Chromium project has been made possible thanks to the CodeWeavers’ Wine development expertise.

You can download the CrossOver Chromium browser from the website or the links below:

Mac OS X
Ubuntu and Debian (32bit)
Ubuntu and Debian (64bit)

Google Chrome Go Green Theme

In less than two weeks since Google Chrome was released, die-hard fans and users are already customising the browser. ChromeSpots Google Chrome Themes forum has plenty of themes to choose from already.

Theme’s resembling Apple’s Safari, to Mozilla’s Firefox, and even deviantART have all been created.

Once you download a theme you will need to install it. The install path is as follows:

Windows Vista
C:\Users\[user]\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\[current version]\Themes\

Windows XP
C:\Documents and Settings\[user]\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\[current version]\Themes\

To install the theme simply copy the default.dll you have just downloaded to the above directory. I strongly suggest that you backup your current default.dll file before doing this. Unfortunately, for the time being, there is no way to manage multiple themes. However, this is definitely a promising start form theme developers. I look forward to seeing what’s to come.

Edit 2: Real full screen mode is available in the latest release of Google Chrome. You simply need to press F11.

Edit: For clarification – there is no full-screen mode in Google Chrome yet. This simply opens the browser maximized.

One thing that many users may find frustrating is that Google Chrome opens in window mode. Thankfully there is a simple fix for this. By editing the Google Chrome shortcut, you simply need to add the -start-maximized parameter to the end of the shortcut line.

Your new shortcut line should look something like this:

C:\Users\[user]\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe -start-maximized

Problem solved! Chrome will now open in full-screen mode.

Google has just opened up Chrome’s dev channel. The dev channel gives early access to new features and bug fixes. Google promises to release Chrome updates to the dev channel frequently, providing webmasters the ability to test their sites and script with the latest version of the Chrome browser.

Google does warn however that dev channel releases are prone to be less stable than their Beta cousins released on the main Google Chrome website.

To subscribe to the dev channel, you simply need to download and install the Google Chrome Channel Chooser. Full details and installation instructions can be found on the dev channel website.

Google Chrome browser in action

Google has just thrown a huge spanner into the browser war with the release of their new web browser, Google Chrome. According to Google, “Google Chrome is a browser that combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the web faster, safer, and easier.”

Early testing seems very promising, and I have found the browser to be fast and responsive, even though it is still in beta at version 0.2. There still seem to be a few rough edges, but I would think we will see these ironed out as we see new releases.

Built on WebKit technology, Google Chrome includes some useful new features, including:

• Address bar under each tab
• Individual windows are in their own “sandbox”
• Thumbnails of your favourite sites
• One search bar for searching and typing URLs

In the next few days I plan to give a more indepth review of Google Chrome as I have more time to play with the browser. If you haven’t already, you can check Google Chrome out at http://www.google.com/chrome/.

How have you found Google Chrome so far?