Chrome Becoming World's Second Most Popular Web Browser

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Chrome Becoming World's Second Most Popular Web Browser

Posted by Soulskill on Friday December 2, 2011 @03:55AM from the now-stop-hijacking-my-middle-click dept.

redletterdave writes with news that Google Chrome is in the process of surpassing Firefox to become the second most popular web browser. Pinpointing the exact time of the change is difficult, of course, since different analytics firms collect slightly different data. The current crop of media reports were triggered by data from StatCounter, which shows Chrome at 25.69% and Firefox at 25.23% for November. Data from Net Applications shows Firefox still holding a 4% lead, but the trends suggest it will evaporate within a few months.

19 of 511 comments (clear)

And still... by bwintx · 2011-12-02 03:58 · Score: 5, Insightful

And still Mozilla doesn't get a clue that some of the recent changes are driving away users. Amazing.

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1. Re:And still... by Anonymous Coward · 2011-12-02 04:01 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Chrome today is what the early releases of Firefix were: a lean, fast browser with a stripped down UI.
  Firefox has become a bloated piece of garbage.
2. Re:And still... by 0123456 · 2011-12-02 04:02 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  And still Mozilla doesn't get a clue that some of the recent changes are driving away users. Amazing.
  Every time Chrome gains market share, the Firefox developers think they need to make Firefox more like Chrome, when that's exactly what's driving people away.
3. Re:And still... by buchner.johannes · 2011-12-02 04:07 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  I think Mozilla is very happy with the stats, because the real news is that the IE usage went down to almost ~50%, and we have today a diversity of browser (engines). Diversity ensures that we don't drive into a dead end, and Mozilla paved the way for alternative browsers, pushing websites away from IE-only design, and making the new technologies we have today possible (CSS, everything beyond HTML4, fast JS) -- although we have to give Microsoft credit for inventing Ajax.
  
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4. Re:And still... by Anonymous Coward · 2011-12-02 04:13 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  If you haven't used it for a long while, how do you know it's still slow and unstable?
5. Re:And still... by Millennium · 2011-12-02 04:14 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Pretty much this. That's not to say that Chrome is bad: it isn't. But Firefox is trying to be Chrome, and no one is ever going to be better at being Chrome better than Chrome itself (except possibly Chromium, but that's something of an academic debate).
  In the process, Firefox is rapidly losing its own way. This is a shame, because I found more than a few of Firefox's old ways better than its new ones, or Chrome's for that matter. We're losing choice in the browser market because it's coming down not so much to a choice between Chrome and Firefox as between Chrome and imitation-Chrome, and Chrome will always win that.
  tl;dr version - Firefox lost its way when it started imitating other browsers, because it will never be able to beat the originals. It must instead become its own original, as it once was.
6. Re:And still... by cockroach2 · 2011-12-02 04:18 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Yet the only thing they really need to copy to get me to come back and try Firefox again is to replace the 13-click procedure for broken SSL certificates with a simple pop-up window. As it used to be.
7. Re:And still... by SomePgmr · 2011-12-02 04:31 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  There's truth in this.
  
  I use chrome on my windows machines... have for a long time. I was using either chrome or chromium on linux for some time too. But as it turns out, very basic functionality in the linux builds has been broken for as long as I can remember and your patience eventually runs out. For instance, bookmarks have never worked right in Chromium or Chrome. There are something like 20 related bug tracker entries for the same issues and they've never been fixed. And I just can't get by without working bookmarks anymore... they're kinda essential to a decent browser.
  
  So I put firefox back on those machines, and I was impressed that everything just works, and it's plenty fast. I'm sure it's because I've only got two extensions installed but I'm happy with it. Now I'm considering moving the windows machines back.
  
  Either way, you've gotta love having choices.
8. Re:And still... by Anonymous Coward · 2011-12-02 04:32 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  You guys are such hypocrites. When versions aren't released fast enough and you end up with memory leaks for months, you whine. When Mozilla takes a pro-active stance and decides to do faster release to get more stable code out there faster, you whine because .. the browser updates? WHO GIVES A SHIT? It's a number you never see unless you actually look for it, and it gets you a better product in the end. Seriously, what the hell?
9. Re:And still... by 0123456 · 2011-12-02 04:42 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  You guys are such hypocrites. When versions aren't released fast enough and you end up with memory leaks for months, you whine.
  Uh, what?
  Why do you need to go from version 9 to version 10 in order to fix a memory leak?
  The only difference I've seen between 3.6 and whatever the heck version Ubuntu is shipping right now is that every new version has removed useful features or moved them around on the menus so I have to hunt around to find the damn things again.
10. Re:And still... by icebraining · 2011-12-02 04:51 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  AMO now automatically updates the major version for every extension that passes a series of automated tests.
  
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Inevitable. by fantazem · 2011-12-02 03:58 · Score: 5, Interesting

I think this was inevitable given how much better Chrome is then all the competition. Once Chrome gets the breadth of plugins that Firefox has, it's game over.
Re:Yay by MyLongNickName · 2011-12-02 04:01 · Score: 5, Funny

I would have had first post but was applying my Firefox updates.

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Re:Yay by recoiledsnake · 2011-12-02 04:04 · Score: 5, Funny

And your FirstPost extension broke?

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No surprise due to bundling by birukun · 2011-12-02 04:06 · Score: 5, Interesting

We are constantly removing Chrome from the software packages that are bundling it. Kind of a turnoff for me.
Just like getting a new PC with all the trialware crap.

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They screwed it with the new release process by danielcolchete · 2011-12-02 04:10 · Score: 5, Insightful

Do you know what changed between FF4 and FF10? Almost nothing! Really! From FF6 to FF10 it is nothing for sure. But they managed to break addon compability 7 times in between. So, from what I understood, we were going to have releases from often so that we could get more features more frequently. We got nothing! Or almost nothing. I jumped of from FF6 to Chrome and I lived happily ever after. By the way, 5% of the Internet users are stuck with the outdated FF3.6 today, without the HTML5 advances of FF4 and FF6, because of this new release process. It is as if we need another browser vendor holding the web back. Thank you Mozilla.
1. Re:They screwed it with the new release process by Freedom+Bug · 2011-12-02 04:47 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  Actually, Firefox has done a lot to improve addon compatibility. They now have a bot that checks the API calls of all addons in their repository and automatically marks those that don't use any changed API's.
Adblock by NYYz · 2011-12-02 04:30 · Score: 5, Insightful

I like Chrome, but until Adblock works as well as it does on Firefox I'm not interested. I'm not willing to watch Youtube commercials.
stranglehold broken; don't do it again by Onymous+Coward · 2011-12-02 04:36 · Score: 5, Insightful

Diversity ensures that we don't drive into a dead end, and Mozilla paved the way for alternative browsers, pushing websites away from IE-only design, and making the new technologies we have today possible
Exactly. Their main objective at the outset was to "take back the web". The shape of this graph, where it comes back from monopoly around 2004, is because of Firefox. We all have good reason to be thankful.
Microsoft's stranglehold on the market let them define the standards including not make any progress for 5 damned years. Stuck with cross-browser incompatibilities, stuck without technological progress or many of the features we take for granted these days, stuck with a browser that got everyone's system hacked and ate up countless geek hours with reinstalls. Man, what a nightmare.
And it wasn't just Microsoft's fault. It was also the fault of the users who did not opt for a heterogeneous browser ecosystem. Granted, it's a lot to ask the average person to defend a "heterogeneous browser ecosystem", but at least the geeks (and epidemiologists) should get it. And if you don't, let me spell it out for you: Don't push us towards browser monoculture . Not again, please. That sucked.