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."

Comments

Getting off the train to crazytown

[symbolset]

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.

Re:Getting off the train to crazytown

[negRo_slim]

The rise of Google's Chrome browser is all about add ons being introduced and the fact it doesn't look like total ass in a default install on Vista or 7.

Re:Getting off the train to crazytown

[mattventura]

getting themselves out of that trap

People are still IN the trap. It's vendor lock-in at its finest. They start with MS from client to server, and everything is dependent on other MS products. Then they seal it when they have to start making MS-based web apps and such. And on top of that, they see no reason to get out. There aren't any 'consequences' for some people. So they just stay in the MS-hole.

Re:Getting off the train to crazytown

[xaxa]

Since the beginning of December I've seen loads of adverts in London (mostly on trains and in stations) for Google Chrome... have Google been advertising anywhere else?

Re:Getting off the train to crazytown

[BrentH]

I saw a huge billboard here along the highway in Amsterdam East.

Re:Getting off the train to crazytown

[Grimnir512]

I've seen an advert here in Glasgow. Oddly it was in a place where it wouldn't get much viewership.

Re:Getting off the train to crazytown

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, no kidding. Back in '03 I was writing a new corporate web app. This was at a time before Firefox ( still Phoenix /firebird) when IE had 98% of the market. I begged my boss to make web standards a requirement. That was denied. I still coded my part to standards, but my coworkers thought I was nuts predicting other browsers to arise. Yeah, now its still ie 6 only. I think I retroactively win that argument.

Re:Getting off the train to crazytown

[tgd]

Having been on both sides of that -- at a company ignorantly producing software that required IE, and at companies that had to support systems still running IE because of that precide problem, its not organizations standardizing on the MS suite, the problem stemmed from the shortage of qualified web application developers at the tail end of the dot-com boom. There were vast numbers of "developers" getting into the space that had absolutely no idea what they were doing, and the non-technical companies who were hiring engineers into corporate IT departments *really* got the short stick when it came to hiring. When real software companies were snapping up anyone who could muddle through code, you can imagine the sort of engineers that were ending up at insurance companies and hospitals and companies like that.

The organizations were stuck with piles of crap because of their engineers, not because of some grand corporate policy or strategy. Find some old-timers at those companies and buy them a beer and they'll tell you all about it.

Re:Getting off the train to crazytown

[Zocalo]

It's on the homepage of Amazon's UK site, and I've seen a few of the billboard ads outside of London as well, but the core focus in the UK definitely seems to have been on London over the last few weeks. The level of advertising on the London Underground is pretty much at saturation level, I'd say.

Re:Getting off the train to crazytown

[jonbryce]

I've seen lots of them around the South of England, around Manchester and in Cardiff, so I would imagine they are all over the UK.

Re:Getting off the train to crazytown

[stevey]

you saw it - and remembered it!

Re:Getting off the train to crazytown

[malkir]

Yup, 25 second youtube ads

Re:Getting off the train to crazytown

[truthsearch]

My experience has been the opposite. I've worked with some very smart engineers in the financial industry. Any time we tried to diverge from the MS path we were told to stay on it by management. These companies had signed very large contracts with Microsoft (for licenses and support), and so management felt they needed to commit completely to get the full value from their contracts, even when other solutions would save them money in the long term. This was most definitely corporate policy, straight from the CTOs / CIOs.

Re:Getting off the train to crazytown

[Blue Stone]

>The level of advertising on the London Underground is pretty much at saturation level, I'd say.

I refuse to use the London Underground until it gets a decent adblocker.

Re:Getting off the train to crazytown

[Hes Nikke]

here's a decent adblocker, insert each of these into your eyes:

*you found a pair of chopsticks*

Re:Getting off the train to crazytown

[Herby Sagues]

Actually, it is more due to Google bundling the browser by default with the download for most of its offerings. For example, dowload Google Earth and you will get by default your browser replaced by IE. Yes, you get a chance to opt out from it, but since a desire to run a non-web mapping application is completely orthogonal to the desire to replace your browser, I find the practice a horrible abuse, and it is a sign of what Google is becoming.

Re:Getting off the train to crazytown

[dunkelfalke]

Augmented reality glasses with a built in ad blocker is a thing that could very well happen in a few decades. Ad companies will probably compensate it with hypnotic ads however so those suckers who haven't got the ad blocker installed in their glasses are doomed.

Re:Getting off the train to crazytown

[Dan Ost]

Sadly, you can be right and still not win the argument.

Re:Getting off the train to crazytown

[SlowDancing]

Spot on.

Last year I visited a large corporation to see a demo of their latest web-enabled product. Their field engineers had to have Windows and IE6 on their laptops to tap into the company servers, but to demo their standards-compliant web app they all had to have Firefox as well. Open Source gets the work done, it's future-proof, and hopefully this is only the first shocking example of this bureaucracy-laden company's shift away from proprietary to open. (Wouldn't count on it... their market-capturing strategies are a lot like Microsoft's in some respects. You never know, though...)

Re:Getting off the train to crazytown

[Stevecrox]

Half the billboards in Plymouth had that big Google Chrome logo on them, as of yesterday only two in the city centre were still advertising it though.

Re:Getting off the train to crazytown

[bazorg]

just wear your hoody backwards...

Re:Getting off the train to crazytown

[FST777]

Here in the Netherlands (I live in Ede, near Arnhem), they're everywhere. From smallish posters at bus stands to billboards.

Re:Getting off the train to crazytown

[CastrTroy]

MS has been making some good moves. Silverlight is probably their biggest problem right now as far as interoperability goes, and even then there's moonlight. But other than that, they seem to be moving forward on standards. Don't they actually use JQuery as part of their standard web app development package. They realize they aren't the only browser in town anymore, and they are making big inroads in web app development to make people want to use their platform including open sourcing ASP.Net MVC. They are a quite far from where they were in the old days with ActiveX. I don't even think they want people to go that route anymore. They realize they will have to embrace openness to compete on the web.

Re:Getting off the train to crazytown

[eyore15]

I see the same thing in education. My school system bought into Apple very heavily years ago, and now can't get out. Our servers our Apple. Most teachers use iMac laptops. However, need to teach business classes -- need a PC. Want to run the district accounting software? Need a PC. Now, need those PCs to play nice with the servers? That's a problem. My state just received word of a 3.5% reduction in state funding. But will we go to a FOSS server? Nope. Will we leave MS Office behind (along with its horrible fees) in favor of Open Office? Nope. Will we continue to manage our own email system when Google gives management away for free to education? Of course not. It's Baby Duck Syndrome (BDS); implant on the first thing you see. Without education's slavish attachment to Apple, I'm not sure where they would be either.

Chrome

[sopssa]

Has passed? StatCounter shows they already passed in August 2008, far before Chrome beta for Mac or Linux was available. However Internet Explorer still seem to have majority of marketshare with 63% (interestingly the Net Applications site seems to use IIS..)

Interestingly other countries seem to have a totally different market shares (wiser users?):
Opera is leading with 32% in Russia, with 35% in Ukraine, and 44% in Belarus.
China saw a huge 7% decrease from 95% in just recent two months, with Maxthon picking up the same percent and Firefox as 3rd with only 3%. (Maxthon uses IE engine tho)

Google has huge ways to market Chrome; they can do tv/billboard ads, internet ads, include a notice on their sites (like they're doing with YouTube) and enable option to install it along with their other apps, and pay manufacturers to include Chrome with their pc's.

Re:Chrome

[dangitman]

From the StatCounter website:

"Stats are based on aggregate data collected by StatCounter on a sample exceeding 5 billion pageviews per month collected from across the StatCounter network of more than 3 million websites. "

Doesn't sound like a particularly reliable source of data to me.

Re:Chrome

[sopssa]

It does sound a bit more reliable than Net Applications tho, "which the company says encompasses data from some 160 million users per month.". Thats 31x larger source for data.

Re:Chrome

[sopssa]

Well that was a bit different metric, but the point still stands.

Re:Chrome

[dangitman]

No, StatCounter talks about pageviews, while Net Applications talks about users. I'm guessing most users tend to load more than 31 pages per month.

Either way, there are lies, damn lies, and web statistics.

Re:Chrome

[Trepidity]

Possibly true--- the real question though, which I don't think either data source has made a convincing effort to account for, is how representative each sample is of the total population of internet users. An unbiased sample doesn't even need to be particularly large; a few thousand users would suffice for a very low margin of error. But millions of users in a skewed sample is still a skewed sample...

Re:Chrome

[sznupi]

Not really much wiser users; influence of people setting up OS on home machines (which are also much older on average)

See, in those post-soviet countries legal Windows is almost unheard of (shift towards laptops changes things of course, but only a bit; not only they are smaller part of market, notable number of them comes essentially without OS (FreeDOS? Some Linux booting into textmode? LiveCD? Without drivers for the hardware...). So somebody vaguely fluent in "computers" will set up pirated copy, usually. Putting there a better browser among other alternatives (like better ICQ client). Opera is preferred because it works very good on slow and RAM starved (by todays standards) machines.

Re:Chrome

[BronsCon]

And I'm sure the BETA came out AFTER that, right?

Was waiting for Chrome on OSX until...

[juuri]

... the AD deluge started. Seriously, google, do I need to see on every one
of your sites your insipid little ADs pushing me to use your browser on OSX
now?

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?
 

Re:Was waiting for Chrome on OSX until...

[sopssa]

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.

Re:Was waiting for Chrome on OSX until...

[QuoteMstr]

They just have good PR people

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.

Re:Was waiting for Chrome on OSX until...

[E IS mC(Square)]

It makes much more sense if you replace Google with Apple in your comment ( - except for "don't be evil" part).

Re:Was waiting for Chrome on OSX until...

[Abreu]

Google is (and has always been) an advertisement company.

You are expected to live with it, or circumvent it (it's not that hard)

Re:Was waiting for Chrome on OSX until...

[Azureflare]

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!"

Re:Was waiting for Chrome on OSX until...

[dangitman]

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.

Re:Was waiting for Chrome on OSX until...

[Ethanol-fueled]

Sure, they're a big mega-evil corporation. Their mission is to get inside our heads and sell ads. But their success could be attributed to much more than savvy PR guys with headphones and rollerblades.

Unlike the others, Google actually innovates. Takes risks. Some ideas flop, others are hugely successful. Microsoft and Yahoo just keep turning out the same old shit because they are inert and unwilling to innovate. Sure, they add a feature to widget X or rebrand widget Y, but they have not created any new services. Microsoft in particular is puzzlingly suicidal -- the Zune, and that horrible ad campaign (thanks for wiggling your ass in my face, Bill, we know you have gazillions of dollars).

Most importantly, Google don't get greedy. For example, the ads in the middle of youtube videos. You can see when an ad will pop up and you can even skip past it if you want -- try doing that with pre-clip commercials on CNN.com. Google don't force you to do anything like the other companies do. They don't shove banner ads in your face when using MSN messenger. Google are huge, but they don't project greed. Google succeeds because it does not project control and does not try to strong-arm the user. Google lets the user come to it and use it on the user's own terms, and that happens with clever and seamless integration of its ads into other services. What Google does not try to do is strong-arm the user into using its shit by honking a clown horn in his/her face. That said, I'll never use Chrome. FF, Opera, and derivatives all the way.

Re:Was waiting for Chrome on OSX until...

[commodoresloat]

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.

If it were any different, we'd see changes in leadership. CEOs remain CEOs because they continue to pursue profit above all. That's part of the system that's not likely to change, whether you like it or not. The challenge is to articulate a business model that makes "do no evil" (or, at least, "be perceived as doing no evil") into a profitable action, and Google and Apple have successfully convinced many people that they have done that.

Re:Was waiting for Chrome on OSX until...

[Natural Join]

I worked at Google as a developer for many years. I have also worked at other huge corporations, like Adobe and Xerox. Google is nothing like every other huge corporation. They are exactly like some hippie, "don't be evil" group of socially conscious software developers. That's because that's what they are, both in the engineering department and all the way up to top management, including Larry, Sergei, and Eric. Not saying this is true of the sales department, but they're not in charge; the developers are. If Google were an advertising company, the sales department would be in charge.

They search engine came first. Of course something's gotta pay the bills, and the search engine by itself is an expense, not a source of income. If Google were an advertising company, the ad system would have come first, like it did with Overture.

Re:Was waiting for Chrome on OSX until...

[Anonymous Coward]

"I worked at Google as a developer for many years."

I wish you good luck with your new career at Google PR.

Re:Was waiting for Chrome on OSX until...

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

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!"

So basically, you're saying you're extra annoyed because ads for Google products are not very specifically targeted. They are not very specifically targeted because it is Google advertising using other advertising companies, instead of their own system. You've pretty much just made a comment that confirms Google's business model as valuable. Now all we need is for commercial ventures like Hulu to start letting Google handle which ad gets played for which user, so the ads will be more appropriate to you. Maybe you should send a note to the company playing the ads a suggestion.

Re:Was waiting for Chrome on OSX until...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Was waiting for Chrome on OSX until...

[internettoughguy]

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

Re:Was waiting for Chrome on OSX until...

[GlassHeart]

They have bankrolled two open source browsers, Chrome and Firefox, and this is something that we will never see Microsoft or Apple do.

You mean the Chrome browser that uses WebKit, which is an Apple-funded improvement over KHTML?

Re:Was waiting for Chrome on OSX until...

[Dragonslicer]

They just have good PR people

Because there's no way that Google could ever be popular simply because they have good products and services.

Re:Was waiting for Chrome on OSX until...

[Draek]

It's like the difference between a guy trying to hit on every girl he meets, and a rapist. Both try to maximize the amount of sex they have, but they both go through *very* different paths to do so.

They put out cool tech, and (usually) they don't try to cripple them for their own benefit, as they realize there's more money to be had in having more users and a bigger market than in providing an "unified" experience or whatever's the newest excuse Microsoft and Apple throw at us whenever they play the lock-in game. And they most certainly haven't thrown anybody in prison for putting their business model in danger, ala Adobe.

Are they perfect? no, they aren't. Neither are RedHat or Sun. But as far as big business goes, they ain't that bad either.

Re:Was waiting for Chrome on OSX until...

[Ethanol-fueled]

You:

Apparently your eyes are crusted over with GoogleJizz and haven't noticed that Google/Doubleclick serve a majority of the ads on the internet.

Me:

That said, I'll never use Chrome. FF, Opera, and derivatives all the way.

Well shucks, so I sucked Larry's and Sergei's dicks and spoke in ignorance of the Youtube thing. Dosen't mean that I go back to them if somebody, in this case the Mozilla foundation, treats me better by having allowed me to block "the majority of the ads on the internet" without using whatever other data collection methods Chrome does.

Some people prefer Chrome because it is fast. Other people can wait an additional 50-100 milliseconds without fidgeting while the page loads.

Re:Was waiting for Chrome on OSX until...

[The End Of Days]

"Truly conscientious" is a completely subjective term, just like evil (as used in this case.) Your morals are yours alone and have no bearing on anything but your actions.

Re:Was waiting for Chrome on OSX until...

[indiechild]

What an ignorant post, but of course you get modded insightful.

Re:Was waiting for Chrome on OSX until...

[mqduck]

Seriously, google, do I need to see on every one of your sites your insipid little ADs pushing me to use your browser on OSX
now?

"Ad" is an abbreviation for advertisement. It is not an acronym.

Re:Was waiting for Chrome on OSX until...

[twoHats]

Fail - Both Apple and Google have failed miserably. Apple more than Google. I believe that Google has produced some rally great and innovate ideas that have helped keep the flow of tech workers moving. The evil is really relative with them (C H I N A). With Apple things are definitely more rotten. This is the snake medicine / revival tent kind of evil. The kind that promises salvation, while delivering the same old crap. oops - sorry ...

Re:Was waiting for Chrome on OSX until...

[True Grit]

This would be more believable if it wasn't a totally new UID.

And your comment would be even more believable if you had any UID at all. At least the GP has one.

you gotta have heard about /. before.

'hearing about' != 'registering as a user'

I lurked here (read-only) for at least a year or so before bothering to sign up. Maybe the GP, when he was at Google, was just too busy doing Real Work(TM) to bother?

Besides, its not like Slashdot is the center of the IT universe. What reason would anyone have to expect that every current and former Google employee is a /. member?

/. may be the center of *our* universe, but its not everyone else's Prime Attractor. :)

Re:Was waiting for Chrome on OSX until...

[shutdown -p 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.

I don't have to care about Google's "don't be evil" and "hippie culture" at all to enjoy their good products, one of which Chrome just happens to be (another two, as far as I'm concerned, are GMail and Picasa). Furthermore, based on my experiences with them, I do look forward to their future releases in any technical fields. Does that make me a "fanboy"?

Re:Was waiting for Chrome on OSX until...

[dangitman]

Yeah? What do Apple's research labs do? How many grants to they give to CS university programs? How many scientists to they hire or support?

You're confusing innovation and research. Apple doesn't need to fund CS programs in order to make innovative products.

All they do is package ALREADY EXISTING technology created by SOMEBODY ELSE into shiny packages and sell them.

It's actually quite a bit more involved than that. And Apple does create original products, particularly in software. After all, it was the company that developed the first commercially viable GUI, which set the template for our existing GUIs on all platforms.

OTOH, While MS has thousands of individual products with varying degrees of quality and success, MS has been pumping $5 billion into CS schools, research labs and hiring scientists to work on interesting projects all over the world.

And yet, they almost never manage to make an actual innovative product. Funny, that.

Re:Was waiting for Chrome on OSX until...

[bigngamer92]

With Apple things are definitely more rotten. This is the snake medicine / revival tent kind of evil. The kind that promises salvation, while delivering the same old crap.

Even as an Apple hater I have to disagree. Apple's not hiding what it's been doing with its products. The only people who get miffed are those who want to be able to modify their products (which means Geeks). Google is data mining, but that will be pointless in 10 years, as everyone will have put all their information into third party hands.

In conclusion, no one is getting undersold with snake medicine. Everyone is getting exactly what they want, which is SHINY portable net devices, that can't run viruses, but can update everyone on what your doing.

Re:Was waiting for Chrome on OSX until...

[twoHats]

Unfortunately Apple is the best engineering design company ever!! However - when one looks a little closer at OS-X - and iTunes etc one finds the snake oil i am refering to. I just spent a couple of hours cleaning up a really sloppy update of iTunes - as i looked around for solutions ( i'm a Linux guy and ignorant of mac) I found endless sad stories of folks trying to deal with the same thing. Earlier, the same machine (owned by my friends daughter) had all kiinds of wifi problems - looked around and found - the radio was known bad - but Apple didn't support replacement. Whaaa? - anyway - biz as usual as far as i can see... Apple - MS ... whats the diff...

Re:Was waiting for Chrome on OSX until...

[dangitman]

Innovation results from research.

But research doesn't have to occur in a university lab. Do you not think Apple performs research when it makes a new product?

The entire product doesn't just appear in your head as an epiphany.

Actually, sometimes it does.

Most of the innovative products are built on existing research that was not viable 10 years ago, but is now.

Right. So how does that make them not innovative?

Which they copied from XEROX? Making something commercially viable requires marketing and advertising, not innovation.

Copied from Xerox? The first Mac OS might have been inspired by Xerox' research, but it was very different, and a lot of hard word went into making it a viable product. A product prototype or idea is not the same as something ready for market. Otherwise, Xerox would have simply released it as-is. But Xerox did not have the insight to see the value in it, and work it into a usable product.

For example, for the GUI to work, Apple needed an input device - the mouse. This was not an invention of Apple's, but the existing prototypes were not reliable or accurate enough for commercial use - so Apple put a lot of engineering effort into refining those prototypes into something that would work.

The NT kernel, NTFS, Office 2007, Flight Sim, Cleartype, Visual Basic, etc, were innovative for their time.

But all were based on previous research and inventions. By your previous arguments, that makes them not innovative. You can't have it both ways.

You seem to have been confusing invention and innovation. They are separate, but related things. In many cases, more work goes into the evolution and refinement, rather than the invention.

Re:Was waiting for Chrome on OSX until...

[E IS mC(Square)]

Wow, man. If Apple copies, it's inspiration. Somebody else innovates, it's based on previous research. Way to go.

IE 5.5 forever

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know about everyone else, but Internet Explorer 5.5 is working pretty well here on my Windows NT 4 machines. IE5.5 has the fastest ECMAscript execution, is reasonably easy to program for, and works on all of our 2000 and NT 4 desktops. Until the other browsers start supporting legacy Windows systems, IE5.5/6 will always have a place.

Time to go back to coding the web-based CSM in C with a COBOL backend on Fujitsu Cobol .NET...

Anonymous Sig 2.0:
MADONNA IS AMAZING! I LOVE MADONNA - EROTICA.MP16!

Re:IE 5.5 forever

[Arancaytar]

I know you are kidding, but that post still gave me nausea. :P

Re:IE 5.5 forever

[Tumbleweed]

I don't know about everyone else, but Internet Explorer 5.5 is working pretty well here on my Windows NT 4 machines.

Dude, you should try Windows Millennium - WAY easier on system resources than that hog NT4! Plus, as the name 'Millennium' implies, it's probably Y2K-compliant. Ish.

Worthless

[pudge]

Such metrics are almost always worthless. And such is the case here. Their methodology is fundamentally flawed, and you can't fix flawed methodology by just getting more of it.

Ars Technica notes, 'The company tracks OS and browser use among "member sites" that use Net Applications' tracking services, which the company says encompasses data from some 160 million users per month. This means that the only OS and browser numbers being tracked are those from users who specifically visit those member sites, which include the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and InformationWeek. If specific demographics of users—like, say, Linux users—don't tend to read those types of sites, they are going to be underrepresented, and similarly, other demographics may be overrepresented.

It obviously could be the case that Chrome is used by people more likely to use those "member sites" than people who use Safari.

Unfortunately, Ars Technica then writes, 'That being said, browser metrics such as these aren't worthless. Even though they may be an inaccurate way to make comparisons between operating systems, they provide a good picture when it comes to trends within a specific OS. For example, Net Applications tracked the Mac OS at 7.3 percent at the end of 2007 and 9.63 percent at the end of 2008, showing more than a 2.6 percentage point jump in only a year for the Mac. In this sense, it doesn't matter if Mac users tend to visit the Wall Street Journal's website more than Linux users. The trend is clearly showing that Mac users, with all their unique browsing habits, are growing steadily.'

That's obviously false, because it doesn't take into account the fact that demographics can trend from year to year (perhaps the WSJ introduced a new, and popular, Mac-specific section on their web site).

Re:Worthless

[maxume]

Of course, it isn't particularly likely that all 160 million sites introduced popular new mac specific sections.

Re:Worthless

[IntlHarvester]

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.

Re:Worthless

[sopssa]

Bye, I'm off to set my User-Agent to elinks, and access the target websites over every tor exit node.

Talk about completely wasting your time while thinking you're being clever. While true it doesn't represent the usage 100%, the sample size is a little bit larger than that.

Re:Worthless

[westlake]

This means that the only OS and browser numbers being tracked are those from users who specifically visit those member sites, which include the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and InformationWeek. If specific demographics of users--like, say, Linux users--don't tend to read those types of sites, they are going to be underrepresented,

The Moz Foundation is a Net Applications client.

Opera. Nokia. Adobe. Apple. Microsoft. RIM. D&B. CNN. Roche. Amazon.

The geek who hasn't ventured out of his grandma's basement in the last decade might be overlooked.

But the odds seem very good that you will be counted.

Re:Worthless

[jedidiah]

...of that list, very few of those sites are actually "general interest". They are strictly vendor sites that someone might visit when they need a driver or a plugin update. The rest of the time they should be pretty invisible.

CNN and Amazon are somewhat interesting. The rest represent clearly skewed user sets.

Re:Worthless

[Matheus]

They didn't say 160M "sites" they said 160M "users".

If say Google.com or Facebook.com alone were to throw in their numbers to this mix their entire data set would appear as a statistical anomaly.

Re:Worthless

[maxume]

Oops.

Still, I doubt that the sites visited by the 160 million people had a persistent skew in content changes.

Re:Worthless

[pudge]

the odds seem very good that you will be counted.

When you play the odds, you are admitting your sampling methodolgy is flawed.

This is similar to the Neilsen ratings. Sure, it might work for many people, but there will be significant demographics that will be left out, making the data not just generally worthless, but damaging.

Re:Worthless

[gazbo]

Would you care to enlighten us as to what you mean by "we have a good sample"?

Re:Worthless

[IntlHarvester]

Also, to people who understand statistics.

None of these surveys claim to be a statistically valid sample, and nobody with half-a-brain believes that they are. Maybe its only you who is confused..

In fact, I can think of nothing more "worthless" than demanding data that does not exist and is effectively impossible to collect. It still is useful to see general browser trends across large pools of sites, despite that.

Re:Worthless

[pudge]

Still, I doubt that the sites visited by the 160 million people had a persistent skew in content changes.

You can't really know that without analyzing it, and if you don't do that -- and why would you take the time? -- you can't know it isn't skewing the data. Which means you can't trust the data.

Re:Worthless

[pudge]

None of these surveys claim to be a statistically valid sample, and nobody with half-a-brain believes that they are.

Exactly.

It still is useful to see general browser trends across large pools of sites, despite that.

Your last sentence disagrees with your first.

Re:Worthless

[pudge]

Huh. None of what you said had anything to do with what I said!

Re:Worthless

[hairyfeet]

do they count Facebook, MySpace, and the webmail portals? Because dealing with "average Joe" customers all day I would say those sites would probably give the most accurate results. The younger folks live on Facebook, and even the older folks have dropped Outlook express and other download mails for Yahoo, Live, and Gmail.

So if one wanted to see the "average user" stats I bet that figuring the data from the above sites would give a pretty clear picture of what folks are using. Sites like RIM and MSFT just aren't hardly ever gone to by ordinary folks, and many that I have talked to still refuse to shop online thanks to fears of hackers. But even the most tech fearful seem to have been bitten by the Facebook bug and everybody checks their webmail so that would probably be the best non skewed stats one could get.

Re:Worthless

[pudge]

Would you care to enlighten us as to what you mean by "we have a good sample"?

No. But I direct you to seek out any introductory text on sampling methodolgy.

Re:Worthless

[maxume]

I'm willing to trust it a little bit, and it isn't as if the conclusions being discussed here are deep and weighty.

Re:Worthless

[Pascal Sartoretti]

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

If you really want to track this, you would rather use absolute numbers instead of percentages. Losing market share is not so tragic as long as long as you don't lose actual users.

Re:Worthless

[hkmwbz]

And you will never have a non-"flawed" methodology for capturing this information

So if you don't have a working methodology, just pick a random one? How is false data better than no data?

Re:Worthless

[pudge_confirmer]

And you will never have a non-"flawed" methodology for capturing this information, even for the users on your own site.

False, of course. It has a degree of error, but it is not flawed methodolgy. There's a difference: we have a good sample, they do not.

You say " we have a good sample, they do not." (emphasis mine).

It appears Gazbo asks an open-ended question; you have been critical about the sample other others, and you say you ("we", including you) have a good sample.

By "we", do you mean slashdot?

By good, what makes it more than bad and less than excellent?

By sample, what do you mean specific to this question? Please feel free to assume I know as much as you learned from an introductory text on sampling methodology. As you know, good methods applied to bad data give bad results.

My interest, and perhaps Gazbo's, is to "we", and "good", much more than sample.

What you say is interesting.

Ciao!

Re:Worthless

[pudge]

I'm willing to trust it a little bit

Feel free, but there's no actual reason to trust it.

Re:Worthless

[pudge]

By "we", do you mean slashdot?

No. I mean the data on "your own site." Which is obvious, since that is what I was responding to.

By good, what makes it more than bad and less than excellent?

Because on "your own site," you have all the data for all the users. There's no significant sampling error. There can be errors in analyzing the data, but -- minus the occasional lost log entry -- there's no sampling error, because you're not taking a sample, you have the entire possible set of data you are concerned with (the users on your own site); whereas, these people are taking a (relatively) tiny portion of the Internet and trying to generalize it out to the entire set of (demographically different) Internet users.

Please feel free to assume I know as much as you learned from an introductory text on sampling methodology.

Given your questions, that is impossible for me to do.

Re:Worthless

[pudge_confirmer]

But it seems to me that there are many flaws in using all the data you have on your own site. I can point them out, but they are so obvious that I am surprised you are not aware of them.

For example, to get you thinking and encourage a discussion, ip addresses can change, multiple users can have the same ip addresses, cookies can be deleted, persons can use more than one computer, multiple persons can use one computer.

It seems to me the more valid and more difficult approach to the problem of OS and browser choices and changes is not to look at websites used by persons (one or many or even all sites), but look at persons (many or all) and see what browsers and OS they use.

What do you think?

Re:Worthless

[pudge]

But it seems to me that there are many flaws in using all the data you have on your own site.

No, there's not.

For example, to get you thinking and encourage a discussion, ip addresses can change, multiple users can have the same ip addresses, cookies can be deleted, persons can use more than one computer, multiple persons can use one computer.

None of those are flaws "in" using all the data. Those are all data analysis problems, which are distinct from sampling problems.

Re:Worthless

[Jimmy_Slimmy]

What conclusions is it you assert you can get from your data?

Re:Worthless

[pudge_confirmer]

Don't try to trick him!

Chrome is on the Droid, too...

[jddj]

That probably gave the figures a big bump. Using it right now.

Re:Chrome is on the Droid, too...

[MathiasRav]

The built-in browser on my HTC Magic sends the following user agent string:

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 1.5; en-ie; HTC Magic Build/CUPCAKE) AppleWebKit/528.5+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.2 Mobile Safari/525.20.1

Other phones (from analyzing my access logs from my site which attracts mobile users) send either Mobile Safari/525.20.1 or Mobile Safari/530.17.

For the sake of comparison, my Chromium sends the following user agent:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.8 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.0.283.0 Safari/532.8

It seems Chrome/Chromium as well as the Android built-in web browser both run WebKit, and they both base their UAs on Safari's.

It sounds crazy to me to assume that Google would have two different teams to work on two different browsers, and also to assume that they don't share any codebase.

Re:Chrome is on the Droid, too...

[pslam]

As an ex-google employee who worked on Android and (peripherally) Chrome, I can tell you the grandparent is absolutely right. They share WebKit, but they were written using branches that were not merged until after public release. None of the rest shares any code whatsoever. Hell, the 'chrome' (not 'Chrome') in the Android browser is written in JAVA.

Android's browser is NOT Chrome, shares absolutely no code outside of WebKit, and even that is via general-purpose merging of changes via branches. I have no idea why various Google directors/PMs have suggested otherwise in the past, other than of course just being incorrect without realizing it.

This stuff is all visible in public repositories. Go have a look. There's no code shared other than WebKit.

And, of course, it doesn't even send the same User Agent string so it won't be counted as Chrome in any case.

Re:Chrome is on the Droid, too...

[imakemusic]

Google: We just make shit and then figure out what happened afterwards, on Slashdot.

Jumping ship from IE?

[tgd]

I'm not sure I know anyone who uses IE who even knows that Chrome exists.

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.

Re:Jumping ship from IE?

[Shikaku]

I love when people say X is bloated, but never mention what the bloat is.

Please, name something you can remove from the default install of Firefox.

Re:Jumping ship from IE?

[idiotnot]

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).

Re:Jumping ship from IE?

[selven]

Please, name something you can remove from the default install of Firefox.

Integrated bloat is the worst kind.

Re:Jumping ship from IE?

[BZ]

> But the bigger sisue is that WebKit/KHTML is now a better core than Gecko

Based on what metric? It uses more memory, is faster in some cases and slower in others, is easier to hack in some ways. It also just provides a renderer, as opposed to an entire browser. So which is better depends on what you're trying to do and how much effort you want to expend on the non-renderer parts of your app (e.g. to use webkit you have to provide your own http stack and so forth).

If you just want to embed a non-browser HTML renderer that you're going to feed data into, then webkit is better, sure. That's what it's designed for; it's not what Gecko is designed for.

Re:Jumping ship from IE?

[LordLimecat]

Agree with parent, youll need to define bloat. Session recovery? Guess what, every browser ive checked out there supports it, including Chrome. Tab close undo? Ditto. Same for a database backend (chrome has one), extensions (chrome, opera, IE all have them).

So what exactly is the bloat being referred to? I use chrome because I find it to be faster, but from recent experience Firefox 3.5 is faster than 3.0, which was much faster than 2.0, which was faster / better than 1.5, etc.

Re:Jumping ship from IE?

[BZ]

One other note... Webkit and Gecko have different priorities in other ways too: for example, correct behavior of CSS selectors in the face of DOM mutations is a top priority for Gecko (and hence behavior is correctin all the cases I know of) and is not for Webkit (and hence the behavior is not correct in various cases; "for now we will just worry about the common case, since it's a lot trickier to get the second case right" as the Webkit code comments say). There are various other areas in which Webkit is behind Gecko in terms of standards support, and vice versa. They seem to have different future development priorities (e.g. in terms of things like SMIL vs CSS Animations).

It's also not clear which is developing faster, and that aspect is subject to rapid change. I think at this point there are more full-time engineers employed to work on Webkit than on the equivalent parts of Gecko. That may or may not continue to be the case.

Another interesting question, of course, is IE. IE9 has a bigger development team than either Webkit or Gecko, from what I can tell, and they're rapidly working on closing the existing gaps. IE's support for CSS2.1 is better than either Webkit's _or_ Gecko's in my testing (easier to do in some ways because the spec has kept changing so in some cases Webkit/Gecko implement earlier versions). Of course IE has a lot of catching up to do in other areas.

It'll be an interesting next few years all around.

Re:Jumping ship from IE?

[tgd]

Whatever it is that's using 450MB of RAM and chewing up 5x the amount of time loading pages.

That's a good place to start.

Re:Jumping ship from IE?

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

Performance-wise, they're both blazing fast even on a modest single-core/1GB system.

Just to pick up on this point... it might be something funny with Ubuntu 9.10, or maybe I've been using Chromium a bit too much, but Firefox just seems very sluggish these days. I've recently upgraded my main computer from a 2.8GHz Celeron (2GB RAM) to a 2.6Ghz Core i5 (4GB RAM), and Firefox still takes a few seconds to start up! It's true I do run a number of extensions, and I do have a fairly rediculous number of bookmarks in FF, but even on a fresh OS install with vanilla FF, it's still not fast.

I'm not knocking Firefox btw -- I love it to bits for all it's extensions -- but the sluggishness (both startup, but also generally UI-laggyness) make it harder to love these days. So FF is kind of my web-dev/testing browser whilst Chromium is my day to day jumping around websites browser.

Re:Jumping ship from IE?

[adarn]

I think the parent is referring to resource bloat, not feature bloat.

I've never run FF out of the box with no extensions for very long so I can't say if the browser itself is the trouble or poorly coded extensions but we all know that FF has become slower and more resource intensive with age. 3.5 is some improvement but it still is not the same as it used to be.

Re:Jumping ship from IE?

[couchslug]

Features = bloat.

Remember Phoenix? Light,fast, nothing else.

It morphed into Firefox which is featureful and buggier. (I like the features so I don't run FF on slow PCs.)

Re:Jumping ship from IE?

[IHateEverybody]

I find that most of Firefox's "bloat" comes from extensions. A brand new install of Firefox, particularly the more recent betas, starts up very quickly but as soon as you start installing certain extensions its start up time becomes very slow. This is in stark contrast with Chrome 4.x which is fast even with a lot of extensions. (I have 17 installed in Chrome on my netbook and it still flys.)

Re:Jumping ship from IE?

[Magic5Ball]

Just diff Camino and Firefox.

The former loads consistently in under one second on my four year old OS X and Windows machines and remains responsive under whatever memory and CPU load, while Firefox since version 3 with just adblock and noscript addons takes over eight seconds to load and hangs all tabs in all windows while waiting for trivial things (e.g. AJAX content updates) to happen in any loaded document window.

Bug 40848 exemplifies the attitude which could sink the non-Gecko part of Firefox in the near future, in that it took years and secret skunkworks by some young turks to get the project to acknowledge and work on a predictable (and predicted) fundamental architectural performance problem relating to pretending that a web browser is like a cooperatively multitasking operating system.

Having developed an internal corporate deployment and configuration management tool to support Firefox 2 on over 4,000 thin desktops, moving Firefox 3 was a non-starter for its large memory profile. Since we were able to get great performance out of Firefox 2 through automagically setting some of the documented about:config settings, we put substantial work into moving to Epiphany before Epiphany gave up on Gecko due to its unpredictable release cycle and uncertain Firefox-linked roadmaps. /proudly typed on Safari 4 with Glims

Re:Jumping ship from IE?

[selven]

XUL is a pretty big one. Then there's all the addon-like features that Firefox started to put into its main version, like microformats, an RSS reader, etc. More here

Re:Jumping ship from IE?

[The J Kid]

I'm not sure I know anyone who uses IE who even knows that Chrome exists.

That's not the point. (also, there are Chrome billboards everywhere here in the city) This is the point:

Bank of America has apparently recently added Google Chrome to their list of officially supported browsers.

I called this! On Slashdot!

Also, you can phone up your bank, if their site's not working for you and scream:
"WHAT DO YOU MEAN, YOU DON'T SUPPORT GOOGLE?"
and they'll get with the Google.

(In a Chrome OS topic, but still)

Re:Jumping ship from IE?

[xigxag]

If the FF install was 450MB of RAM, that wold be bloat. The fact that when open and running, Firefox might occupy a 450MB footprint isn't necessarily bloat, but either poor programming (if the RAM usage slows the system down) GOOD programming (if the RAM usage speeds the system up -- there's no point in having 4/8GB of RAM in your system if the applications never use it) or just a necessary reality (if you have 50 tabs open, with youtube clips and huge modern pages inside, they're gonna take up memory, no matter what.)

5x the amount of time loading pages as what? As 10 years ago when pages were all simple html/css? As chrome? FF isn't ~5x slower loading pages, it's ~5x slower running javascript. And that's not due to "bloat" but to the failure to keep up with advances in jvm efficiency.

If people really think Firefox has become bloated, they should try loading up version 1.0 and seeing if it really seems faster. But don't forget to run the current version without addons so they're on the same footing.

Re:Jumping ship from IE?

[selven]

Hi, welcome to Slashdot. I would like to remind you that, unlike on Youtube, coherent rebuttals with actual arguments are quite popular here and you can earn much karma by trying out a couple.

Re:Jumping ship from IE?

[rrohbeck]

Please, name something you can remove from the default install of Firefox.

Something they need to work on is XUL. People in the know say that that's where FF burns the most cycles, especially during startup. It needs some kind of JIT compilation.
Also, why is it that FF just sitting there doing exactly nothing always sucks up a couple percent of the CPU?
One other thing that needs improving is multithreading. Why is the GUI slow while multiple other tabs are loading?

Re:Jumping ship from IE?

[rantingkitten]

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.

Re:Jumping ship from IE?

[True Grit]

I'm not sure I know anyone who uses IE who even knows that Chrome exists.

At some point Firefox was in the exact same position, yet it eventually managed to take marketshare away from IE, and without the advantage of Google's ad budget.

I'd be willing to bet its almost entirely loss of Firefox users

At this point it probably doesn't even matter. We don't even know yet how much of this rapid adoption is permanent or not. Its a lot harder to guess who are the 'winners' and 'losers', especially long-term, with so many players now in the game.

Choice is good, and nothing beats a little friendly competition at getting a complacent player off their duff and back in the game (yes, I'm looking at you Firefox: at some point you lost your 'lean-n-mean' under an avalanche of XUL chrome and plugin hell - you need to work on getting that back).

Re:Jumping ship from IE?

[ChienAndalu]

One other note... Webkit and Gecko have different priorities in other ways too: for example, correct behavior of CSS selectors in the face of DOM mutations is a top priority for Gecko (and hence behavior is correctin all the cases I know of) and is not for Webkit (and hence the behavior is not correct in various cases; "for now we will just worry about the common case, since it's a lot trickier to get the second case right" as the Webkit code comments say).

Webkit has a 100/100 Acid3 score and Firefox only 96/100

Re:Jumping ship from IE?

[marsu_k]

This can be frustrating, granted. But there's a way to improve this a lot. While I do think this process should be automated (perhaps every time FF is automatically updated?) it's certainly doable - some googling will give you GUI tools for it as well (for Windows anyway), and you can find a FF addon from the comments on that page. Mind you though, on my work work laptop (C2D, 4GB RAM, Win XP) I've never had the need to do this, it always seems snappy enough, but it made a world of difference on my ancient desktop (Athlon XP 2600+, 1GB RAM, Linux). And I'm willing to put up with the occasional DB cleanup because I've really come to like the "awesome bar", I hardly ever use bookmarks anymore.

Re:Jumping ship from IE?

[marsu_k]

One other note... Webkit and Gecko have different priorities in other ways too: for example, correct behavior of CSS selectors in the face of DOM mutations is a top priority for Gecko (and hence behavior is correctin all the cases I know of) and is not for Webkit (and hence the behavior is not correct in various cases; "for now we will just worry about the common case, since it's a lot trickier to get the second case right" as the Webkit code comments say).

Webkit has a 100/100 Acid3 [wikipedia.org] score and Firefox only 96/100

Neither of these assertions are mutually exclusive. If I understand the GP correct, he is saying Webkit doesn't always work correctly when the DOM is dynamically manipulated. I can believe this; although most of my headaches are caused by IE, Webkit has sometimes caused some very strange issues, for example (this was a few years back, I sure hope it has been fixed since) it was impossible to select radio buttons that had been created with document.createElement. And no browser engine is without bugs or implements every standard correctly, there are issues with Gecko as well. And Presto. My point is, even though Acid* tests are a reasonable indicator for standards compliance, they don't guarantee bugfree operation under every circumstance.

Re:Jumping ship from IE?

[BZ]

Acid3 doesn't test selector matching while the DOM is changing. What it does test for those 4 points is SVG fonts. Your call on which is more important.

Chrome on Ubuntu

[Dreadneck]

I'm giving Chrome a whirl on Ubuntu. The install was simple using GDebi, the performance is great and flash, java, divx, wmp, quicktime, and realplayer plugins are working, I've got AdBlock, LastPass, and SmoothScroll extensions installed. What's not to like (other than a current lack of an official ubuntu theme)?

Re:Chrome on Ubuntu

[Dreadneck]

Apparently you missed the part where I said I had the AdBlock extension installed. What ads on Hulu? Not seeing them here. As for my "viewing, usage habits, history, plugins, etc. all being tracked by Google" - what evidence do you have that Chrome is sending any of that back to Google? Unless you're talking about the option to "Help make Google Chrome better by automatically sending usage statistics and crash reports to Google" in Options | Under the Hood, in which case Google isn't doing anything other than what the user allows. So, unless you have any actual evidence that Chrome is 'phoning home' behind the user's back, what's not to like?

Re:Chrome on Ubuntu

[Dreadneck]

I think you're confusing Chrome running under Windows for Chrome running under Linux.

Re:Chrome on Ubuntu

[broken_chaos]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome#Usage_tracking

There is some usage tracking going on no matter how your options are set. We only have Google's word that this contains 'non-identifying' information, which they've often defined, in the past, to include IP address, OS version, ... which is sent every 24 hours, on searching for anything with Google, and other 'significant events' which don't seem to be defined.

Re:Chrome on Ubuntu

[Duncan J Murray]

Go to Options > Personal Stuff and change appearance to GTK+ theme.

Re:Chrome on Ubuntu

[internettoughguy]

If you're that paranoid why not just compile the Dev stream of chromium, having removed all of the code that doesn't take your fancy?

Re:Chrome on Ubuntu

[Dreadneck]

I tried that... but purple window borders? Ugh.

Re:Chrome on Ubuntu

[martin-boundary]

What's not to like (other than a current lack of an official ubuntu theme)?

Can it run in a terminal in text mode?

Net Applications

[bonch]

Ah, Net Applications, the place whose surveys Slashdotters pick and choose to believe in depending on whose doing well in the survey.

Re:Net Applications

[caluml]

depending on whose doing

depending on who's doing (who is).

That'll be £5 please.

What matters in fact?

[gmuslera]

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.

Re:What matters in fact?

[hkmwbz]

Unsafe/slow/nonstandard/closed browsers are losing ground

Browsers? As in all versions of IE? I can't think of any other such browsers worth considering.

Re:What matters in fact?

[fm6]

Firefox has problems with speed, reliability, and resource leakage. I still use it, but I'd switch to Chrome if it had a decent feature set and a less idiosyncratic user interface.

And yet...

[AnswerIs42]

I still have to start up Opera or FireFox because I have too many sites I visit that just do not work in chrome.

But yet, for a netbook, Chrome is the best choice because it uses the smallest amount of real estate for non-browser window information.

Re:And yet...

[Rockoon]

Opera is highly configurable. It shouldn't be too hard to minimize the amount of space taken by the toolbar and so forth. Right click the tab bar and select Customize -> Appearance. Toy around a bit.

Re:And yet...

[sznupi]

Apart from customization mentioned already by other poster, I'm surprised that Opera Turbo, very low resource usage, definitely felt on slow hardware and built-in syncing weren't enough to keep you with Opera on a netbook.

Re:And yet...

[Paradigm_Complex]

But yet, for a netbook, Chrome is the best choice because it uses the smallest amount of real estate for non-browser window information.

By default, yes. After configuring, not necessarily. Firefox's UI is *very* configurable, and I wouldn't be surprised if fans of other browsers can make similar claims for their preferred browsers. I expect most people who care enough about their screen real estate to chose their browser based on that fact, would also be willing to learn to configure their browser to get even more real estate, thereby nullifying any advantage Chrome may have by default. I own an eeepc 701 - you know, with the 7" screen. I'm one of those people where the screen real estate really matters.

installed vimperator so firefox can do everything from the keyboard alone, as well as fire gestures so I can do (almost) everything from the mouse alone, all without any of the standard buttons and bars and what not. There is no address bar or search box or stop button or home button. All I've got, beyond the webpage itself: the tab bar if there's multiple tabs (which I could disable if I chose too), the status bar (which I could also disable if I chose too), and one line for vimperator. I'm tempted to see if I can patch vimperator to get that to autohide, so that I could have 100% of firefox's window dedicated to the page itself when I'm not using vimperator's ex line.

Chrome is fast, which is great for underpowered netbooks. Even the latest firefox beta's, which are aimed at improving speed, aren't quite where Chrome is. However, in terms of screen real estate, Chrome's default advantage isn't worth much if anything for those who care about it.

Re:And yet...

[The End Of Days]

Or pretty much any browser in full screen mode, which kills off damn near all the chrome. I know that extra keystroke would probably cause someone to have a conniption, though.

Nothing to do with the OS X version

[gyrogeerloose]

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.

Re:Nothing to do with the OS X version

[The J Kid]

I have replaced Safari with Chrome as my default browser on Mac.

Re:Nothing to do with the OS X version

[FictionPimp]

I'm a mac user. I switched from safari to chrome. My wife switched from ff to chrome.

Re:Nothing to do with the OS X version

[Magic5Ball]

Along with Safari, I've been using Chrome since the early spring pre-betas out of interest. It didn't become fully useful until it supported Flash and printing correctly, but since this Fall, it has become the default browser on half of my Macs in place of Safari. I find that Chrome has easier keyboard bindings and more responsive tab switching than Safari, and also doesn't drag on Street View.

Re:Nothing to do with the OS X version

[Joe Jay Bee]

I dropped Safari like a hot rock as soon as Chrome came out for Mac. Safari is buggy, slow, crashes all the time and is inflexible enough that it really gets on my tits. I'm glad to see the back of it.

Re:Nothing to do with the OS X version

[_|()|\|]

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.

I have indeed all but abandoned Safari in favor of Chrome, warts and all. While Safari does well in synthetic benchmarks, it chews up memory and slows to a beach-ball inducing crawl. Firefox is slightly better, but suffers from essentially the same problem.

Chrome's process-per-tab model, on the other hand, really seems to work as promised. I've been using it on three computers since the beta came out, and it is unquestionably more responsive. Multiple windows, with multiple tabs each, open for days, and I can switch to any of them with no appreciable delay (let alone beach balls!).

Re:Nothing to do with the OS X version

[gyrogeerloose]

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.

Okay, looks like I was wrong then, there are at last a few people who hate Safari enough to put up with the quirks in the current version of Chrome. I will have to use it more, I guess, and see what I'm missing.

Re:Nothing to do with the OS X version

[slim]

On my Mac Mini at least, Chrome Beta is noticeably faster than Safari. Plus it works the way I expect a browser to work.

The only quirk I've encountered is that CTRL-K doesn't work the same way as on Windows. But CTRL-L ? works just as well.

Re:Nothing to do with the OS X version

[Azureflare]

I may be slightly biased here, but I am a mac user who abandoned Firefox on Mac for Chrome.

I never liked Safari, mainly because it was used by so many hackers to compromise mac systems. I still use Safari for netflix though, since Chrome doesn't work with netflix. That's really the only problem I've run into with Chrome.

Re:Nothing to do with the OS X version

[Azureflare]

As an addendum, Chrome DOES work with netflix if you modify the user agent string on startup. The only problem is that when I play netflix full screen in chrome on a mac, video playback is extremely choppy (This on a top of the line iMac). Safari works fine, so I'm thinking maybe it's some debug code or some weird thing to do with full screen playback and silverlight in Chrome. Funnily enough, hulu fullscreen works great in chrome.

Re:Nothing to do with the OS X version

[alpayerturkmen]

I am sorry to tell you this but I am not using Safari at all since the launch day of Chrome on Mac. And you know what, I have only seen a single site that is having a slight alignment problem on it. I am sure there are other people like me.

Stuck in y2k

[symbolset]

These are the same people who would have put Vista over the hump to acceptance, and who are diligently trying to get W7 to work. They just can't.

MS really euchred themselves here.

Ads on the internet?

[Rix]

I have no idea what you're talking about.

I've seen an amazing rise in traffic from Chrome

[QuatermassX]

I've seen the number of visitors to my web site using Chrome double in November and December with most of the visitors using 3.0.195.33 and split between Windows and Linux (with Windows having a slight edge). I'm really rather surprised at the surge, but thankful that standards-based web browsing will be the norm in the near future (at least amongst people fond of fine-art photography).

I won't be using Chrome until ...

[niks42]

they ship a Mac version that runs on PowerPC ..

Re:I won't be using Chrome until ...

[Ash-Fox]

they ship a Mac version that runs on PowerPC ..

I don't see the point in Apple wasting time in developing for a stagnant platform that no longer receives software even from Apple.

Re:I won't be using Chrome until ...

[niks42]

Are you suggesting that I should accept processor hegemony without a fight?

Those who do nothing in the face of moral crisis deserve their special place in Wintel hell.

Re:I won't be using Chrome until ...

[Ash-Fox]

Are you suggesting that I should accept processor hegemony without a fight?

Nope, just saying you should stick to a platform and architecture that is NOT becoming completely stagnant due to the fact there is no more 'future' development for that combo intended ever again.

Re:I won't be using Chrome until ...

[niks42]

Ah, call me sentimental.

I accept your point, though. Clearly Steve wasn't being sentimental when he cut PowerPC out of Apple's future.

Jumping ship from IE? Not exactly...

[DesScorp]

"but may also be due to users jumping ship from IE."

Some of us jumped ship from Firefox. It's served us well these past few years, but since 3 came out, it's been increasingly buggy and memory hoggish.

Wrong.

[mathletics]

I'm a Mac user who abandoned Safari for Chrome. Well, technically I abandoned Firefox, since Safari has always been a last-place choice for me.

Incidentally...

[BigBadBus]

...I updated my own stats a week ago

X is bloated beacuse...

[bjartur]

Firefox has...

Built-in window manager (likely beacuse of Windows' crappy WM)

Built-in session-manager (to remember the tabs, I guess)

Built-in text-editor

Built-in WYSINWYG HTML-editor

and more

Compare to Surf (or Uzbl ore similar browser), and THEN argue that Firefox isn't bloated.

Re:I remember

[hkmwbz]

I remember when Chrome first came out it got panned

Really? Where?

And yet, here's Chrome, moving into the number 3 spot.

Are you surprised. Anyone can get more users by using their online ad monopoly like that.

Everyone but MS grits teeth, welcomes Chrome

[David Gerard]

"We absolutely promise that we only want to completely screw over Microsoft with this, and certainly not Mozilla Firefox," said Google's Sundar Pichai. "That we put a pile of our sponsored Mozilla developers on the project is completely irrelevant. We're not evil, remember."

"We are so, so happy with Google Chrome," mumbled Mozilla CEO John Lilly through gritted teeth. "That most of our income is from Google has no bearing on me making this statement."

Microsoft was unfazed. "Browsers don't need to be integrated with online apps," said marketing developer Ian Moulster. "Certainly not like the operating system ... I'll just get back to you."

Google's new browser will give you their web and email services, photo processing, mapping, office applications that will run in said browser and will make you a cup of tea. This is all paid for by personally-directed text ads in your tea leaves, based on analysing a DNA sample taken when you sip the tea and sending your genetic code back to Google for future targeting.

Pichai stressed that Google would maintain complete confidentiality within the marketing department of whatever the browser accessed concerning your confidential business data, bank account details, medical information and personal preferences in pornography. "We're Google. We know where you live. In a completely not evil way. Sponsored link: Get Chrome Browsers on google.com. Or we'll make you use Windows Live."

(link)

Wait for survey of IT managers

[deanston]

For most MS shops still sticking to IE6 as the officially supported browser, this is no surprise nor meaningful. Just confirms corporate and Windows users use more than IE. Safari users unaffected.

Hey Mr. Data Snob with the low UID.

[FooAtWFU]

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.

Re:Hey Mr. Data Snob with the low UID.

[martin-boundary]

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.

That's a false dichotomy. The correct dichotomy is between using a biased sample to form an opinion whose premises are therefore flawed, and forming and opinion based on an explicit acknowledgement of "no data available".

The first alternative leads to incorrect reasoning, while the latter does not.

Re:Hey Mr. Data Snob with the low UID.

[IntlHarvester]

Except I have other data available, and stats from both large and small ecommerce sites are generally in-line with these published "marketshare" reports. Which leads me to believe that, yes, these reports somewhat accurately reflect general web use trends, even if they are "worthless" for a technology site developer.

Then again, I'm not really interested if Apple is 7% or 9% this month, or whether Linux is more or less popular than the iPhone or whatever advocacy crap people come up with.

Since I mostly have used these numbers to prioritize testing, or occasionally to make the argument that "Yes we really do need to support Browser X", it really doesn't matter a whole lot if the premises are flawed because absolutely nothing important is riding on them.

Re:Hey Mr. Data Snob with the low UID.

[martin-boundary]

I you have other data available to use, then you're not using this particular data anyway. The fact that your other data agrees with this one doesn't matter since you're not using this one.

What would be wrong is to trust your other data more if this one agrees with it, or to trust your other data less if this one disagrees with it. Two sets of statistics of the same type can almost never be combined. Technically, this requires a meta-analysis.

Re:Hey Mr. Data Snob with the low UID.

[pudge]

You seem to be implying that any bias or skew in your data sample renders it utterly useless.

Not at all. I am, on the contrary, not referring to bias or skew at all, but in the utter lack of randomness in the sample, relative to the general population.

You have to choose between "not really statistically valid sample" and absolutely nothing whatsoever.

And either way, you have no valid results. Guess which one is therefore better, as it costs much less?

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

In the real world, you can't pretend that something fundamentally flawed isn't fundamentally flawed, just because it's the best you can do.

or remain utterly ignorant

You're not getting it. Relying on this data, you also remain utterly ignorant. This is a case where something IS NOT better than nothing.

Re:Hey Mr. Data Snob with the low UID.

[pudge]

Except I have other data available, and stats from both large and small ecommerce sites are generally in-line with these published "marketshare" reports. Which leads me to believe that, yes, these reports somewhat accurately reflect general web use trends

Flawed reasoning. This is what gets us into messes like we see with the climate change data. You expect to see certain results, you do, and therefore those results are correct and the methodolgy is good enough. It's nonsense, of course.

Since I mostly have used these numbers to prioritize testing

And that is what this data is obviously WORST at giving you, since it cannot tell you relative browser usage. Use your own site data for that, not someone else's.

Re:Hey Mr. Data Snob with the low UID.

[snadrus]

Reporting live from acedemia:

The field of Statistics is all about making patterns from random information and recognizing the sampling errors implicit in the tests.

Re:Hey Mr. Data Snob with the low UID.

[IntlHarvester]

Yes and no, I obviously can't show proprietary data from client A to client B, but it's worth using as a smell-check for similar audiences.

And one could endlessly quibble over the correctness, but IMO the existence of this data is still vastly preferable to a bunch of internet trolls or PHBs claiming "nobody uses browser XYZ".

Re:Hey Mr. Data Snob with the low UID.

[IntlHarvester]

Obviously the site data is preferable, but you can't use it if the site doesn't exist yet.

Re:Hey Mr. Data Snob with the low UID.

[pudge]

Obviously the site data is preferable, but you can't use it if the site doesn't exist yet.

I don't understand your use of the word "preferable." It implies there's an alternative set of data.

Does IEtab not work?

[rsborg]

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).

Is there a reason you can't use IEtab on FF? At least you can ditch the malware-magnet IE application frame, even if you don't ditch the trident rendering engine.

Re:Does IEtab not work?

[idiotnot]

Yes, there's a reason....about the only customization I do to FF is getting rid of the awful default theme. I don't run any really unusual plugins/extensions (java/flash/acrobat are about it).

Re:Don't worry

[AHuxley]

Its win win, MS gets the cash and warm US mil PR glow.
US mil gets systems it mall fresh users can slide into.
Then you get that perfect contractor flow back.
Make lots of connections in the mil, then sell your services back on a buggy system.

firefox memory usage

[snooo53]

I think the problem isn't that Firefox is using 450mb of ram, but that Windows feels the need to start swapping like mad when you still have gigabytes of RAM free (I don't typically run Linux or MacOS so I don't know if those have the same problems). So either way, the effect is poor performance with all the unnecessary pagefile usage.

This thread is quite remarkable.

[symbolset]

If I had posted this comment - no matter how deep - on slashdot a year ago, there would be several dissenting replies both from ACs and signed in users of various UID ages (but mostly new ones), and then subcomments supporting the dissenting views. I would have used their ignorance to amplify my message with dozens of applicable links and so in the view of search engines amplify the importance of those links. I would have been motivated to do so by the challenge presented. The idiots would have continued to argue and let me post rebuttals with links for weeks, to the detriment of their message in favor of mine. But now there's not any of that. It would have been modded down first before the mods rescued it from obscurity and metamodded the downmods until the people who had downmodded it could no longer moderate.

Now with the new year it's a frist spot and there's not a dissenting opinion to be had, downmods are conspicuously absent.

I can only surmise that the MS Bangalore blog center has a new boss, and she/he is effective, or they've fired them all for negative competence. We should be aware of this and be prepared to thwart their new strategies.

Nominal contextual comment to invalidate "off topic" moderation: Yeah, "standards based" is gaining value in all fields, especially software. People are starting to understand in 2010 the only reason why your new stuff doesn't work with your old stuff is that you forgot to read on the package that the vendor would prefer you only use their stuff.

Chrome is still fail -can't adjust the fonts

[Snaller]

Yeah, I know, none of the kids below 35 understand why in the world you'd want to adjust fontsize - but it bloody well becomes necessary! And Chrome is just a joke browser until they add that.

Now some kid is going to say:

* Just zoom in.

Zoom is NOT the same as making fonts larger, sure they become larger when you zoom in but so does the entire damn page, so you have to sit and scroll with the mouse left right left right left right FOR EACH DAMN LINE! And you can't see anything else on the page!?!

It has to be like with firefox, where it makes JUST THE FONTS larger, and then reflows the page so the layout is the same (you know, the way html was supposed to work!?)

and some might say "just go into options and set fonts"

Those are idiots. Have you just arrived on the web today? What sick planet are you from where you think that the same damn font size would work for all pages on the planet? THEY DONT

And of course - that doesn't work to begin with, because like IE, they only use the font size preferences on pages which do not use stylesheets - and everybody is abusing stylesheets to make the web look unreadable these days.

So google, you suck. Do better.

Read the Terms of Service lately?

[argent]

Not even Microsoft has said you're not allowed to disable their software updates, and IT departments all over the world run their own update schedules and policies. Meanwhile when Apple started including unrelated software in THEIR software updates, people went haywire, but Apple's software updates can be turned off or merely deferred. You can't turn off Google Update, not in the software, and not in their Terms of Service. I wonder what happens when Google starts trying to enforce this:

11. Software updates

11.1 The Software which you use may automatically download and install updates from time to time from Google. These updates are designed to improve, enhance and further develop the Services and may take the form of bug fixes, enhanced functions, new software modules and completely new versions. You agree to receive such updates (and permit Google to deliver these to you) as part of your use of the Services.

Since Chrome is Webkit-based, it's basically Safari in an ugly new skin. I'm sticking with Firefox and Safari.