For the first month since browser statistics tracking began, the internet browser Mozilla Firefox (often much favoured for its tabbed browsing, add-ons, security and stability) claimed over a 20% market share for net browsers at the end of 2008.

Mozilla remains the second most popular internet browser behind Internet Explorer, the current market leader by a long way with a 69.77% worldwide share. Apple’s Safari captures 7.13% of the market while other browsers Google Chrome, Opera and Netscape each have less than 1% shares.

Mozilla is toting this as a milestone for them as competitors for the big boys Microsoft. “It’s a huge achievement, one a few years ago most would have considered impossible” said Mozilla CEO John Lilly. “The open web is more vibrant than ever, and the thousands of Mozilla contributors around the world have played a major role in making it that way”.

In the next bid to Googlise the online world, Google launched the BETA version of its new browser Chrome just hours ago. Contrary to many New Zealand reports, the new browser is now available for download – many New Zealand news stories have claimed it wasnt to be released until Thursday the 4^th.

So what is new and different about the new Google browser? The NZS.com team’s first impression is that pages are loading faster than on other browsers, and the interface, while decidedly simple, is cohesive and easy to adapt to.

All of our settings were imported, and we love the fact that each individual tab runs itself with ‘crash control’ – so if one site causes problems the entire browser won’t need to close, just that tab.

Every time you open a new tab, you also get a ‘most visited’ page with screenshots of your most frequently visited sites and searches. A great novelty feature is the ‘incognito view’, meaning ‘what comes into this browser, stays in this browser’ – it’s stealth surfing made easy.

Creating, dragging and moving tabs and shortcuts is easy, and there’s no doubt that we’ll discover many more customisable beauties throughout Google Chrome’s first day of use.