Samsung has overtaken Apple as the handset brand most regularly used for mobile web access, according to web analytics firm StatCounter.

In its global report for the year to June, StatCounter says Samsung (with a 25.47 per cent share) has taken a narrow lead over Apple (25.09 per cent) and the once dominant Nokia (21.96 per cent).

This time last year, Nokia led globally with 28.05 per cent of internet usage followed by Apple on 25.43 per cent and Samsung on 19.46 per cent. BlackBerry's share has declined from 5 per cent to 3.62 per cent in the same period. Apple still holds a healthy lead in the British and US markets.

The report says that Android has established itself as the dominant player in the mobile operating system market, growing its share of mobile internet usage significantly in the last year from 26.53 per cent to 37.93 per cent.

Despite the gains for Android, the share held by Apple’s iOS held firm, declining slightly from 25.41 per cent to 25.09 per cent. Nokia’s Series 40 is in third place on 13.43 per cent. Its Symbian OS has declined to 7.69 per cent from 13.47 per cent following Nokia’s strategic shift to Windows Phone, which has doubled its share (to 1.4 per cent) but so far failed to take a significant lump of the market.

StatCounter says its analytics code is installed on more than 3 million website globally and records over 15 billion page views to these sites each month, which are then analysed in order to compile the report.

It found that Google Chrome extended its lead as the browser most widely used for internet access, grabbing a further 10 per cent of the market in the past year.

Chrome now has a 42.68 per cent share, ahead of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (32.04 per cent) and Mozilla’s Firefox, which saw its share fall from 23.73 per cent to 20.01 per cent in the last year.

Google continues to dominate the search engine realm with 90.09 per cent of usage in June. Bing (3.75 per cent), in which Microsoft has invested heavily, and Yahoo (2.83 per cent) have the largest share among those scrapping for the remaining 10 per cent of the global search market.

In terms of web usage by operating systems, Microsoft’s Windows 7 remains in top spot with a 52.62 per cent share. The 12-year-old Windows XP platform is still behind more than 21 per cent of web usage with Apple’s Mac OSX in third place on 7.43 per cent.