I was looking through the browser stats at the W3schools for the past year and the trend clearly shows an upbeat for Chrome. Chrome released their new 4.0 stable builds and they opened the extension gallery officially with this post here (Head over and catch up with some cool extensions 🙂 ). With the launch of extension support and extension gallery the stats are only going to better. Well Firefox also did launch a major update the last week moving to gecko 1.9.2 with support for Personas and few other updates but still not a major upgrade
The competition is interesting and still is going to get better this year esp
ecially with IE 9 and Firefox 4.0 coming up in the next quarters. I am more of a Web kit guy and I would still bet on Chrome gaining more market share. In 2007,when safari got introduced to the windows, i was simply mesmerized with the the font rendering (really miss that on chrome) and the speed of it. I found Weskit to be the culprit behind safari’s elegance. In Sep 2008 Google created that open community to take Weskit to the place it deserved and a year and half clearly shows the true potential of the rendering engine.
To my understanding what will win in the future of these browser wars is completely based on the potential of the rendering engine and  community they have around them. Firefox has a big one and Chrome is catching up with them. IE can file as many patents as they want, but they wont survive long until they help the web with some open standards. Clearly my bet is on chrome, who would you bet on?
Update:- Now Google adds support for GreaseMonkey Scripts which makes Google Chrome take Firefox head on.  read more about the grease monkey script here.  Here is a similar story from Mashable confirming that chrome is indeed stealing market share like i noted above, only that they didn’t take sides on the future about who will win.( o yeah we the users will win 🙂 )