Chrome Helping Other Browsers Out, Says Opera CEO

Pablo Martinez-Almeida writes "Opera CEO Jon S. von Tetzchner confirms that new entrants in the browser market are raising awareness on the mainstream Internet community about the availability of alternatives to the ubiquitous Internet Explorer. 'How has the emergence of WebKit and Chrome changed the market for you? JvT: The effect of Chrome so far has been 20 percent more downloads every day. It's fairly logical when you think about it, because the biggest hurdle we have is all those people that don't realize there's an alternative in the market. Now, with the launch of Chrome there's focus on the choice of browsers in the market.'

Comments

Chrome for me?

[Viol8]

"How has the emergence of WebKit and Chrome changed the market for you"

When they can be bothered to release a linux version let me know then I might be able to give answer.

Re:Chrome for me?

[agrounds]

Demands to have something ported for us usually come from novice users who are not able to port software themselves, and are not aware of the extent to which software is ported by others.

I think labeling users that don't code at that level as 'novice' is disingenuous at best. I have used *nix systems for well over 10 years in my daily life and in my job and have nothing more than a basic understanding of C because the bulk of my work (network engineer) revolves around PERL, AWK, and expect with a healthy dose of Oracle and MySQL. Does that make me a novice user? No, I don't believe so. Users come in all shapes and sizes, and everyone's individual strengths reinforce the community as a whole.

A proper and well-documented OS should be able to support any user that wants to use it without an excessively steep learning curve. Usability of a well-designed tool should never require intimate knowledge of how the tool is constructed.

Re:Chrome for me?

[not already in use]

First of all, there is no archaic tool chain.

This is highly subjective. I realize in the *nix world, it is a badge of honor to use command line development tools. Of course, there are people who don't feel the need to lay claim to arbitrary feats, and just want the best tool for the job. The GNU toolchain is old, has seen little innovation, and has not kept up pace with Microsoft and Apple facilities. It is stagnant, except in the eyes of those who take pride in using such archaic and user-unfriendly tools. What's more, it's common to be berated for wanting something more modern, usually taking flak for being a novice or some other unsubstantiated claims regarding ability.

Re:Chrome for me?

[TheRaven64]

The GNU toolchain is old, has seen little innovation, and has not kept up pace with Microsoft and Apple facilities

You realise that Apple currently uses the GNU compiler? They use their own linker, which is more primitive than the GNU one (Mach-O is, in many ways, much less nice to work with than ELF). They use xcodebuild rather than make, which takes input files that are easier to generate from XCode but almost impossible to hand-edit and very difficult to edit with anything other than XCode, but they also support using GNU Make for building.

Or are you confusing the toolchain with the IDE? Most modern IDEs, including Visual Studio and XCode, drive a command-line toolchain in the background. Whether you use the GNU toolchain from a command line or from an IDE is your choice. The same is true when you use the Microsoft toolchain, although since it was impossible to get it without buying their IDE until a few years ago, most people used it via the IDE.

Re:I think we're already there

[mdm-adph]

Ah, yes -- I have a few (not many) family members and older co-workers aware of "FoxFire," too.

Yes, that's what it's always called, an no, no matter how many times I correct them it's always "FoxFire."

Re:I think we're already there

[betterunixthanunix]

The majority of people do not fully understand what Firefox is. There reason IE remains so popular is that most home computer users think their computer is just another appliance, and they want it to work out of the box like a VCR. So they just start it up for the first time, click "start," see something labelled "internet" and just use it, never even realizing what they are using or what they are doing. It has nothing to do with the technical merits of the web browser, it has to do with people who are not interested in computing beyond the on/off switch.