IE 8 and Chrome have momentum.

In it's January 2010 report, W3Counter shows Internet Explorer 8 and Chrome have become increasingly popular and have the momentum going into what everyone hopes is an great year.

Internet Explorer 8 has a 23.69% share eclipsing FireFox 3.5 by a small, but noticeable 0.39%. In 2008, Chrome had a 0.3% market share, currently Chrome is the 4th most popular browser, 7th overall,  with a market share of 4.62%, or 6.3% (when including all versions) and has strong momentum. Safari 4, the only version that made the top 10 stack, sits at 4.98% making it almost the least used browser (when combining all versions) and only above Opera 10 which barely made the top 10.

Many believed that Chrome would capture more FireFox users, but it appears that Chrome is pulling from all "browser pools".  Much of this can be contributed to the mass marketing and constant "Download Chrome"  "Get a fast, free web browser".  This message can be seen on Google search, when using Google Mail and visible on just about every product Google offers.  This could be another reason Apple views Google as the "Evil Empire", from phones to browsers, Google has their hand in everything.

Overall, when combining all versions of the most popular browsers, here are the market share percentages:

IE: 49.7

FireFox: 32.3

Chrome: 6.3

Safari: 5.4

Opera: 2.1

Internet Explorer is still the dominate browser, in terms of market share, but Chrome and FireFox have put a hefty dent in IE's user base.  From a developers standpoint, I can see how these percentages might be skewed a little bit, especially when every developer I know has at least 3 different browsers installed on their machine at any given time.  The reason for this is to test functionality and cross-browser compliance, but I suspect others have multiple browsers installed as well.