An increase in Google Chrome users, more competition to IE?

Google yesterday announced their Chrome browser has come out of Beta. This is one of the fastest Google services to come out of beta tag. It has taken just over 3 months while some of the other Google services seem to be in Beta phase for a very long time. For example, Gmail is still in Beta even though it was launched in 2004. Google claims to have improved Chrome's security and stability features as well as increased its speed. Now we believe this is going to be more of a competition to Internet Explorer than Firefox. Firefox has its own fiercely loyal set of users who will not switch to any other browser. The same cannot be said of IE users. We, at site24x7, have seen an increase in the number of users accessing Site24x7 through Chrome browser. Below is a snapshot of visitors stats to www.site24x7.com in June 2008. As you can see, close to 49% of visitors used Internet Explorer whereas around 46% used Firefox. Internet Explorer has gone down to second place with 43% visits. Firefox has managed to retain the percentage of visits. Chrome has suddenly come to third in the list with close to 5% visitors. So at least in Site24x7's case, we can say Chrome has eaten into IE's share. We should add that these stats does not reflect the overall browser market share in anyway. IE is still the leader by a huge margin. Its just that Site24x7's website monitoring service caters to a more techie crowd who are more likely to use new browsers such as Chrome or the developer-friendly Firefox to access Site24x7.~ And now with Chrome stepping out of Beta, these numbers might increase further.