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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 has an even faster release schedule and it is actually gaining users at an ridiculous rate.
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.
Web developers care. They want to support the majority of users and typically will gather statistics and read articles about it. The days when you could cover your bases by testing for IE and Netscape are over. Devs that tested for IE and firefox should consider adding Chrome in order to cover >80% of their users.
Man, you really need that seminar!
[...]yet is claimed to be an "open" browser.
Which Chrome developer, of cause, never did, but hey, don't let the facts stop you from hating!
PROTIP: Chromium - open source, Chrome: closed source, based on Chromium.
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)"
I'm 17 and I don't get it :/. Normal kids weird me out anyways, always liking things for the most immature reasons.
I'm sure there was a point in time where Chrome was faster than Firefox, but there's really no reason to stick with it anymore. Chrome lets you import Firefox settings, so that might have something to do with it. All we need now in Firefox is a feature to import all of your Chrome settings and people will be switching both ways instead of just one.
"Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded." -Archbishop Fulton Sheen
And??? Microsoft has even bigger market share, and IE has been consistently losing ground.
Have you ever pondered the possibility that the reason Firefox is slipping is because the project itself has become an unresponsive beast who is now pissing off even its core supporters in the IT industry with its absurd release schedules?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
Chrome seems to be faster and more responsive.
The update cycle for Chrome may be faster, but people knew that from day one. Those who didn't like the update cycle didn't adopt it. On the other hand, Firefox went from a slow update cycle with easily distinguished bug and feature updates to something similar to Chrome. So people who are more conservative with updates (rightfully) feel burnt.
And did I mention the user interface? Chrome and Firefox may be quite similar these days, and are liberally borrowing from each other. On the other hand, Firefox's UI has changed dramatically over the past few years while Chrome has been more of a steady evolution.
In short, all of this change has alienated existing Firefox users. All of this change also gives a sense that Firefox lacks any real sense of direction. Is it any wonder why people are slowly ditching it?
It's not the schedule. It's the process.
When chrome updates to a new version, I don't even know about it and everything just works (including all my addons). When Firefox updates, I have to wait an additional few seconds while it updates, I have to close out a splash page informing me of all the new features that I won't use and I have to figure out how to update and re-enable my all addons which have now magically turned off.
When I open a web browser, I want to do something. If you get in my way of me doing something for 30 seconds every few weeks plus spend 5 minutes trying to get selenium or other addons up and running again, you have failed at your purpose as a web browser.
It is even worse when you have a scenario where you have a few dozen firefox installs across various VMs.. I dread FF updates now because it means that I'm either reimaging test machines or going through a bunch of updates.
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
Lets see... Firefox changes release schedule, and in doing so screws up addons and creates irate IT staff. Firefox usage decline accelerates.
Yep, we know for sure that pissing off your users has nothing to do with dropping market share!
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
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.
I'm still happily a Firefox user. Mozilla has given me an open-source browser with nigh-limitless user customization and control, with seemingly the least amount of conflicts of interest embroiled in its development. The entire Chrome ecosystem seems to be part of Google's recent wave of bad decisions that seems to highlight they can no longer be trusted to act in the best interest of the user and privacy, when there is money to be made; contrary to the Google of five years ago who seemed to be able to resist the void.
Chrome as a browser seems to be better serving Google's needs than the user's needs. Be it the lack of comprehensive AdBlock,NoScript, and HTTPSEverywhere addons (and tons of others) and other user privacy settings, Chrome vs Chromium "conveniences" and other issues, its appearing more and more to me like a better version of IE - integrated and serving Google instead of Microsoft. That's not what I want in my web browser.
Especially amongst the educated, open-source and privacy knowledgeable community I'm surprised how many have switch to Chrome, typically citing resource or speed uses. I really don't think its acceptable to be the sort of person who runs 20 high-end addons including a ton of Stylish and Greasemonkey scripts and then says the browser is using a lot of memory with your sixteen tabs open.
Firefox, Thunderbird, and other Mozilla projects are more important now than ever - open source, standards compliant, privacy respecting, user focused and customizable. Everyone here would balk if I suggested we should all switch to Internet Explorer, Hotmail, MSN, Bing, and Skype because of convenience - Why kowtow to a monoculture just because its Google? This is not to say never use Google products, but we need to make it perfectly clear that we do so because they offer terms that serve our needs, including privacy, as users - not because we have so much invested we're now locked in. Google's gleaming facade has dulled considerably with some of their more recent decisions and spots of possible greed, arrogance, and apathy may be showing up - they need to know that we won't stand for it.
While Firefox isn't perfect, I urge everyone to be alert and make their usage decisions with the long-term ramifications in mind. In a world where most business interests would rather have you access their "cloud" services through a dumb client, completely on their terms, we need to stick up for some of the last bastions of user focused software that can be introduced to laypeople with ease and show them a real difference in the experience! How many of you introduced a friend or relative to open source software with a Mozilla product, which they found to give them better security, privacy, features, and customization? That's worth its weight in gold, so to speak. Sure, the geek community will always be able to roll up Midori or Lynx or some sort of other custom Gecko/WebKit browser from the bowels of a repository, but Firefox is relatively unique in that its features are nearly as accessible, secure, and powerful for the layman as they are for the guru. Trading that in for a product which is controlled by a corporation who's shortest distance to money infringes on user privacy and security is not a smart idea.
List of reasons:
It is also POSSIBLE that firefox js speed has caught up... but when I was designing a Debian based live CD for troubleshooting last year, chrome was a no-brainer because on low-performance systems I might be working on, its CPU usage was just plain lower.
There are a bunch of reasons, but it basically boils down to, Google has a ton of money, and can pay for full time devs to keep churning out massive progress every few weeks. googlechromereleases.blogspot.com is fun to visit and see what crazy thing theyre working on this week.
What are you talking about? They are highly anti-enterprise. Where is a formal msi of Firefox that I can deploy with group policy? How about settings that I can control through said group policy? I can control any aspect of IE through group policies. Why can't I do the same with Firefox? And no, FrontMotion doesn't cut it. I've experienced this time and time again. I'm going through this now with Firefox 7.0. Frontmotion only offers 6.0.2. I've turned off automatic updates, and yet first thing of every day since 7.0 has been released my users are getting messages that their browser is obsolete and needs to be upgraded. These users are locked down, don't have admin priveledges, and can't upgrade their browser. Yet Firefox keeps demanding to be upgraded, and I can't because there is no formal 7.0 msi. I now have to spend my own time building my own msi, just because the Mozilla organization refuses to do this. They ignore the pleas of Windows administrators who are requesting this option, and yet they are amazed when they start losing market share. For my money, I've started ripping out Firefox and rolling out Chrome instead, because I'm tired of these stupid games.
Quit playing Monopoly with Bill.
Linux - of the people, by the people, and for the people.