Despite launching only two years ago, Google's Chrome now represents 9.98% of the total browser market share according to Net Applications' latest numbers. Further enforcing its lead on Safari and Opera, Chrome has nearly doubled in share since the start of 2010 when it held 5.22% of the market. By comparison, Safari has moved from 4.53% to 5.89% throughout the year, while Opera maintained a stagnant 2.xx% portion.
Naturally, Chrome's mounting presence has affected Internet Explorer and Firefox. IE's descent continued in 2010, dropping from 62.12% in January to 57.08% in December, while Firefox fell from 24.43% to 22.81%. Both Microsoft and Mozilla are preparing significant updates for their products with Internet Explorer 9 and Firefox 4 due sometime early this year, so it'll be interesting to see how that affects the stats – if at all.
Browsers aside, Net Applications shows that Windows 7 gained more than 13% during 2010, closing the year out with 20.87% of the operating system market. That's one in five computers, mind you. Windows XP is slowly losing footing, falling some 10% to 56.72% during the year. Meanwhile, Vista dropped more than 5% to 12.11%. Mac OS X 10.6 and 10.5 collectively represent 4.51% (1.45 and 3.05%) as of December.