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Google Chrome Displaces Safari As Third In Survey
Azureflare writes "According to a Net Applications survey, Google Chrome has replaced Apple's Safari as the number-three browser. This may be partially explained by the release of the Chrome beta on Mac and Linux, but may also be due to users jumping ship from IE. More analysis on this topic can be found at ComputerWorld. As anecdotal evidence of Google Chrome usage gaining steam, Bank of America has apparently recently added Google Chrome to their list of officially supported browsers."
The persistence of IE6 is due to organizations standardizing on the MS suite from the server to the browser and building their business intellingence into that web platform. They embraced and were trapped by the consequences of that decision, after which getting themselves out of that trap involved huge expense and much opportunity cost as well as much lost face. Bearing the scars of that experience, its not surprising that they are wary of re-entering the same trap twice. They appear to be deciding that "standards are good". See? Are childrens can has learnings.
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Congrats on having the same sort of doughbagery advertising we've come
to expect from Microsoft and Apple, do you feel like you really belong now?
That we really, really like you now?
This is exactly why I don't understand Google fanboys. They think it's some hippy, "don't be evil", and cool group of "indie" people, while in fact it's just like every other huge corporation doing the best they can to make more and more money. They just have good PR people, which really isn't a surprise since they're basically an advertising company with a technology side to enable their main business.
That's the lesson Microsoft taught the world: being perceived as evil is bad for business. Apple, Google, and so on all invest heavily in public relations in order to avoid the fate of Microsoft. That doesn't mean that the substance of their business methods is any different.
Ha, you know that's actually really funny because I've seen those ads too. And I use Google Chrome on a Mac! I'm thinking "Jeez, that's annoying, but even more so because I'm actually using the browser to view the ad!"
It makes much more sense if you replace Google with Apple in your comment ( - except for "don't be evil" part).
That doesn't make a lot of sense, as Apple isn't an advertising company, and very few people believe Apple isn't a big company out to make money.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Ah, Net Applications, the place whose surveys Slashdotters pick and choose to believe in depending on whose doing well in the survey.
I'm not sure I know anyone who uses IE who even knows that Chrome exists.
I use IE sometimes; there's stuff I try to use that doesn't work in FF or Chrome, especially at work, where government sites still don't work well with either (CAC-enabled DoD sites, especially).
I'd be willing to bet its almost entirely loss of Firefox users (like myself), as Firefox has become a bloated, buggy, slow pile of crap that would make IE6 proud.
I've switched to Chrome most of the time on my Windows box at work, and another here at home. Am currently using FF on this box, because I don't use it all that much. On my macs, I use Safari.
But the bigger sisue is that WebKit/KHTML is now a better core than Gecko, and will probably surpass Gecko-based browsers at some point in the not-too-distant future. This is especially true when you consider that a large portion of the mobile browser market is now WebKit-based (Safari on iPhone, Chrome on Android), and the Gecko/FF port to Win32 was damn near unusable when I used it last (this past summer, before I bought my iPhone).
Chrome displaces Safari that displaced Konqueror. But in the end, what matters is what runs behind. Webkit is gaining ground, and more important, web standards are too, Javascript is gaining speed. Unsafe/slow/nonstandard/closed browsers are losing ground, so all win.
Eh, maybe the stats are "worthless" to sad OS/Browser fanboys who are arguing over every last 0.1%.
But the general trend of the web browser is useful and interesting. These kinds of browser stats are how we tracked the rise-and-fall of Netscape, the rise and stagnation of IE, and the rise of Firefox. People do use this sort of information for development and testing priority, flawed methodology and all.
And you will never have a non-"flawed" methodology for capturing this information, even for the users on your own site. (How do you identify a unique user? how do you know they aren't faking their user agent string? Who is a person and who is a bot? etc) If you can't deal with fuzzy information, don't leave the basement.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
From the summary:
This may be partially explained by the release of the Chrome beta on Mac
As an Mac user who's tried out the OS X version of Chrome, I can assure you that no one is abandoning Safari for it. While it's a decent enough browser for a beta, there are enough annoying things about it to make me wait until the next version to decide whether or not it will replace Safari (or Firefox; I switch between the two) as my primary browser.
If anything, it's more likely that the relative few Windows users who have been trying Safari for Windows have switched over to Chrome, at least temporarily.
This ain't rocket surgery.
This would be more believable if it wasn't a totally new UID. Considering if you worked at Google, Adobe and Xerox, you gotta have heard about /. before.
Agree, and there is definitely a difference on the user front, notably their contributions to open source. They have bankrolled two open source browsers, Chrome and Firefox, and this is something that we will never see Microsoft or Apple do. For m
You seem to be implying that any bias or skew in your data sample renders it utterly useless. You know what? In the real world of web browsers you don't really have the alternatives of "statistically valid sample" and "not statistically valid sample." You have to choose between "not really statistically valid sample" and absolutely nothing whatsoever.
This is the real world, not academia. So take what you can get, realize it has limitations, and use it to form a tentative opinion on the relevant matters... or remain utterly ignorant and leave everything to chance. Your choice.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
The awesome bar, for starters. I start Firefox, type "s" in the address bar, and have to wait for-bloody-ever while it sifts through uncountable megabytes looking for any page I may have visited in the past ten days where the URL or even the title might contain the letter S. Not begin with the letter S -- just contain it somewhere in the url string or title. This is freaking ridiculous.
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