Google is considering pre-installing its Chrome browser on personal computers in the search giant’s latest challenge to the dominance of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

The move would significantly ramp up the browser war that Google launched against Microsoft when it launched Chrome in September, in the battle to dominate how users access and interact with the web.

Latest industry figures show that Internet Explorer currently enjoys a 71.3 per cent market share worldwide, with Mozilla Firefox at nearly 20 per cent. Chrome is used by less than 1 per cent of all web users, but is still under public testing before a final version is ready to launch.

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Joe Wilcox writes:

I love Firefox. It’s a remarkably fast and reliable browser. But Mozilla’s dirty little public secret has been its dependence on Google search revenue. This open-source success story is as much about commercial financial support as community participation. Firefox will fail, I predict for the future, unless Mozilla gets more donors or turns the browser back over to the open-source community. Wikipedia is evidence that tiny groups or individuals en masse can do great works. That 1 or 2 percent is a big number when multiplied by 6.5 billion people.

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