The growing popularity of Google’s Chrome internet browser has allowed it to overtake Firefox for the first time globally in November for usage and it continues to narrow the gap to market leader Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, web analytics firm StatCounter said on Thursday.

In November 2011 Chrome saw its market share roughly doubling from a year ago to 25.7 per cent, while Internet Explorer’s share dropped to 40.6 per cent from 48.2 per cent. The market share of Firefox – which is popular in Europe – slipped globally to 25.2 per cent from 31.2 per cent.

StatCounter statistics are based on aggregate data from more than 3 million websites with a sample of more than 15 billion page views per month.