Google’s Chrome web browser has only been around for two years, but with an almost frantic pace of development it’s already gone through more iterations in that brief time than many other software products do in a decade. Chrome is now up to version 6, and has a rapidly increasing share of the web browser market. It’s now in third place after Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Before Chrome arrived, Mozilla’s Firefox was the darling of the techie crowd (and in many regards it still is, but Chrome is a great, looming shadow on the horizon). Now, Firefox growth has flatlined. It’s still by far the largest web browser after Internet Explorer, but it’s no longer gaining market share.

The above chart makes several things abundantly clear about the browser market:

• Internet Explorer is losing market share (as it has been ever since Firefox arrived in 2004).
• Firefox is neither growing nor losing market share.
• Chrome has more than tripled its market share in the last year. It’s growing much faster than any other browser.

And there are additional signs that Chrome is quickly becoming a big player.

Mindshare catching up even faster

Market share is one thing, but people are getting more and more interested in Chrome. It’s gaining mindshare even faster than it’s gaining market share, which bodes well for Chrome’s future.

Interest in Chrome vs. Firefox:

Source: Google Insights for Search.

When it comes to establishing mindshare, Google has a huge advantage over Mozilla. They own not just one, but several of the world’s largest web properties, and they have frequently been advertising Chrome on sites like YouTube and the Google Search homepage (Google.com). We’re not trying to belittle what Google has done with Chrome, it’s an excellent browser, but with Google pushing it on its own sites, Chrome has one heck of a home field advantage.

Looks like we’re heading right into a new browser war, with IE, Firefox and Chrome duking it out in the top. Next year is going to be interesting.

Perceptions matter, and the perception of Nokia in the news, on the web, and in the minds of many, is that things aren’t going that well. Even in the Pingdom office, we hear “Nokia is doomed,” but do the numbers support this belief?

Looking at the statistics, Symbian leads the mobile operating system race with just over 30% of web browsing traffic. That’s down slightly from late last year, when we noted that Symbian finished 2011 as the top mobile operating system, with almost 34% of the mobile OS market.

What is even more interesting, however, is that Nokia is also ahead when we look at figures for all the mobile handset vendors. In fact, Nokia is way ahead of Apple, and Android lags far behind.

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Pingdom’s Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, security, and mobile stuff.

In this show, we talk mainly about Distributed Denial of Service attacks. Some fresh research shows an increase in smaller, more targeted DDoS attacks, and hacker group Anonymous has vowed to take down the Internet by launching a DDoS attack on the 13 root DNS servers.

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Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, and other geeky topics.

This week we bring you a collection of articles focusing on OpenStack.

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By some measures, more than 7 billion people now inhabit the world, and more than a third of us are on the Internet. But how many are added each day, each week, or each minute? We think we have a pretty good idea.

Read on for some pretty amazing numbers.

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Pingdom’s Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, security, and mobile stuff.

In this show, we can finally talk about Saleh’s Carbon for Windows Phone app being available in Windows Marketplace. We also talk to Rich Brueckner of InsideHPC.com about the world of supercomputers.

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