The Chrome browser increased its marketshare to 56.43% by the end of 2016, according to figures from Net Applications, a company that tracks key Internet technology usage market share and publishes them under the title NetMarketShare.
Figures from February last year show that Chrome's share of the market at that point was 36.56%. This rose gradually during the year and the browser, which is produced by Google's parent company Alphabet, overtook Microsoft's Internet Explorer which in February had 40.85% of the market to be top of the browser usage chart.
IE fell away during the year, according to the NetMarketShare figures. This could be due to the upgrade to Windows 10 which was forced on users by Microsoft during the year. Windows 10 has a new default browser, Edge, though IE is also available on the system.
Since 2015, IE has not had any new features added, though it still receives security updates.
{loadposition sam08}By the end of 2016, IE has lost about half its users, coming in at 20.84%, according to the NetMarketShare figures.
The use of Edge grew slightly, beginning with 3.94% in February and ending the year at 5.33%. This is slower than the growth in the use of Windows 10 which, at the beginning of the year, was used by about 10% of Windows users and increased to 24% by the end of the year.
Firefox showed somewhat similar growth to Edge, rising from 11.68% of the market in February to 12.22% at the end of 2016.
The use of Safari fell from 4.88% in February to 3.47% at the end of December.
Browsers like Opera did not register on the NetMarketShare chart, being grouped in the "Other" group which accounted for 1.70% of users. This, too, was lower than at the start of the year, when the figure was 2.08%.