Slashdot Mirror
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."
IE gets installed with every windows, and they get commission from installing windows.
No, the consumer pays to install Windows. The PC manufacturer gets a commission on that.
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
>>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.
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.
Firefox could have become the rock solid browser that "just works".
The only reason we have standards like those set by W3C is stability.
There is no need for rapid releases any more because the major problems have been solved years ago. I am still using Firefox 3.0 as my default browser and while I had to install Chrome because Google-Translator mysteriously stopped working, otherwise I had no problems with it.
Because of the good extension-system, Firefox could be a rock-solid browser while all the experimental stuff and new functionality is done in extensions.
But no. Mozilla decided that Firefox has to be like Chrome. Of course not really like Chrome because to get the advantages of Chrome would require a complete rewrite of Firefox, so Mozilla settled for a completely nonsensical release-policy completely with automatic non-wanted upgrades ("What is my computer doing now? Oh, my browser changed again!").
Mozilla should understand that the 90s are over and people are no longer buying a new computer every 2 years and upgrade their software even more often. The new features (ALL of them) are not needed in the default install. They could be tested using extensions but there is absolutely no reason any more to change ANYTHING just for change's sake.
What we need is at least one browser-alternative that aims at creating a bug-free browser instead of a perpetual usability experiment.
IE9 finally implemented DOM level 2 and otherwise change it to match other browsers. Previously the DOM has seen little change since IE5, which was good in 1999 but not so good now.
Web power users? What does that even mean? Some soccer mom on facebook probably spends many more hours online and browsers more than the actual so called power users, who are doing something productive with their computor.
And since they track usage instead of users, that means Chrome's userbase is not 20%, like is usually calculated and what most people reading the headline will think.
Soccer moms and clueless uses are perfectly targeted by Google too. Like someone below in the comments mention, not only is Chrome pushed by manufacturers etc, but Google packs it with every download from them. Picasa, Google Earth and so on.. The real power users would always untick the unwanted software and think why is Google trying to push them y while you only wanted x. Google also pushes it on YouTube, Google homepage (if you browse in with IE) and their other sites. They're using all the evil marketing tricks in the book, like using soft language "oh that's ok" or similar instead of "yes" when asking if you want to install Chrome etc..
I wouldn't ever take behaviour on Slashdot as an indication of anything for a browser, Slashdots Javascript is just shit, its layout is just shit, and in general its just shit - there are so many shitty bugs in the code that have been complained about for ages and yet the team constantly roll out new candy rather than fix fairly major bugs.
My two pet ones are the "load another comment further up the chain when you click in the comment box, and remove the focus from the comment box. Yeah, that means the next click will load another comment..." and the random lack of karma scores on comments.
And yet they recently changed the page layout slightly, which fixed none of the bugs commonly reported. Eye candy over functionality.
Utterly pathetic. The only reason I come here any more is for the entertainment from the discussion, which actually I haven't found elsewhere. But as an example of a front end, Slashdot is just shit.
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.)
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Don't you mean thrice? ;)
I dream of a nation where a man is not judged by his skin color but by an number assigned by a credit rating agency.
Care to follow up with information on more sinister stuff than the Halloween documents, patent trolling and the numerous anti-competitive practices to lock out alternatives, as I am unable to find them in search.
I look forward to reading your sources.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.