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Google Chrome Becomes World's No. 1 Browser

redletterdave writes "Just six months after Google Chrome eclipsed Mozilla's Firefox to become the world's second most popular Web browser, Chrome finally surpassed Microsoft's Internet Explorer on Sunday to become the most-used Web browser in the world, according to Statcounter. Since May 2011, Internet Explorer's global market share has been steadily decreasing from 43.9 percent to 31.4 percent of all worldwide users. In that time, Chrome has climbed from below 20 percent to nearly 32 percent of the market share. Yet, while Chrome is now the No. 1 browser in the world, it still lags behind Internet Explorer here in the U.S., but that will soon change. Chrome currently has 27.1 percent of the U.S. market share, compared to Internet Explorer's 30.9 percent, but IE is seeing significant drop-offs in usage while Chrome continues to rise."

5 of 449 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Superior browser by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Except for noscript. There's nothing even close to noscript. The existing attempts to implement something like noscript on chrome are just awful beyond belief. I don't give a damn if chrome's JS engine is safer, I don't want the annoyance of JS-powered ads. Nor do I want the annoyance of having it globally turned off and being cumbersome to re-enable.

  2. Yes Yay, Celebrate the Competition by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'm not sure what to think. I've wanted Microsoft to lose its dominance ever since it eclipsed Netscape browser in 1999, but to replace one evil company that abuses it users, with another evil company that spies on people, is like a pyrrhic victory.

    My logic is to celebrate the contenders even if it's just more of the same corporations. Am I the only web developer that noticed that Internet Exploder started getting passably decent as Firefox & Chrome were breathing down their necks? I welcome any sort of race when before it was just the aborted full frontal lobotomy that is IE6 as a candidate.

    Besides, roll your own chromium and kiss any privacy raping proprietary ties goodbye if you want (and without the loss of HTML5 support and standards).

    --
    My work here is dung.
  3. Re:Superior browser by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    - Toolbar for what? Just to take up space and give me more shit to click?
    - AdBlock works perfectly fine in Chrome for me. I don't know where this shit keeps coming from. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cfhdojbkjhnklbpkdaibdccddilifddb
    - Extensions work fine for me. Not sure what you're driving at on this point.
    - Don't have a problem with Google Updater. Does it not work on your system or does it consume too many resources?
    - Memory usage across all chrome processes is about the same as Firefox for the same tabs. Sometimes a little more or less. It's inconsequential on my modern computer with 8 GB of RAM.

    Chrome is faster, more stable, doesn't require admin rights to update it (that's a big one if you ask me), doesn't have clutter all over the screen.

  4. Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users by Dishevel · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So. If I make something really fucking cool that people all want then I suck?
    Or am I evil?
    Am I screwing over the market?

    Being a monopoly is not a bad thing. Abusing monopoly powers is.

    --
    Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
  5. Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users by BZ · · Score: 5, Insightful

    > those sites are just HTML5,

    No, those sites are HTML5 plus some browser-specific additions, some of which are Chrome-only, some of which are WebKit-only, some of which are IE-only, some of which are Gecko-only, some of which are Firefox-only, etc.

    > The sites will also run on other browsers if they
    > support HTML5

    Oh, really? Please try running http://getcrackin.angrybirds.com/ in a non-WebKit browser. The page relies on sniffing for a -webkit CSS property in a way that relies on a bug in WebKit's CSSOM implementation, and if that bug is not present of if that prefixed property is not supported, will just show you a "This game can only be played on Chrome" message and a "Download Chrome" button instead of just letting you play the damn game.

    Of course if you change the source of your browser to duplicate the CSSOM bug and pretend to have support for that -webkit property, the game does work (especially well if you also add support for yet another non-standard CSS property, actually).

    > it's hardly Google's fault if other browsers do not
    > support HTML5

    It's Google's fault if they push the idea that "Chrome" and "HTML5" are the same thing. It leads to sites like the one linked above and comments like yours....

    Insofar as one can talk about "Google" as a monolithic entity anyway. Which is not very much, as evidenced by the quote you give. There are a number of distinct parts of Google that have pretty different goals (e.g. the people doing marketing and bundling deals for Chrome are pretty scummy, the Youtube folks want to build DRM support into HTML, the actual Chrome developers are pretty reasonable for the most part and not exactly always happy with the actions of other parts of Google).