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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
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
The fact that people are still using it regularly despite it being beta should say something at least.
http://www.policystew.com/
Yes, I was expecting google to come out with a few more updates at a faster pace. There were too many issues that prevented me from using it to become my primary browser (flash/shockwave video freezing/crashing, rendering issues with a few sites). I still use the incognito feature for por... I mean, for banking.
Google products coming out of beta? I'll be playing Duke Nukem Forever long time before it happens.
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.
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.
...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!