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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.'
I used Mozilla/SeaMonkey/Phoenix/Firefox for 9 years. I switched to Opera a few months ago and never looked back.
The 'advertisement banner' was a stigma for me, although now I realise Opera Software are THE innovators.
I realise it's not "open", but I look forward to any JS or rendering optimisations they may do to counter Chrome/FF3.1.
Options are beginning to look like a good thing. Striving to match a rival will only be good for the world (and those of us who develop for the web ftl or ftw).
My grandparents have a series of books entitled Foxfire, so they want to call it that as well. BTW, have you ever seen foxfire (the namesake of the book)? I have in the woods numerous times at night. It's a type of fungus that grows on dead, rotting wood that glows in the dark. It's kind of spooky when you first come across it (like blood from the alien in Predator).
Better known as 318230.
for the big guys: ie and firefox, chrome represents a smaller slice of the piechart
Frankly, I think awareness of alternatives helps Firefox as much as it helps Opera.
Every user who leaves IE for any other browser makes my job as a web developer that much easier.
the truth though is that chrome just slows down coders responsible for cross browser testing and compatibility
Except that Chrome is based on Webkit, so there aren't going to be many Chrome bugs that aren't also Safari and Konqueror bugs.
More relevantly, all of these browsers follow the standards much more closely than IE. The day IE becomes marginal enough for a website to just throw up a "Get Firefox" banner and stop testing on it is a day life gets much easier.
Easily 90% of the time, when I develop something on Firefox (because of Firebug), it works on Firefox, Safari, Konqueror, Epiphany, Opera, Chrome, and iCab, yet fails on IE. This is because every browser other than IE actually cares about standards.
In other words: I would have to do about ten times less work on cross-browser compatibility if IE was gone. Adding Chrome to the mix really doesn't change that.
its dom and javascript quirks seem very safari like. did google base chrome on safari code?
They used Webkit.
The story goes, roughly: KHTML, used by Konqueror (and other parts of KDE), was forked by Apple and used for Safari. Because it was LGPL'd, Apple has to release all their source, at least to the rendering engine, under something called Webkit. And Webkit is used all over the place.
They did, however, write their own Javascript engine. That, or they massively improved Safari's.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
For me as a Web developer, even if it doesn't get much market share, it's already provided a great service (although it sure would be good to see it get market share, it's a nice browser). It has helped me significantly already in debugging Safari issues. With the site that I am currently developing, which is fairly JS/Ajax intensive, all of our Safari bugs showed up in Chrome as well. Since Chrome actually has a debugger (and a fairly decent one at that), I was able to use it to diagnose and fix the Safari issues in a fraction of the time. Of course if Apple were to release a debugger for Safari or a third party were to develop one, that would lessen the need, but Chrome currently solves a significant issue from a developer standpoint.