Google's Chrome browser has already overtaken Apple's Safari as it starts to claw its way up the ladder of success.

True, Safari is not exactly high on the list of preferred browsers as it is generally only used by fanboys who lack the technical knowledge to download Firefox, but it does show use is growing. And it is growing at the expense of the market leader Internet Explorer.

Net Applications' statistics show that IE use is slowly sliding. Chrome jumped from 3.9 percent to 4.6 percent of usage. Safari increased from 4.4 percent to 4.5 percent. What is interesting is that Chrome's jump came as Google released the first beta version of its browser for Mac OS X and Linux computers. Previously only a developer-preview version was available.

As of last month, Google had been scheduled to graduate the Chrome 4.0 beta version to "stable" on January 12, but mention of that release date has now been removed from the Chromium development calendar.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer dropped from 63.6 percent to 62.7 percent usage. Most of IE's share loss has been picked up by Firefox in the past but the open-source browser slipped from 24.7 percent to 24.6 percent from November to December.

Things have not been going that well for Firefox. Although its popularity has been increasing, it is losing punters from the tech geeks that supported it. The consensus is that it is bloated and a lot slower than it used to be.