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While the early release of the Chrome comic might have changed the way Google went about launching its new browser, it definitely did not hurt Chrome’s early success. According to data from Net Applications, Chrome captured more than 1% of the browser market within its first day of release. Since then, it has been growing steadily and is now at around 1.5%, as both technology blogs and mainstream publications have written about it almost nonstop since Monday morning.

Certainly good news, the more standards compliant browsers there are on the market the better.

According to StatCounter, Chrome’s users have been coming from Firefox and Safari, while IE actually gained market share. Most of current Chrome users are still early adopters, but over time, we think that Chrome will mostly drain users away from Opera and IE, as its simplicity and ease of use would most probably appeal most to these two groups, while a lot of advanced Firefox users won’t be able to switch until Chrome supports extensions.

I’d love to believe that Chrome will steal away IE users, but to say that it will because of its “simplicity and ease of use” is ridiculous. Safari is also simple and easy to use compared to IE, and Safari has a whopping 3% share according to that same StatCounter page. Further arguments for the skeptical: the majority of web users and IE users in the enterprise. As long as IT departments install IE6 (or even 7 or 8) by default on employees machines, don’t expect market share to change too dramatically for IE.