On September the 3rd, Google released a beta version of its upcoming Chrome web-browser software. The beta was released at 3:02 PM EDT and it captured 0.5% of the browser market share in just 2 hours of release. What's more, by the end of 9 hours since launch, the browser had already captured 1% of the market. Net Applications found that value to fluctuate but the browser currently is looking above the 1% mark. Data was collected studying the browser's ID:

Official Build 1583
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13

The numbers are mind-boggling. Considering there are about 1.46 Billion internet users, 1% should take at least 14 million users to keep that value. In other terms, the number of times Chrome beta may have been downloaded looks threatening to Mozilla. It wouldn't be too far sighted to think Google Chrome could challenge Mozilla's world record when (or if) a stable release does come out (G-Mail is still beta). The browser has received a largely positive response albeit issues concerning its privacy policy, where irregularities were noted. All in all, Google did manage to make heads turn.