Chrome Hits 20% Share As IE Continues Slide

jbrodkin writes "Google Chrome's rise in popularity has been remarkably fast and it's just hit a new milestone: more than 20% of all browser usage, according to StatCounter. Chrome rose from only 2.8% in June 2009 to 20.7% worldwide in June 2011, while Microsoft's Internet Explorer fell from 59% to 44% in the same time frame. Firefox dropped only slightly in the past two years, from 30% to 28%. While other browser trackers show Chrome with a lower percentage, there's a reason: StatCounter tracks total surfing, not the number of users. It's the Web's power users who are pushing Chrome to new heights."

Comments

Google Evil (beta)

[ShakaUVM]

>>It's Google who just pushes their software. On our network, several users 'suddenly' had Chrome installed.

Yeah. I wanted to put the Google photo screensaver on my mom's computer. So a quick Google search, and here it is - http://pack.google.com/screensaver.html

So you click on "get google photos screensaver" and it takes you, not to a link to the download, but to a page for "The Google Pack" which has a bunch of checkboxes for various software options.

None of which are the screensaver. But Chrome is checked by default, as is Google Desktop. So a non-technical user might think that Google Desktop = hey, free screensaver. So they might download that. And get Chrome. (And all the other bloatware like Avast! antivirus found here:http://pack.google.com/pack_installer.html). I knew that it was probably part of Picasa, so I unchecked all of the bloatware options, and just downloaded Picasa, which indeed had the screensaver my mom wanted, and there you go.

But the point is:
1) Google is acting evil (if my mom had tried to do this herself, she'd be stuck with a horrible antivirus product - or two, there's two in the Pack)
2) Chrome installs are up because of their evil.

Giving free advertising to Chrome on Google.com is borderline evil, too. Leverage of monopolistic powers and all.

Re:PC manufacturers and affiliate marketers

[phonewebcam]

Incidentally, I Installed Windows 7 recently and was asked to choose between Google, Yahoo and Bing as a search engine. No wonder Google wins everything when it gets listed twice like that.

And from a non-commercial source

[David Gerard]

Wikimedia browser share gives Chrome at 15.6%.

(This is just one site, of course. But (a) Wikimedia has no interest in pushing the numbers (analysts' business model is selling out) (b) it's a top-10 general interest site used by normal people, not just geeks (c) this is worldwide.)

Re:PC manufacturers and affiliate marketers

[igreaterthanu]

Don't you mean thrice? ;)