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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.
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.
Chrome displaces Safari that displaced Konqueror. But in the end, what matters is what runs behind. Webkit is gaining ground, and more important, web standards are too, Javascript is gaining speed. Unsafe/slow/nonstandard/closed browsers are losing ground, so all win.
Eh, maybe the stats are "worthless" to sad OS/Browser fanboys who are arguing over every last 0.1%.
But the general trend of the web browser is useful and interesting. These kinds of browser stats are how we tracked the rise-and-fall of Netscape, the rise and stagnation of IE, and the rise of Firefox. People do use this sort of information for development and testing priority, flawed methodology and all.
And you will never have a non-"flawed" methodology for capturing this information, even for the users on your own site. (How do you identify a unique user? how do you know they aren't faking their user agent string? Who is a person and who is a bot? etc) If you can't deal with fuzzy information, don't leave the basement.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
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.