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Google's Chrome Declining In Popularity
holy_calamity writes "After launching in a blaze of publicity that even warmed Slashdot, Google's browser grabbed a 3% share of the market, but has been slipping ever since, and now accounts for 1.5%. Google has also stopped promoting the browser on its search page. Assuming they wanted it to grab a significant share of the browser market, have they dropped the ball, or is this part of the plan?" On Slashdot, Chrome is still the #4 browser (after FF, IE, and Safari) but it was ahead of Safari for a few days, hitting almost 10% of our traffic.
No add-ons. I want my ad block plus please.
GENERATION 24: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation. Social exper
I'm waiting for it to mature. I thought that was the whole point, we test it out, see what we like and wait for it to mature into a stable product.
Now we know how long Slashdot users can stand to browse the internet without AdBlock.
With all the options available today, there's just not a need for another browser right now. For most that don't want to use whatever their default browser is, they use FireFox. Firefox also had a lot more grass-roots promotion in the earlier days, that does not appear to be prevalent with Chrome.
Come on is this a surprise? I've downloaded Chrome, I've used it for a little bit of time and then gone back to Firefox as its got the plug-ins and other bits that I use everyday. When Chrome becomes a full product and has the plug-ins that I need then I'd consider switching, but for now its just something I'll fire up when testing my web code and then use that open window for some browsing because I'm too lazy to switch to another window.
Hell personally I'm shocked they beat 1% of people, I'm stunned that 1% of people cared enough to download a new browser.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Still waiting for their e-mail saying a native Linux port is available.
I gots no use for Windows apps.
"I might have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years." -- Warren Zevon
In my day to day job I deal with having to develop for both IE and Firefox. I haven't even so much as downloaded Chrome. Why should I? I know someone is going to say "Because it's a superior browser", etc etc. I also loved the Amiga and although it was a superior machine (IMHO), it was just TOO much of a niche and the rest of the world functioned on PCs. Just like the rest of the world functions just fine on IE and Firefox.
I downloaded it a couple days after it was released and although it is rough around the edges I've grown to like it a lot. The history search function is really nice and the fact that it takes about a second to launch compared to the 10 seconds for Firefox (at least for me, this is probably out of the ordinary) is a real bonus.
But honestly, this seems entirely standard. Of course it's going to start off with a surge of popularity and then lose a little momentum. This doesn't mean Google has "dropped the ball", it means that people are acting quite normally. It may have been a mistake for Google to release Chrome before all the kinks were worked out (mine has crashed a couple times); however, I don't think this decline in percentage was anything that wasn't expected -- 1.5% is still a hell of a lot of people.
I've been giving Chrome a try myself, but my wife and my kids all still use FF or IE. I like that it takes up less screen realestate for tabs and so forth, and the history-homepage thingy is useful to me.
I'd be happier with Chrome if it weren't for it's habit of getting hung up on Flash sites and bringing the whole OS to a screeching halt - sites that work fine in Firefox.
I'm still using it for performance reasons. Although, Gif animation seems to be slower on Chrome.
----- You know you have ego issues when you register a domain in your name.
Does this mean I don't have to add it to the list of browsers and platforms I already test with?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
with a bunch of engineering students last night. A few had Chrome on their laptops (We were meeting at a coffee shop about a conference), but most of the people in the shop were using FireFox. FF works fine for them and most asked why should they try chrome when what they have works with few or no complaints. There was nothing revolutionary in Chrome from their perspective. Hell, I opened it up and the first thing I saw was the dial pad area and I thought, "what the hell, looks just like Opera with different looking tabs at the top." To me there was no reason to use Chrome over Opera or FF or Safari.
People are generally hesitant to change unless there is a good reason. Look at how long it to FF to make in roads. Finally when MSIE was having the hijack of the week, people moved to FF because of the perception it was somehow safer. A lot of Mac users, myself included, use Safari because it works. That was not always the case, but these days I don't have many problems with safari and webpages. I have FF and Opera but I rarely use either unless I'm testing.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
It seems to me that the pool of users that Chrome is seeking to draw from has already been taken by the likes of Firefox and Opera. And, unfortunately for Chrome, fans of Firefox and Opera are violently loyal customers. Even if Chrome supported addons I would have a hard time giving up my Firefox.
Depends on what you mean by most widely utilized. If you mean that most people use it, no. IE + firefox market share is way over 50%. If on the other hand you mean there are more browsers that use it than there are browsers that use something else, it seems so.
If your goal is to get other browsers to improve, then market share is nice but not a necessity. Google wants the world full of browsers that are good platforms for web-based applications.
I find it surprising that Opera is still behind Chrome. I'm personally a Firefox user, but I really thought that Opera was more prevalent, especially on Slashdot. I guess the few Opera users there are, are just really vocal when it comes to promoting their browser.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
People wanted to tested it.
Ohnoz, some people thought their old browser was better than the first public version of the other one, who could have guessed!?!
So far...
*No Linux version yet - can't use it at home on Ubuntu without sloppy hacks
*No find-as-you-type - I didn't realize how much I used this in FF until it's not there
*No AdBlock Plus - I determined this to be my only real must-have FF extension. There are a few others I really really like, but I can get away without them for the most part.
*Lack of extensions in general.
On top of those, I think it's a novel new browser, has some good things, but there's a lack of transparency, too. At least with Firefox, I can view their Bugzilla, check out progress on Mozillazine, and feel like I'm seeing some progress and idea of where things are and where they are going. So Google has said they'll support addons and extensions. It's open source so people can hack it if they want. Well....where are they on supporting extensions? Where's the community building on the source? When is the estimated release of a more final version rather than something that really seems more like a technology preview demo?
That said, I'm having problems with the Minefield pre beta (FF 3.1) today, and am actually thinking of trying Chrome as my default for the day to see how I fare. Crazy.
Google Gears stood in the way of successful installation.
Being open source, all the best features of Chrome will end up as FF extensions. It's already happening. It will only be a matter of time before all the good of Chrome more or less absorbed into Firefox, and all the bad (google's snooping, no extensions) are left out.
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
Get a Linux / Mac version of the browser going and see what happens. I know there aren't nearly as many Linux / Mac users out there, but these are vocal communities who will extol virtues of anything that takes up less processor capacity or makes their day have one less click in it. There's an opportunity to make all these windows guys feel like they are missing out unless they use Chrome.
M
Google wants to be able to drive the future of the web and how it is used. To do that, they need some say in how browsers are built. Even if only 1.5% of people use Chrome, they still get this. For example, Google needs users to have browsers with fast Javascript so their apps work well. By releasing Chrome, they put pressure on Firefox and IE to meet their performance benchmarks. As they add other features, other browsers must take notice.
/...
I wrote an early review of Chrome when it was released http://www.digital-us.org/tech/2008/9/6/google-chrome.html
I use Chrome pretty much just for Slashdot. I use Firefox for almost everything else.
I assume it's the faster javascript (or maybe just placebo effect, who knows) but Slashdot seems a lot more responsive in Chrome than in Firefox.
The preferred solution is to not have a problem.
I know some people might think this is picky, but the lack of smooth scroll in Chrome is what made me go back to firefox. I spend 90% of my time scrolling on websites when I browse the web, so I want the feature I use 90% of the time to be working perfect. This is another reason why I use Safari on my Macbook, because the smooth scrolling is the best i've seen in any browser combined with two-finger touch scroll.
"Assuming they wanted it to grab a significant share of the browser market, have they dropped the ball, or is this part of the plan?"
My assumption is that this is a standard Google release - something half ass that only mostly works... which someday Google may come back to and fix, or maybe not.
There is a group in Europe that is distributing Chrome minus all of the ills and Google junk. It's vastly better.
http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron.php
Chrome Vs Iron
http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron_chrome_vs_iron.php
Clear win, IMO. Open source made this possible - and in only a couple of months.
...stop the presses...
This just in... Google should have contributed to Firefox, instead of reinventing the wheel. Following a wave of hype, market share is now declining... News at 11, 10 Central.
Speaking of FreeBSD/Linux/Solaris/AIX/BeOS/whatever OS you can name, chances are there is a Firefox to suit you.
Unlike any other browser in the history of the planet, there are also approximately 1.2 gazillion plugins for Firefox. The vast majority are cross platform, due to Firefox's Gecko/XUL/Chrome (note the name).
Firefox has momentum. I.e., it's growing on IE (pardon the pun) as well as Safari/Opera. (Was that an estimated 300 million FF users, out of 1.5 billion on the Internet?)
In addition to this, the future Firefox 3.1 is supposed to have a really, really fast JavaScript engine that rival's JS in Google's Chrome browser.
But wait, there's more. Wasn't it Google Gears that was supposed to create disconnected (on- or off-line) desktop apps on Firefox. Why throw in the towel?
There's even more! Google could have wrapped this all up neatly in a "plugin framework," and written it with less effort, and made themselves a defacto-must-have-it part of Firefox, and have impacted more users in less time.
People could have even written themes and other plugins that bolt on to their "plugin framework," the same way Firebug has its own add-ons (like YSlow).
So, why, why, why did they move away from Firefox and reinvent the wheel, instead? I saw no features that couldn't have been done as a Firefox Add-On.
Maybe I'm wrong, here, so feel free to flame away and moderate me out of my miserable existence!
Google is the main contributor to Firefox.
Moneywise, that is. Not so much for the code.
Anyway, Chrome is such a radically different design than Firefox that no amount of code contributions could turn one into another. This is how it has to play out.
Google did not build Chrome to capture market share. They did not create it to launch a product or to circumvent adblock (duh).
They built it for a real strategic reason: to make sure the web remains usable and open. If Google hopes to serve web apps in the future, they depend on the quality of browsers, and the current browser architectures apparently don't satisfy them.
Changing Firefox wasn't an option and attacking IE is a mission with very little payoff for Google. So Google chose to inject their design principles into the market by creating a radically new, yet incomplete browser, and release it open source, so it gets adopted. If Microsoft steals this technology to make IE9 even better, Google's mission will have succeeded.
There's an Economist article which explains all this pretty good as well:
link