According to the latest web browsers market share figures shared by Net Applications, Google's Chrome, which has lately become a very popular browser, has managed to inch past Apple's Safari in market share, to become the third most popular and largest used browsers. The popularity becomes much more significant when one considers that it has only been around for a little time as compared to its competitors.

Compared to November, Chrome's market share in December jumped to 0.7% and experts have been quick to attribute the success to the beta versions of the browsers which have been released for Mac OS X and Linux.

Windows users were given more reasons by Google to switch to the Chrome when the company released expanded features and functionality for Chrome's Windows version.

Even before the recent beta and Windows expansion releases, Chrome was doing pretty well. Since January 2009, Internet Explorer's share of the browsers market managed to slip by more than 7%, and the share was immediately snapped up by mainly Firefox and Chrome.

Since then, Chrome has been doing pretty well for itself and has now become one of the most used browsers, and with the impending release of Google Chrome OS, the popularity is expected to grow more.