Google's Chrome narrowly became the world's top internet browser for the first time on Sunday 18 March 2012, according to StatCounter, the independent website analytics company. The firm's research arm StatCounter Global Stats reports that Chrome topped the polls in India, Russia and Brazil, all of which contributed to it becoming the number one browser for that day on a global basis.

"While it is only one day, this is a milestone," commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter. He added that Chrome still faces a battle to unseat its main rivals including IE and Firefox in many regions. Chrome remains in 2nd or 3rd place in China, United States and Germany, for example.

According to data collected by Net Applications, February saw both Microsoft Internet Explorer and Google Chome losing some browser market share which was quickly picked up by Apple's Safari, Mozilla's Firefox and Opera.

Last month's numbers still have IE on top with 52.84% of the market (down from 52.96% in January), while Firefox kept its silver medal by securing a 20.92% share (20.88%). On third place we have Chrome with 18.90% (18.94% in the previous month), while on fourth Safari has once again passed the 5% mark, topping 5.24% (4.90%). Opera was fifth with a 1.71% share (1.67%).

Don't worry if you just installed Firefox 10.0 cause there's a new Foxxy browser craving your attention, the Firefox 11.0 beta. This fresh build comes with an updated migration tool that can also import Chrome bookmarks, history, and cookies, and features add-on syncing capabilities, redesigned media controls for HTML5 video, and support for the CSS text-size-adjust property and the outerHTML property.

Firefox 11.0 also brings some goodies for devs like the Page Inspector 3D View, the new Style Editor tool, SPDY Support and more.

To download the Firefox 11.0 beta (for Windows, Mac OS or Linux) see this page.

Mozilla has today let loose the 10.0 version of the Firefox browser for Windows, Mac OS and Linux. This release includes several fixes, brings a hidden forward button (which appears when the user navigates back), Full Screen APIs, and features support for WebGL Anti-Aliasing, CSS3 3D-Transforms, and for the < bdi > element for bi-directional text isolation.

To download Firefox 10.0 (for any of three platforms mentioned above) visit this page.

Keeping the Chrome crowd well-stocked on new releases, Google has made available a couple of versions of its browser, the 16.0.912.75 (Stable channel) and 17.0.963.26 (Beta channel).

The new Chrome 16 build is a security update which comes to fix three vulnerabilities rated 'High', while the first Chrome 17 release brings quite a few fresh goodies like New Extensions APIs, Omnibox Prerendering (the browser will load a website in the background while you type in the URL), enhanced download protection, and a few tweaks.

Both Chrome 16.0.912.75 and 17.0.963.26 are available for Windows, Mac OS and Linux and can be downloaded via this page.