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Google’s latest browser, Chrome 15, edged past IE 8 in the last week of November. Chrome 15 took 23.6 per cent of the worldwide market compared to IE 8’s 23.5 per cent.

Internet Explorer 8 is no longer the most popular web browser in the world, according to a new report.

While that version of Microsoft's ubiquitous browser is still leads in the U.S. and Canada, Dublin-based web analytics firm StatCounter says that globally Google's latest browser, Chrome 15, edged past IE 8 in the last week of November. Chrome 15 took 23.6 per cent of the worldwide market compared to IE 8's 23.5 per cent.

In Canada IE 8 has 21.7 per cent of the web users, as of the week beginning Dec. 5, and 19.2 per cent are on Chrome 15.

Web developers everywhere – who can be easily nudged into decrying the limitations of Internet Explorer – will no doubt cheer the news, though there is another caveat.

If you combine all the versions of IE, it's still the world leader. Chrome remains in second, having passed Mozilla's Firefox earlier in December.

In November, Chrome saw its global market share roughly doubling from a year ago to 25.7 per cent, while Internet Explorer's share dropped to 40.6 per cent from 48.2 per cent.

Still, Chrome's growth makes possible the idea that one of the most universal methods of accessing the Internet – via Microsoft's blue-hued lower-case "e" desktop icon – is on the decline and could eventually disappear.

In case you were curious, the company's methodology is explained here: "StatCounter Global Stats are based on aggregate data collected on a sample exceeding 15 billion page views per month (4 billion from the U.S.) from the StatCounter network of more than three million websites."

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