Google Chrome Named Top Internet Browser

— -- Google Chrome has become the top browser in the world, beating out rival Internet Explorer, according to new data.

Net Market Share, an analytics firm, said Google's browser had 41.71 percent of the market share in April compared to Microsoft Internet Explorer's 41.33 percent. In third place was Firefox at 10.06 percent, followed by Apple's Safari at 4.47 percent.

Chrome was already crowned the winner back in 2012 according to another measure by the tracking group StatCounter. At the time, Firefox came in second and Internet Explorer was third.

The reason for the different results is that the two companies measure web traffic differently. Net Market Share counts unique visitors, instead of page views, per day. Another huge difference is that Net Market Share analyzes more than 40,000 websites, according to a description of its methodology. StatCounter says that it tracks more than 3 million sites around the world.

While the war of the browsers has been competitive over the years, it hasn't been cutthroat.

Internet Explorer and Mozilla teams have sent cakes to one another to celebrate various achievements.

"We started this tradition when we sent them a cake for Firefox 2. It was probably the best damn cake I've eaten," Internet Explorer engineer Jacob Rossi said of one marble chocolate vanilla confection, according to a Reddit AMA forum in 2014.