News 

Both StatCounter and Net Applications reported similar take-up of the browser, with the latter reporting a peak of 1.48% before it fell back.

Usage was at its highest outside working hours, which is similar to the pattern for Firefox, largely because businesses tend to restrict users to Internet Explorer.

It remains to be seen

ADVERTISEMENT

whether Google can sustain its impressive debut. Chrome usage was likely to be artificially high after launch as early adopters gave it a thorough once over. Nonetheless, with 1% it has already overtaken Opera.

While Chrome’s launch appears to have gone smoothly — in contrast to the hiccoughs that affected the release of Firefox 3 — it was not without problems. It didn’t take long for security researchers to discover that Chrome users are vulnerable to the same “carpet bombing” attacks that threatened Safari until Apple released a fix. The flaw allows an attacker to populate websites with malicious code that Chrome will automatically download.

Hopefully this — and any other flaws that are found — will be fixed before Google releases a Mac version of its browser.