Google Chrome is immensely popular with its browser market share constantly rising each month. After beating out Internet Explorer back in May, it has been on a slow rise to world domination since. After a successful July, Chrome is now a third of the way toward that goal.

The monthly StatCounter results came in today and the results aren’t that surprising. Chrome is still rising, Internet Exploer and Firefox are still trending downward. Safari and Opera remain pretty constant at the bottom of the pack.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Browser Market Share

What’s interesting is that Chrome now owns a third of the entire global browser market. Internet Explorer still has a third as well, but that’s constantly dropping. The launch of Windows 8 may be enough to catapult Internet Explorer back up to the top, but Chrome is going to keep rising regardless. The downfall of Firefox is definitely attributing to that as the folks at Mozilla can’t seem to compete with Chrome, even with constant updates.

As far as the country by country basis goes, Chrome and Internet Explorer are mostly neck and neck. Firefox still holds a lot of Africa and Europe, but that’s also slowly moving to Chrome. Despite Chrome’s popularity, it still has yet to become the number one browser for most of the developed world with the U.S., Canada, Great Britain, China and Japan all predominantly using Internet Explorer.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Browser Market Share

As we move into the launch of Windows 8, it will be interesting to see Internet Explorer is affected by that. If Microsoft has their way with Windows RT, Internet Explorer will be the only browser available on those devices. It’s also the only browser that actually works well within the Metro interface for now on Windows 8 Pro. Chrome is currently testing the waters, but it’s nowhere near as polished as Internet Explorer 10. Regardless, we’ll just have to wait and see.