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Chrome Set To Take No. 2 Spot From Firefox
CWmike writes "Google's Chrome is on the brink of replacing Firefox as the second-most-popular browser, says the Web statistics firm StatCounter, which shows that Chrome will pass Firefox to take the No. 2 spot behind Microsoft's IE no later than December. As of Wednesday, Chrome's global average user share for September was 23.6%, while Firefox's stood at 26.8%. IE, meanwhile, was at 41.7%. The climb of Chrome during 2011 has been astonishing: It has gained eight percentage points since January 2011, representing a 50% increase. During that same period, Firefox has dropped almost four percentage points, a decline of about 13%, while IE has also fallen four points, a 9% dip. That means Chrome is essentially reaping all the defections from Firefox and IE."
Chrome's silent, background auto-updates don't hurt either. What? You've already installed a new version and I just need to restart the browser? AWESOME *restarts browser, tabs restore* boom, new, updated Chrome.
May eventually happen, but It's going to be a bit...
Stats from from a real world web site over the last 30 days...
MS Internet Explorer No 891,058 47.4 %
Firefox No 317,909 16.9 %
Safari No 264,506 14 %
Google Chrome No 162,473 8.6 %
Android browser (PDA/Phone browser) No 93,691 4.9 %
Unknown ? 54,509 2.8 %
IPhone (PDA/Phone browser) No 28,603 1.5 %
Mozilla No 25,610 1.3 %
Opera No 12,074 0.6 %
BlackBerry (PDA/Phone browser) No 9,396 0.4 %
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
Firefox had been my browser of choice for years, but lately (is mozilla listening?) it's kinda sucked. I used it regularly on three desktops and a laptop, and sometime this year it's started to hang regularly and exhibit extremely slow behavior. Task Manager shows MASSIVE memory usage and significant CPU usage.
Needing a browser to verify a website I maintain, and with Firefox taking forever to do anything, I tried Chrome and have switched to it. Chrome renders significantly faster and doesn't appear to consume nearly the resources of Firefox. I'm sold.
I'm not getting religious here -- I am happy to go back to Firefox if some future version performs well. But in the meantime, I gotta get work done.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I'm amazed more don't put two and two together. Most of Mozilla Foundation's income comes from Google. Seems like a huge conflict of interest...
And many others feel the same way - below is an excerpt from a cnet article from a few years ago to ponder when considering what's happened with Firefox lately...
"However, the open secret in the tech sector is that at the end of the day, Google calls the shots. As this blog post will explain, when a pro-user security feature in the browser threatens Google's business model, it is the feature that is made to compromise--not the search engine."
Read entire article at http://news.cnet.com/8301-13739_3-9776759-46.html
One has to wonder whether some driving Firefox development are really in cahoots with Google with the objective of marginalizing Firefox as a Chrome clone.
Regardless of whether that's the case, Firefox is looking to be more like Chrome all the time ... and, hence, imho, it's no surprise so many Firefox users are flocking to Chrome.