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Chrome 15 Overtakes IE 8 For Top Browser Spot
An anonymous reader writes "If you're reading this on Chrome, you're part of a wave that has ditched Internet Explorer or Firefox and helped vault Google's browser to the top Web browser spot worldwide." Are you reading this on Chrome? (I'm using Chromium right now, but that's pretty close.)
An excellent point. It's also worth noting that Firefox is the most popular browser in Europe. Probably due to those EU regulations about Windows offering a default choice. Y'know the ones that people said would have no effect anyway.
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2011/01/04/us-internet-europe-idUKTRE70324F20110104
Michael Reed, freelance tech writer.
Same goes for Opera, which is extremely popular in Russia and CIS countries and actually beats any other browser. It has like 50% market share in some countries. http://my.opera.com/dstorey/blog/2009/03/16/a-look-at-desktop-market-share-cis-edition
I've used Chrome a lot and like it even more. Unfortunately, a mere day's browsing generates 700,000 writes according to windows (almost an order of magnitude over any other browser). As an SSD user, this just isn't acceptable and all the fixes are a complicated way of 'shoving the cache onto a spinning disc drive'.
without a proper NoScript solution, all other browsers fail. FF is a bloated beastly browser, but can't live without NoScript anymore.
I also want to add that all the popularity of Firefox is due to it's own quality.
Chrome is aggressively advertised in all Google services, specially Youtube.
It also has TV ads including Super Bowl ads, using celebrities like Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga and even Hatsune Miku!
It also tries to sneak installs by sponsoring freeware downloads with chrome bundled. Opt-out of course.
They even messed up with the opt out option to make it hard to opt-out. I am specially offended by that *because* it is such a petty thing to muck with. It was a simple, straight forward Windows form but the opt-out option was semi-disabled. Oh come on that's just childish!
So I'm not impressed by Chrome's market share. It mostly shows the efficacy of strong marketing. I'm not saying it is a bad browser, or that Firefox is perfect, just that Chrome's success isn't really due to some sense of superiority.
And another thing.
What is with Chrome fanboys? Google is a for-profit corporation vent on market domination. It is NOT a good thing if Chrome kills Firefox, the last thing we need is another browser monoculture.
But... the future refused to change.
I also want to add that all the popularity of Firefox is due to it's own quality.
True. Firefox is now a rock-solid, stable and mature browser. Having said that, I have actually been using Chromium as my default browser for a few months, for just two reasons:
1. Chromium loads webpages perceptibly faster, and
2. because Chromium by default takes up marginally less real-estate on my laptop screen with menubars, toolbars and whatnot that are not necessary.
However, if Chromium were not available, I would not be persuaded to use Chrome, as I am not happy about the possibility of anything I do being relayed to Google.
So you have the source code for Chrome and have built it from source?
You have any of the really important Google software, i.e. the backend source code?