Chrome to take No. 2 browser spot from Firefox

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9220396/Chrome_poised_to_take_No._2_browser_spot_from_Firefox

by canistr • 15 years ago

179 102 15 years ago

ajross• 15 years ago

Less important IMHO than Chrome vs. Firefox vs. IE is the fact that we now find ourselves in a world where there are three serious competitors for browser mindshare instead of one dominant one. That makes collaboration on standards a winning strategy instead of a losing one: any two browsers can agree on something and push it with majority support, pulling the third along. When it was IE vs. the world, the existence of a standard (a sane standard, anyway) that could be implemented by its competitors was a losing stratagy for MS.

Bravo!

AshleysBrain2• 15 years ago

Yep, great times for the web! They've all been trying to one up each other with performance too - good times for web developers.

fl3tch• 15 years ago

Or it could mean that each browser effectively has veto power over any innovation. If developers know that 25% of their visitors will be using a browser that doesn't support a particular standard or technology, that may prevent them from implementing it... at least "for now". That will prevent widespread adoption, thus justifying the outlier browser to never support it.

TomOfTTB2• 15 years ago

I want to agree with ajross but thus far the pattern seems to support fl3tch. WebGL, SPDY, and WebM are all technologies being held up by one browser.

hnal9432• 15 years ago

That's possible, but any browser that refuses to implement a sufficiently great technology will also risk losing users to browsers who give them a better experience. It will be turbulent, but the consumers will win in the end.

baddox• 15 years ago

That's why I wish my idealistic notions were practical in the real world. Ideally, web developers would design according to standards, which would force browsers to adhere to the standards or risk losing market share. Unfortunately, pragmatism has to win out, and developers have to utilize every hack and bad practice imaginable to get their content to be accessible on every browser.

notatoad2• 15 years ago

webapps help a lot with this though. with websites, where pageviews are king, you can't afford to exclude any big browsers. when you are developing a webapp, especially something that your customers are going to use to generate revenue for themselves, you as a developer are in a much better position to exclude browsers that don't implement standards.

obviously it's not an ideal situation, but i have no qualms about using webGL to implement something labeled an "advanced feature" in my app, and give IE users an error saying their browser isn't supported.

tomjen3• 15 years ago

That depends on the feature in question.

Some features, like SPDY, can be implemented even though not all the browsers support it -- which means that those that don't will find that their users think their browser is slow.

Some features can be emulated with things like long-polling.

And some (WebGL) can't.

I doubt you will be right about those features that can be replaced or emulated but you are properly right about those that can't.

Then again every day we choose to exclude some customers (you only speak Japanese? Well sorry then).

azakai2• 15 years ago

> Less important IMHO than Chrome vs. Firefox vs. IE is the fact that we now find ourselves in a world where there are three serious competitors for browser mindshare instead of one dominant one. [..] Bravo!

I like the sentiment and agree with most of it. But we are definitely not in a good place quite yet.

It looks like Chrome will overtake Firefox this year on desktop. It will likely also overtake IE on desktop, simply because the number of people forced to use IE - in big corporations - is small compared to the number of normal users. So IE will continue to go down quite a lot more.

So Chrome will be the #1 browser on desktop. But that's just one side of things. Chrome will also be the #1 mobile browser because it will be bundled on Android, the #1 mobile OS. Combine desktop and mobile, and Chrome will get a dominating majority. (ChromeBooks might also take off, making the control even more complete - but it's hard to say if they will.)

Chrome's rise is the result of a great product and a truly massive marketing campaign. But it looks like it will succeed far too much, potentially replacing the currently open and competitive space with one dominated once again by a single player. And just like the previous dominator, this one has other products it can and will leverage with the browser (as we saw indications of in the leaked Dart memo, and as we currently see with Chrome-only features of gmail and google docs).

Yes, Chrome is mostly open source, so that by itself makes it less evil than the previous browser monopoly. But even an open source project that is controlled by one company, and used to further its own ends - which legally it must as a for-profit - can be a very bad thing. We can't blindly assume that what is good for Google will always be good for everyone else - if that ever was the case.

Pewpewarrows• 15 years ago

Even more interesting (if you project out further) is that by this time next year, Chrome will have eclipsed IE to become the #1 browser in terms of market share. But only if you continue to project on the exact paths that each of the three are taking, which doesn't account for saturation or mindshare caps whatsoever. Still, it's satisfying to imagine IE being overthrown in a year from now.

Permit• 15 years ago

I can't imagine that happening. It seems to me most people are locked in to IE largely out of indifference or workplace constraints. If anything, IE has vastly improved as a browser over the last few years. If IE was ever going to be dethroned, my money would have been on the mid 2000s when IE6/IE7 were noticeably inferior to Firefox.

That being said, I'd much rather be proved wrong. :)

tomkarlo2• 15 years ago

Two forces that may play against this: there are a growing number of people browsing from non-Windows devices (OSX, iOS, Android) on which there is no IE option, and for businesses that choose to save money by using Google Apps, it's probably preferable to put their users on Chrome to ensure the best possible compatibility and performance. Yes, IE has tremendous inertia in its favor, but most of the trends seem to be washing the other way.

rimantas• 15 years ago

It depends on the region also. In my country IE lost its throne a year and a half ago. http://www.ranking.lt/en/rankings/web-browsers-groups.html

In Ukraine IE is third. Guess who has #1 spot: http://www.ranking.com.ua/en/rankings/web-browsers-groups.ht...

Karunamon• 15 years ago

Very satisfying indeed.

Unfortunately, what I foresee happening is home user market saturation reaching 100%, but Chrome never taking a majority thanks to business types (you know, the people still on IE6.) Too much reliance on ActiveX and AD and being able to lock down the homepage and other things that get corporate IT control freaks all hot and bothered.

jrockway• 15 years ago

It's a "security" thing. Big companies pay Microsoft money in order to have a "secure IT infrastructure" that "regulators" will like. Microsoft's lawyers wrote some words that appeal to those folks. Google's stuff is free, and so Chrome doesn't come with any guarantee that it won't single-handedly take out the company's entire technology infrastructure.

Obviously this is very far removed from reality (you can read Chromium's source code and audit yourself. IE? Nope.), but these people aren't operating in the real world. IE is the best browser for the imaginary world that the "decision makers" live in.

(On my work machine, running chrome.exe causes an alert to be triggered and execution is denied. Of course, renaming it to not_chrome.exe allows it to work fine. Secure!)

simonbrown• 15 years ago

ActiveX can be achieved with the IE Tab extension and Chrome for Business supports things like locking down the home page.

http://www.chromium.org/administrators/policy-list-3

narism• 15 years ago

Chrome supports SSO with NTLM/Negotiate. On Windows it will even automatically turn on SSO for sites in your Local Intranet security zone, which is much smoother than the Firefox about:config, network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris method.

http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/http-aut...

throwaway322• 15 years ago

If we project even further chrome will have 200% market share, imagine the results of that!

gkoberger2• 15 years ago

"Look, this is the world we wanted. And this is the world we made." - Mike Shaver, VP of Technical Strategy at Mozilla

http://john.jubjubs.net/2011/09/15/mike-shaver-thanks/

vsl2• 15 years ago

I've often wondered how Mozilla's status as a non-profit affects its prospects. I've heard that its tough sometimes to recruit and retain because of the lack of lucrative exit possibilities for employees (e.g. IPO).

Don't know if Chrome is going to overtake IE, but it would definitely be good to see it give it a go.

redthrowaway3• 15 years ago

The types Mozilla tends to attract are likely to be FOSS crusaders, who care more about working on free software than lucrative exits.

Also, exits are only a consideration for startup employees. 98% of programmers are working for corporations that have already had their exit, and so the primary considerations (as they are for employees everywhere) are salary, benefits, and options. I can't see Mozilla being too far behind the market on salary and benefits, and stock options tend to be pretty worthless for the average employees anyway due to blackouts and whatnot.

wmf• 15 years ago

Exactly. Nobody's going to get in on the Google, Microsoft, Apple, or Amazon IPOs either.

zobzu3• 15 years ago

That's correct almost every Mozilla employee strongly believe in FOSS values, but not just that. They all believe in the Mozilla mission and manifesto, aka, each one I have meet so far wants an open web, and a fair future where we don't have any kind of vendor lock-in.

Not only that, but also a choice on our privacy.

If either MS, Google, or any such company gets a large percentage of the user base (75%?) again, the web is going to be locked and not very privacy oriented again. Don't think for a second that Google cares much. They don't do evil, but they'll do as bad as their business requires.

They do use their quasi monopoly right now to promote Chrome and it works extremely well. Chrome is a very good browser but you may understand that such growth is not due to that alone, in fact, being a good browser is only a requirement, not the actual factor of the growth.

Unfortunately it will be used to enforce Google control over the web.

gkoberger2• 15 years ago

I'm a Mozilla employee. I don't think our lack of a future IPO has hurt us at all, as far as hiring goes. Mozilla pays really well, and we have quarterly bonuses to offset our lack of stock options. If a massive exit is what someone is looking for, I don't think Mozilla would be a good fit, anyway.

Additionally, most employees work for Mozilla Corporation, which is a for-profit corporation owned by the non-for-profit.

More info: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/careers.html

cpeterso2• 15 years ago

Does Mozilla have a marketing plan to win back Chrome switchers? Once an IE or Firefox user switches to Chrome, what would prompt them to reevaluate Firefox?

cooperadymas• 15 years ago

I've shown Chrome to a lot of people, ranging from "fairly technical" to "what's a web browser?" The response is a near unanimous "wow!" I don't think any have gone back to Internet Explorer, although Firefox might have reclaimed a couple.

kenjackson• 15 years ago

Really? I'm fairly technical and I've never had a wow moment looking at a web browser except maybe two instances -- an early look at ShockWave (or something in that family) and Mosaic.

Literally everything else has been, OK, evolutionary.

What did you show them in Chrome that made them say "Wow!"?

notatoad2• 15 years ago

my experience has been the exact opposite. almost everybody i've encouraged to switch has been turned off by a UI that doesn't look identical to IE. they need the buttons to be where they are used to seeing them. hopefully the IE9 transition helps these people get used to a new UI, but i suppose most of them will just not upgrade to that either.

asomiv• 15 years ago

After seeing how all the ads and flash websites slow down my dad's Firefox browsing experience, I tried to switch him to Chrome. After a while, he switched back to Firefox by himself.

The reason? He uses the dropdown box in the location bar as a kind of bookmarking mechanism. Chrome doesn't have such a location bar. And he's not content with using real bookmarks, it has to be the location bar dropdown and nothing else.

ElliotH• 15 years ago

My favourite moments aren't the 'wows' so much as the times I wipe and setup someone's laptop after they've messed it up, put chrome on it and hear literally no complaints.

redthrowaway3• 15 years ago

Is this desktop-only, or does it also count the Chrome browser on Android? If the latter, this could go a long way towards explaining Chrome's meteoric rise relative to FF and IE, which lack mobile presence.

contol-m• 15 years ago

The Android browser is not Chrome or Chrome-based.

redthrowaway3• 15 years ago

I'm stunned, but I just looked into it and you're right. Oddly enough, it's actually Safari:

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 0.5; en-us) AppleWebKit/522+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/419.3

http://www.infinitezest.com/articles/which-web-browser-is-us...

edit: Downvotes ahoy! I'm just relaying the information I found when searching. On the Anroid-DLS wiki, it gives a very generic "based on webkit" answer, so that doesn't say much one way or t'other.

http://android-dls.com/wiki/index.php?title=Android_FAQ#Q:_W...

nextparadigms• 15 years ago

It's only the desktop browser. The only place I've seen stat companies adding the desktop one with the mobile one is for Safari actually, and skewing the results in favor of Safari.

And no, Chrome doesn't include Safari numbers either, just because it has Safari name in its user agent.

alttag• 15 years ago

The same company also has Symbian as the leading mobile browser OS by a wide margin [1], bases on page views. Not what I would have expected.

1: http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-ww-monthly-201009-20110...

gospelwut• 15 years ago

Aren't non-Android/iPhone phones still wildly popular outside the U.S?

untog• 15 years ago

Yep. The view that everyone is using smartphones is just the result of being inside a US-centric bubble. Well, and parts of Europe too.

rmc• 15 years ago

Depends, Android & iPhones are still very very popular in the EU, however pre-iPhone all 'smart phone' would have meant either a blackberry or a symbian.

patrickaljord2• 15 years ago

Not in the US: http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-US-monthly-201009-20110...

joebadmo4• 15 years ago

I have to use IE6 at work, and I'm surprised at how much of the Web is simply broken for me. It's kind of bittersweet.

arctangent• 15 years ago

I understand your sentiment, as I have to make sure the apps I make work on IE6. But don't ever forget that it's your browser that's broken (and possibly your company's IT policies), rather than the web (in most cases).

joebadmo4• 15 years ago

Oh, I have no illusions about what's broken. That's why it's bittersweet. I'm sad that I can't view a web site, but I'm happy that IE6 compatibility is going away.

jewel• 15 years ago

Have you tried Google Chrome Frame? You're exactly who they made it for.

joebadmo4• 15 years ago

I am. Only since the recent release of admin-less chrome frame. Can't say I've noticed much difference, unfortunately.

PhilRae• 15 years ago

Don't websites have to state in the meta tags that chrome frame is to be utilised for it? I don't think it generally applies for all sites.

phzbOx• 15 years ago

Couldn't you use the chrome inside IE6? Or a virtual environment with a real browser? (To be honest, I'm not sure if I'd just prefer going with links instead of ie6..)

joebadmo4• 15 years ago

I'm using Chrome frame, but it doesn't work that well. Don't have virtual machine access.

thought_alarm• 15 years ago

Back when IE6 was released, ten years ago (!!), it was really starting to look like Microsoft had won the browser war. Browsing the web with anything other than IE on a Windows machine was an increasingly crippling experience.

It was a very grim time.

Fortunately, a number of web developers held out of a viable alternative to a Win32/IE monopoly. When Firefox was finally good enough for general use it was embraced by many web developers, Google in particular. By 2005 many prominent new web sites (Gmail and Google Reader, for two) took special care to support Firefox from day 1, something that was would have been unheard-of only a few years earlier. At that point it was clear that Microsoft could not win the browser war, and IE development languished.

bryanlarsen• 15 years ago

Most people switched to Chrome because it's faster than the competitors, but interestingly enough, it's now the slowest: http://lifehacker.com/5844150/browser-speed-tests-firefox-7-...

We all win, because even if Chrome is the slowest, it's not slow.

46Bit• 15 years ago

That's actually a brilliant way of putting things. Personally, what matters to me most is that the UI very rarely if ever hangs. I don't really mind how long it takes to do things, so long as it doesn't occasionally take 3 seconds to respond to a click (even on a top-spec MBP, I'm looking at you FF & especially Safari). The perfectly streamlined design helps too :-)

patrickaljord2• 15 years ago

Chrome is still the fastest in Javascript according to your benchmark, which is one of the most important thing, cold boot for example happens once a day at best. The other benchmarks of your article are a bit dubious as there is no standard way to measure "cold boot" or opening several tabs.

draebek• 15 years ago

Thanks, interesting link. I was surprised to see your comment since I keep wanting to go back to Firefox, mainly for its better extensions, but find myself sticking with Chrome because it feels faster to me.

Two things this Lifehacker article did not cover that are important to me: creating new windows and creating new tabs. I do a lot of this. I haven't timed it but if I had to take a guess I'd say Firefox is at least twice as slow as Chrome at making a new window. I think that explains why Chrome feels faster to me.

(OS X 10.6.8, Firefox 7, whatever latest stable Chrome is, in case anyone's wondering.)

charlieflowers• 15 years ago

Chrome without a doubt feels faster than Firefox to me. I think Firefox's performance has degraded over the past 6 months or so. I can't prove it (just anecdotal based on my experience), but it got so bad that I switched back to Chrome (and have been loving it).

rorrr2• 15 years ago

Chrome is the fastest where it really matters - javascript, and by a huge margin.

Who cares if browser startup takes 3 or 6 seconds? I start my browser in the morning, and never close it.

And who really cares if some browser eats 50% more RAM? RAM is ridiculously cheap, 8GB of laptop memory with the highest reviews on newegg is $40.

bzbarsky2• 15 years ago

Note that the difference in JavaScript test scores in that article is almost entirely due to differences on the V8 benchmark.

So more precisely, Chrome is fastest by a huge margin on the benchmark they explicitly tuned for.

guelo• 15 years ago

It's important for Mozilla to stay relevant and strong. When corporate behemoths are going at it having a nonprofit who is only interested in the good of the web with no ulterior motives keeps everyone honest.

zmmmmm• 15 years ago

It is quite profound when you consider that Firefox has been mostly funded by Google via the search page revenue deal.

If you take Firefox + Chrome and credit them both to Google (unfair in many respects, I know) - Google can claim "responsibility" for the majority of web browsing today. They have almost single handedly engineered a competitive marketplace in the browser space (ok, unfair again to the Mozilla devs, but it's still profound to me to contemplate it).

zobzu3• 15 years ago

Mozilla got the deal when Firefox was that big, that it was a juicy deal for Google. Google won't make that sort of deal if there's nothing to gain. They're capitalists, not a non-profit organization.

Don't get the deal wrong. Mozilla as a small non-profit gets a lot of money for their size, but the deal still is the hell of a good deal for Google.

It actually played a major part into making Google the de-facto search engine among the community that matters most, us, the techs, the geeks, etc.

KevinMS• 15 years ago

Doesn't it bother anybody that Chrome is made by ad company?

The way I see it, if everybody started using ad blockers like I do, google would implode almost instantly. So how would they combat that? Control the platform for viewing the web and be positioned to kill ad blockers if it ever became a problem.

Would you buy a DVR controlled by a television network? That would be insane, as soon as DVRs ate too much into their revenues they would just kill the skipping feature.

But because of the abundance of chrome fanboys, this is just what is happening, and everybody is looking the other way.

A little while ago we had a big company doing everything they could to control the "personal computer" platform, even evil things, and illegal things, and now there's another company trying to control the internet as a platform and a lot of you hackers are eating it up, I'm just baffled.

Griever• 15 years ago

I use Chrome because it is an absolutely excellent browser. It gets a lot of things right that others do not, and it is (mostly) open source.

Since you brought up television companies controlling DVR's, I will make an attempt to extend upon that. Would you use a DVR controlled by a television network if it was significantly better than a DVR of any other nature? I have no problems admitting that I would, and I feel that a lot of others would as well. That is how I relate Chrome to other browsers. Sure, its controlled by an ad company, but it's also an absolutely fantastic product that includes a lot of features that make my day much less stressful than using "other" browsers, especially as a developer.

If Google wants to start killing off the AdBlock extension, then they can do that. It's their product and they can do whatever they want to, but that also means I have the freedom of jumping ship and using Firefox. Chrome has gotten its popularity among this crowd because they have made consistently good decisions when it comes to features, ui changes, etc.

Going back to DVR's, if a television company wants to release a product and then take away features that user's have had from the start, then fine. It's their decision. But remember, Sony did it with the PS3 and look how that turned out. There is almost always another choice, and that is especially true in the browser market.

zobzu3• 15 years ago

the thing is, imagine a world where Chrome has 70% userbase, IE 20% and Firefox 10%. When Chrome decides of a new features, others must follow or die.

Now, it's easy to think of features that sounds "technically useful" but also "going to bring a lot more ad traffic / much less privacy".

Heck, why not make 3rd party cookies mandatory for example? :>

And if Google can't win through the browser war, they will try other fronts, like they do with NativeClient, which is a good lock-in, because others will not want to implement it.

kgermino• 15 years ago

Would you rent a DVR from Comcast? Thousands of people do.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-01/comcast-takeover-of...

timewasted• 15 years ago

No, it doesn't bother me that Chrome is made by a company that makes money by serving ads. In fact, Google is using some of the ad money to fund the development of the webrequest API [1], which allows me to fully block the ads that they (and others) are serving.

The simple fact is that Chrome serves my web browsing needs wonderfully, so I use it as my primary browser. If the day comes that this is no longer true, I will just switch back to Firefox, or whatever awesome browser emerges between now and then.

[1] http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/trunk/experimental....

gst2• 15 years ago

I don't care at all.

If google does something like that it wouldn't take long until someone forks Chrome.

joelthelion• 15 years ago

I take it you use Chromium then?

chalst• 15 years ago

Doesn't it bother anybody

A little, but do be aware that (i) Mozilla is 83% financed [] by search royalties from that same ad company, and (ii) Chromium has a somewhat independent developer community

Making money from ads is also not evil: you are probably served by a local newspaper which is probably both good for your neighbourhood and financed mostly or entirely by ads. This stream of revenue comes with conflicts of interest, but these can be handled better or worse. I think Google has done pretty well in this; at least my criticisms of Google mostly do not lie here.

[] http://www.extremetech.com/internet/92558-how-browsers-make-...

brador2• 15 years ago

For most people, myself included, it's not about the ads as such, it's more the tracking that goes with it. I'd happily see ads all day if they didn't track me, but they do, so I use adblocking. Should I unblock the sites I like? Yes, I should, but it's just too much work so I leave it on permanently.

fauigerzigerk• 15 years ago

I do share your concerns but I still use Chrome more often than Firefox because Firefox has some annoying issues on the Mac that don't seem to go away (stalling text entry and scrolling after a few hours of uptime being the worst)

I'm keeping a close eye on what Chrome does in terms of privacy related settings. The moment I feel that Google does indeed leverage Chrome to spy on me more than they would otherwise be able to, I'm back on Firefox. After all, Chrome has some very annoying issues of its own (window switching is broken on pages with Flash vids, and Flash keeps crashing more often than in other browsers)

I'm not convinced that blocking all ads helps my privacy interests though. The alternative to ad funding is a paid subscription model which takes away privacy altogether.

BryanB55• 15 years ago

I dont care who is #1 or #2 as long as it isn't IE and IE just goes away completely. I work in a real estate industry and it seems like so many of our customers are still using IE7 and have no clue how to work a computer which just makes it even more frustrating.

cpeterso2• 15 years ago

Chrome now comes bundled with the Adobe Flash updater. This is probably a large contributor to Chrome's climbing popularity. Chrome is also bundled with Google's other applications and with Skype (but I'm sure Microsoft will end that).

http://www.salsitasoft.com/blog/2011/09/23/wonder-how-chrome...

JohnTHaller• 15 years ago

Important Note: This is based on StatCounter, which is definitely not indicative of the overall web. Something like Net Applications gives a much more accurate picture and shows Chrome at 15.51% at Firefox at about 22.57%: http://www.webmasterworld.com/r.cgi?f=145&d=4368971&...

It does vary a lot by geographic region. Europe shows higher Firefox numbers. And, if I recall correctly, Firefox is number one in a few countries (Germany, Russia).

guard-of-terra• 15 years ago

It is Opera that is #1 in Russia.

I'm not absolutely sure because Opera, Firefox and all the versions of IE combined have a very close market shares, and yes, Chrome is running up fast too. But I remember Opera held "the most popular single version of browser" the last time I checked.

evandena• 15 years ago

As a long time (relative) Chrome user, I've recently switched back to FF. I need video ad blocking (ESPN for example). I'm sick and tired of watching a 30 second video ad, followed by 15 seconds of content. Chrome cannot block video ads do to the plugin being javascript. Firefox is native C code, so apparently it can.

skeptical• 15 years ago

While most of the people are discussing what each browser 'stands for' or its main goals, we should not forget about simple practical aspects.

Apart from deals between mozilla and google, I much prefer to support the mozilla foundations than google. And when on linux I actually use chromium instead of chrome. Furthermore I even think the whole firefox concept focused more on real features rather targeting the dumbest possible user as chrome does.

But even considering all these aspects, I use chrome mostly because it has had a clutter-free UI for a while, fires up much faster and has a proper implementation of incognito mode. Like many people, I use a browser all day, I cannot afford not to be pragmatic in here. If firefox catches up on these important aspects, I will for sure move back. It does look like they got finally they're act together and started to make major improvements. Let's wait and see.

Chrome to take No. 2 browser spot from Firefox

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