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Google Chrome Displaces Safari As Third In Survey
Azureflare writes "According to a Net Applications survey, Google Chrome has replaced Apple's Safari as the number-three browser. This may be partially explained by the release of the Chrome beta on Mac and Linux, but may also be due to users jumping ship from IE. More analysis on this topic can be found at ComputerWorld. As anecdotal evidence of Google Chrome usage gaining steam, Bank of America has apparently recently added Google Chrome to their list of officially supported browsers."
The persistence of IE6 is due to organizations standardizing on the MS suite from the server to the browser and building their business intellingence into that web platform. They embraced and were trapped by the consequences of that decision, after which getting themselves out of that trap involved huge expense and much opportunity cost as well as much lost face. Bearing the scars of that experience, its not surprising that they are wary of re-entering the same trap twice. They appear to be deciding that "standards are good". See? Are childrens can has learnings.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
You seem to be implying that any bias or skew in your data sample renders it utterly useless. You know what? In the real world of web browsers you don't really have the alternatives of "statistically valid sample" and "not statistically valid sample." You have to choose between "not really statistically valid sample" and absolutely nothing whatsoever.
This is the real world, not academia. So take what you can get, realize it has limitations, and use it to form a tentative opinion on the relevant matters... or remain utterly ignorant and leave everything to chance. Your choice.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
The awesome bar, for starters. I start Firefox, type "s" in the address bar, and have to wait for-bloody-ever while it sifts through uncountable megabytes looking for any page I may have visited in the past ten days where the URL or even the title might contain the letter S. Not begin with the letter S -- just contain it somewhere in the url string or title. This is freaking ridiculous.
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