Slashdot Mirror
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.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
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!
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.
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).
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.
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)?
Power does not corrupt - power attracts the corrupt.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
"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)
http://rocknerd.co.uk
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.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
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.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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 ...