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."

Comments

No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[partofme]

Google blatantly advertisers Chrome on their websites and YouTube (but only to IE users.. heh), they have billboards and TV advertising campaigns, they pay OEM's, hardware manufacturers and shareware/freeware authors to bundle Chrome with their products, they aggressively try to put Chrome on your computer if you install any other software from Google, they pay makers of Angry Birds to have Chrome-only HTML5 version of their game and make websites that purposely only work with Chrome. They game and spam other search engines like Bing too.

Seems like they went full in and do whatever they can to get that market share. Even supporting CISPA.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[RanCossack]

They game and spam other search engines

I clicked your link. I read the article you linked. It has nothing at all to do with the text you provided for it. O_o

I can't tell if you accidentally linked the wrong article, or were doing a pretty clever gamble... :o

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[SimonTheSoundMan]

Good for Google and good for the web!

Their competitors (Mozilla) know they can't keep up with Google's advertising campaign. It's a shame that it hard to to get any sort of billboard or newspaper ad for Firefox.

At the moment the everything is competitive. But as you say, Google keep on introducing tags that only Chrome understands, I wish they would stop doing that and stick to ratified standard. Many web apps are only supporting Chrome only tags, your example was Angry Birds, mine will be Tweet Deck. Any others people can think of?

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you please list some Chrome only tags? Are these tags Google created? Or are these HTML 5 tags that other browsers don't exactly support yet?

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[cpu6502]

>>>they aggressively try to put Chrome on your computer if you install any other software from Google

How so?They install chrome w/o permission?

>>>they pay makers of Angry Birds to have Chrome-only HTML5

What??? It doesn't run on HTML5 Firefox or IE9? What error does it give you?

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[Anonymous Coward]

Google has demoted its Chrome home page in results for a search using the keyword "browser" following an effort to have bloggers promote the Google browser that backfired. Now, there is no Chrome ad at the top of the results or link to the Chrome page anywhere on the first page of results on Google. It's ranked in position 50, according to Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand, which first reported this news.

The article sez: Google was spamming its own results, but stopped when people called them on it.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[cpu6502]

>>>tags that only Chrome understands, I wish they would stop doing that and stick to ratified standard.

Netscape/Mozilla did it when they were dominant. Microsoft did it too. Now it's google's turn.

BTW both those companies are good examples of how no monopoly lasts forever. New upstarts come-along and end the monopoly.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[a90Tj2P7]

My personal favorite has always been having Adobe offer Chrome when downloading Flash. I'm downloading a plugin for my browser, I don't want another browser.

Even supporting CISPA.

Read your own links. They haven't "supported the bill", they've "been supportive of finding the right language for the bill". As in, trying to fix it.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[marcosdumay]

Nearly so. You can opt out if you find the checkbox hidden in a dark room in Alpha Centaury behind a warning of beware the leopard.

But they don't force people to actualy use it.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[kikito]

The reasons you give are anecdotal. It is just a better browser (especially better than IE).

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

And Google knows when you wipe your arse, what you did it with, and how much you paid the undocumented nanny, while you were distracted from child-rearing, by the arse-wiping task.

They are willing to sell this to bidders. Don't worry! It's only in the "Aggregate". ;-)

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[chrb]

they pay makers of Angry Birds to have Chrome-only HTML5 version of their game

make websites that purposely only work with Chrome

There is no such thing as "Chrome-only HTML5" - those sites are just HTML5, that will work with Chrome. The sites will also run on other browsers if they support HTML5; it's hardly Google's fault if other browsers do not support HTML5, is it?

They game and spam other search engines [zdnet.com] like Bing too.

Interesting article! Did you bother to read it? In fact, it's the complete opposite of trying to game and spam search engines:

Google has demoted its Chrome home page in results for a search using the keyword "browser" following an effort to have bloggers promote the Google browser that backfired. Now, there is no Chrome ad at the top of the results or link to the Chrome page anywhere on the first page of results on Google. It's ranked in position 50, according to Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand, which first reported this news.

Google's statement, according to SearchEngineLand, is:

"We've investigated and are taking manual action to demote www.google.com/chrome and lower the site's PageRank for a period of at least 60 days.We strive to enforce Google's webmaster guidelines consistently in order to provide better search results for users. While Google did not authorize this campaign, and we can find no remaining violations of our webmaster guidelines, we believe Google should be held to a higher standard, so we have taken stricter action than we would against a typical site."

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[jbolden]

The Netscape monopoly was overthrown by Microsoft being willing to lose great deals of money and depending on your outlook being willing to leverage another monopoly.

The IE monopoly might very well have lasted a lot longer with concerted effort and government support.

I'm not sure how those examples lead to sanguine confidence that technological lock in is no bid deal.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[EvilBudMan]

Yeah and their add blocking plug-in really works good for FaceBook.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[Anonymous Coward]

Outside of government enforced monopolies, they aren't even bad. If everyone loves Nike shoes and nobody buys any other brand, Nike has a monopoly. Big deal. They can't suddenly start charging a thousand bucks per shoe. People will just buy substitutes. It's only when the government says "we only approve of this shoe, all others are illegal" that Nike can start acting uppity.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[Baloroth]

The article sez: Google was spamming its own results, but stopped when people called them on it.

No it doesn't. To quote:

Google's statement, according to SearchEngineLand, is:

"We've investigated and are taking manual action to demote www.google.com/chrome and lower the site's PageRank for a period of at least 60 days.We strive to enforce Google's webmaster guidelines consistently in order to provide better search results for users.

While Google did not authorize this campaign, and we can find no remaining violations of our webmaster guidelines, we believe Google should be held to a higher standard, so we have taken stricter action than we would against a typical site."

The demotion is a response to a campaign in which bloggers were found posting low-quality content related to Google Chrome in an effort to promote a Google video about King Arthur Flour. At least one of the posts had a hyperlink to the Chrome download page, which can help a site rise in Google search results through Google's PageRank algorithm. But paying people to include such links violates Google's guidelines.

"So far, only one page in the sponsored post campaign has been spotted with a 'straight' link that passed credit to the Chrome page," Sullivan writes. "It's also unlikely that the campaign overall was designed to build links. But my impression is that Google's deciding to penalize itself anyway with a PR reduction, to be safe."

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[cpu6502]

In other words they want CISPA to pass so google can turn-over User data to the DHS without risk of being sued by the user. Google, like all the other companies, wants the language to specify immunity for themselves.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[Dogtanian]

BTW both those companies are good examples of how no monopoly lasts forever.

This argument always grates with me, as if the fact that no monopoly (or anything else in existence) lasts forever somehow makes it okay. Firstly, it can still last a *damn* long time and hold things back for a significant part of one's lifetime. Secondly, in a lot of these cases, one monopoly can be (and frequently is) replaced by another soon after- something that is often touched upon or even accepted by those making that argument, yet with the assumption that this is somehow okay and significantly better than a single, long-lived monopoly.

Well, it's not. The fact that a monopoly might eventually fall when one is old and grey, only to be replaced with another monopoly (yay!) is a piss-poor substitute for a proper balanced and free market.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[Anonymous Coward]

Never saw this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-yzUfB2S9s
But saw some other versions on ITV and Channel4 channels.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[a90Tj2P7]

The only point there was that working with the House to change the bill is not tantamount to formally supporting it. Any claim that it is would be objectively false. Speculate all you like, but without any supporting information on what changes they've made/recommended, you're only making things up.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[Eirenarch]

Why tags? How about Chrome Native Client the equivallent to ActiveX?

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[Anonymous Coward]

And why would I care about that?

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, shill, aka techLA, techNY, insightin140bytes, looks like your moderation on this post has something in common with ie market share. Straight down. Hahahahahahahahaha!

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[Dishevel]

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.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

I know you are, but what am I?

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[Anonymous Coward]

Well... it isn't chrome only, per se... but the way some of the browser functionality is set up makes it a PITA to support the different types of browsers. In order to develop for all browsers, you have to really check the user agent since somethings won't work in other browser implementations.

For example, I can code a site to utilize Mozilla's plugins, but then I also have to add code to support WebKit in order to get the same things to work on Safari/Chrome and also code to support IE9 for proper rendering of DOM and SVG objects.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[similar_name]

It also helps that MS ties its browser to its own operating systems. As tablets and smart phones are used more and more to access the Internet and with so many of those devices running non MS operating systems, Internet Explorer market share will continue to fall. Four short years ago Windows had 95% market share. For 2012 it is at 85%.

The real danger for MS is that as more and more people become familiar with other operating systems like iOS and android they will eventually become more comfortable with the idea of a non-MS pc. If I were MS I would segregate my products and let each compete on its own on any OS. Even for businesses, there is a move to web apps and making sure they work on iOS and android so there is becoming less and less need for Windows (there are still a lot of businesses that need Windows but the trend is clear).

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[sudonymous]

There is no such thing as "HTML5"

FTFY. It is a work in progress. Nothing called "HTML5" has been agreed upon by all parties.

those sites are just HTML5, that will work with Chrome

Because Google paid to have them work with Chrome. And since HTML5 isn't a standard, other browsers don't act exactly the same as Chrome, so it won't work quite the same. Not that it couldn't, if someone paid to have it developed for the other browser.

The sites will also run on other browsers if they support HTML5; it's hardly Google's fault if other browsers do not support HTML5, is it?

It's hardly other browsers' fault if Google decides to make Chrome slightly different, since there's no standard for HTML5 yet. Other browsers will support HTML5 once HTML5 actually exists. Right now it's a mish-mash of features that everyone calls "HTML5" but aren't standard across-the-board.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[BZ]

> How so?They install chrome w/o permission?

They have in the past, yes. For example, until Microsoft bought Skype, a default Skype install would install Chrome and make it your default browser. If you wanted to avoid that you had to jump through some hoops during the install.

How much money do you think Google paid Skype for that deal?

They have similar deals with Adobe (installing Flash will install Chrome too), some antivirus vendors (Kaspersky, say), and lots of other software distributors.

Welcome the the way business is done in the Googleplex.

> What??? It doesn't run on HTML5 Firefox or IE9?

Nope. It explicitly sniffs for WebKit and refuses to run on other browsers.

> What error does it give you?

"Your browser is not supported".

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[jellomizer]

Well for the "make websites that purposely only work with Chrome" They are taking advantage that Chrome is very strong in supporting HTML5... Other browsers can support those features too, they just didn't yet.
And If the browsers did support those features do you expect Google to have a fit for other browsers using the Standard?

Googles fight with IE, is the fact that it is so far behind other browsers... Still... That supporting IE is hampering Googles style. That is why they made chrome, They needed a browser that supports the standards well. Not so much to corner the Browser Market but to be able to make its sites do what they want it to do... Then we get to use those standards and make better apps because of this. This is different then Microsoft or Netscape attempt to corner the browser market, where their goal was to be the company that made the standards to force other vendors to choose which browser they will support.

Companies Goals are to make money Giving Browsers away from free, cost the companies money. So you need to figure out what their profit motive for the effort.

For Microsoft they wanted to win the browser war and make IE as a platform to run Active X and pushing their .NET technologies. Give the browser for free make it popular try to keep all the developers using Microsoft Development schemes if possible, and make sure all the browsers are using Microsoft approved OS (most notably their own)

For Google their goal is to sell services and display adds, they don't need to lock you in to an OS or lock the developers in, it is in their best interest to maximize users and developers. To sell more services and display more adds, they need a wider group of people. To keep you using Google services, you need to be kept up to date on the browsers to get the new stuff available. Firefox was Ok, however I expect Google wanted priorities in the stuff that is supported, to match their product plans.

Netscape goal was to sell the browser, when IE came out for free, they had to give it for free and try to sell their other services such as their Web Server solutions... Part of Netscape's failure was they lost their business model, and couldn't compete with their other ones for more then a few years. As Netscape wasn't pushing Developer tools (as much) most developers went with Microsoft who had nicer output tools.

Opera was in the selling browser market. Their goal is to make a fast browser and they sell it to mostly mobile devices. Because of this they try to keep it fast and as standard compliment as possible, as to leverage their partners devices to keep them successful so they will buy their browser again.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know why you were modded down. It's a valid point and as on-topic as most.

Being a monopoly isn't illegal or even wrong, on its own. It's any anti-competitive behavior that we usually have a problem with, legally and ethically.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[Dogtanian]

So. If I make something really fucking cool that people all want then I suck?

That's both putting words in my mouth to the point of strawmanning *and* missing the point of what I was saying.

The point I was replying to (more in general than specifically to what the OP said) was the suggestion that monopolies are okay because they don't last forever, i.e. implicit in this is that monopolies would be a bad thing if they lasted forever, but they're don't, so that's okay. Which, as I pointed out, doesn't make it all okay at all.

However, since you raised the issue, I'd say that although they do have some advantages, I do not consider monopolies in general to be particularly desirable. Yes, I'm sure there are some "good" monopolies, but there are also a lot of bad ones. And when one company has dominance over the market, there is still the tendency for things to be have to be done according to their philosophy, even if they're acting entirely in good faith and not being "abusive".

And, of course, there is always the potential for a "good" monopoly (or one that is seen as good at one point) to turn bad- or be turned bad by new bosses or owners. Remember a few years back when Google was already dominating the market, yet also the darling of Slashdotters and could do no wrong? A few years on, the even-more-dominant Google, while not yet the "big bad", has lost the uncritical love of the fanbase due to increasing concerns over privacy and dominance issues.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[Anonymous Coward]

Except it's not like ActiveX at all as nacl is aggressively sand boxed and cross platform. But thanks for playing.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[Anonymous Coward]

Why tags?

Well, because that's what GGP said:

But as you say, Google keep on introducing tags that only Chrome understands, I wish they would stop doing that and stick to ratified standard.

(emphasis added)

I'm not GP, but I'd also like to hear about these supposed Chrome-only tags -- I'd bet most of them are not only also found in chromium and other derivatives, but in other webkit-based browsers as well.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[BZ]

> 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).

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[Anonymous Coward]

Last I checked sound synth was still using Flash on Firefox.
But I think that's more a decision to use mp3 and not ogg.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[rtfa-troll]

Why tags? How about Chrome Native Client the equivallent to ActiveX?

Native Client is equivalent to ActiveX in the same way that Google's evil is equivalent to Microsoft's; only occasionally and mostly by accident.

• ActiveX requires your code to be signed by Microsoft; Native client works for anyone.
• ActiveX fully trusts the code delivered; Native client aims to 100% sandbox it.
• ActiveX is single OS / Single architecture; Native client is trying to become cross platform.
• ActiveX was a closed single vendor system; Native client is pretty open and competitors could easily use it if they wanted.

I think Native Client is a bit of a misguided experiment. I worry that a sandbox implemented directly on so many different physical processors will have great difficulty being secure. However, it's not that they aren't aware of these worries and aren't trying to take them into account.

Every time that someone tries to say that "Microsoft is not as evil as they used to be" remember that they keep trying to add features from the above ActiveX list into their new ARM based Windows. Neither Apple nor Google will ever be as sneakily anti-customer, anti-consumer and anti-humanity as Microsoft is. Not even if their management specifically sets out to be.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[Dishevel]

Monopolies are not anything other than good.
The only times a monopoly is bad is when...
A) Government grants one.
B) Monopoly uses government to create regulations to hinder competition.
or
C) When government fails to protect the market from abusive monopolistic practices. (Which are already illegal.)

That is pretty much it. Other than those cases the ability for a monopoly to exists comes only from its ability to server its market extremely well.

There is nearly a monopoly in the search industry. Because Google did so well for so long. Now Microsoft is spending massively to become better.
This makes Google need to step up their own system to keep on top. This is good for us. Which ever way you go you get served better.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[rahvin112]

Monopolies are NOT illegal. I swear to god this is one of the most misunderstood facets of US law. The Sherman Anti-Trust law establishes one illegal act. This is for a Trust (a business with a monopoly on a sector of the economy) to use that Trust to gain another Trust in a second business. In other words, it's illegal for Microsoft who has a monopoly in Operating Systems to use that Monopoly to gain a Monopoly in Internet Browsers.

The Sherman Anti-Trust act came about because the large Trusts of the early 20th century used their Trust to gain control of other businesses. Carnegie used his Trust in Railroads to gain a trust in Steel and Coal. Rockefeller used is Trust in Oil to manipulate early Automobiles, plastics and the petrochemical industry. JP Morgan used is Banking Trust to basically screw everyone.

It's not illegal to have a Trust or to gain a Trust unless you already have a Trust that you are using to gain a second one. The Sherman Anti-Trust act has as a penalty for abuse of a Trust in that it allows the government to forcibly break up the business into smaller pieces (or leavy a fine and restrict the business), but if you never abuse the Trust you can't be punished under the Act. Admittedly it's hard for a Trust NOT to abuse the Trust to further their business but it's not illegal to have a Trust.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[Dogtanian]

Monopolies are not anything other than good. The only times a monopoly is bad is when...

The problem with saying something so ludicrously OTT like "monopolies are not anything other than good" is that you then sound like you're contradicting yourself in your next sentence. "Monopolies are generally good except when..." would have sounded more level, but would not have let you express your apparent love of monopolies(!)

Other than those cases the ability for a monopoly to exists comes only from its ability to server its market extremely well.

That's exceptionally naive. What about monopolies formed from companies intentionally buying out their competition (which doesn't even *have* to be done via "abusive practices")?

There is nearly a monopoly in the search industry. Because Google did so well for so long. Now Microsoft is spending massively to become better. This makes Google need to step up their own system to keep on top. This is good for us. Which ever way you go you get served better.

And what happens in situations where it would cost a massive amount of money to enter a market, and it still wouldn't be worth it because the monopolistic market leader was so far ahead and likely to remain there due to the network effect and/or economies of scale?

Facebook is bordering on this, Google+ has not proven to be a success so far despite probably being the most likely to topple them. Are Facebook being abusive in order to maintain their position?

If not, does this then make it desirable that I have no real choice if I wish to use a social network (the whole point being to use the one that everyone else uses) despite Facebook's laughably bad-faith approach to privacy?

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[slashmydots]

You're burying the lead. A brand new, fresh install of Windows of any OS variation going to google.com will see a "get chrome" button. Not some hyperlink somewhere hidden, not some fudged search result, right on google.com itself. So....yeah. In fact, I think the wording is "Chrome: A better way to surf the web. Click here to get it" or something to that effect.
Also, I guarantee that offering the free angry birds app inside of Chrome as a plugin was 50% of their market share alone.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[Anonymous Coward]

Used to be a monopoly was 60% of the market not 90% like MS...

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[BZ]

Another example: http://grouek.com/ctrlpaper/

Works fine in Firefox, say, if I spoof the UA as Chrome. Refuses to work otherwise, and not because Firefox doesn't implement WebGL or something. Just because it's sniffing specifically for Chrome. And again, Google encourages that.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[Dishevel]

That's exceptionally naive. What about monopolies formed from companies intentionally buying out their competition (which doesn't even *have* to be done via "abusive practices")?

What about them? Are they doing something wrong? If not....

And what happens in situations where it would cost a massive amount of money to enter a market, and it still wouldn't be worth it because the monopolistic market leader was so far ahead and likely to remain there due to the network effect and/or economies of scale?

What would you suggest? Dismantle the company before it can do anything wrong solely because it made the investment and succeeded?
Pour taxpayer funds to start a competitive company? Again. If they are serving the customer and not doing anything illegal then I am cool with it.

Facebook is bordering on this, Google+ has not proven to be a success so far despite probably being the most likely to topple them.

Not a crime. No problem here.

Are Facebook being abusive in order to maintain their position?

If they are being abusive then people can choose to stay or go. Facebook is not a need.

If not, does this then make it desirable that I have no real choice if I wish to use a social network (the whole point being to use the one that everyone else uses) despite Facebook's laughably bad-faith approach to privacy?

Yes. It is desirable. People can learn that there are alternatives. They can bite the bullet and drop out of Facebook. Those that do win back their freedom. Those that do not do not. If you move to a competitor you can get with like minded people. This is good. If your grandmother will not make the move then you can visit, call, snail mail. You know all those things we did before Facebook to maintain real relationships with those we needed to.
Those others are not nearly as important as you think. You relationships will improve or die out. All based on the effort you want to put into them.
As it should be.
But if you want to continue to use Facebook even though you know they are selling you out and you do it with open eyes then that sir, is fully on you.
A choice you make. Good or bad, your call.
But to break up and or destroy a company that many people (sheeple) seem to like because you can not gather the will to leave voluntarily is not and can not be the answer.
Slashdot sucks! Slashdot is the one I like them most though.
Government regulation of Slashdot must be what we need. To protect the people who have to post here but can not stand the way they have to post here.
See. Does not make much sense, does it?

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[DragonWriter]

Monopolies are NOT illegal. I swear to god this is one of the most misunderstood facets of US law.

You actually aren't helping it be understood well.

The Sherman Anti-Trust law establishes one illegal act.

This is true only for astoundingly large values of "one".

This is for a Trust (a business with a monopoly on a sector of the economy) to use that Trust to gain another Trust in a second business.

A "trust" is not a business with a monopoly, but a particular form of combination of businesses (whether or not it forms a monopoly.) And the Sherman Anti-Trust Act (15 USC Sec. 1-7) itself (and, a fortiori, US antitrust law which includes but is not limited to the Sherman Act) makes illegal more than just leveraging an existing monopoly to monopolize another area of business. Particularly, the Sherman Act:

1. Makes a felony of "[e]very contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nation." (15 USC Sec. 1)
2. Makes a felony of "[e]very contract, combination in form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce in any Territory of the United States or of the District of Columbia, or in restraint of trade or commerce between any such Territory and another, or between any such Territory or Territories and any State or States or the District of Columbia, or with foreign nations, or between the District of Columbia and any State or States or foreign nations" (15 USC Sec. 3(a))
3. Makes it a felony to "monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations" (15 USC Sec. 2)
4. Makes it a felony to "monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce in any Territory of the United States or of the District of Columbia, or between any such Territory and another, or between any such Territory or Territories and any State or States or the District of Columbia, or with foreign nations, or between the District of Columbia, and any State or States or foreign nations" (15 USC Sec. 3(b))

   You can reasonably argue that Sec. 1 and Sec. 3(a) are the same "act", and that Sec. 2 and Sec. 3(b) are the same "act", which gets you two illegal acts under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. But you can't reasonably argue that there is only one illegal act created by the Sherman Act.

   Also, the Sherman Act isn't the whole of US Antitrust Law, which also includes the Clayton Act (15 USC 12-27, 29 USC 52-53) and other provisions.

   The Sherman Anti-Trust act has as a penalty for abuse of a Trust in that it allows the government to forcibly break up the business into smaller pieces (or leavy a fine and restrict the business)

   The Sherman Act does not actually specify (or limit) the remedies for violation, aside from the criminal fines, or even expressly make final equitable relief available (preliminary injunctions are specifically referred to in the Sherman Act.) The Clayton Act does expressly provide (and regulate) some equitable remedies available for violations of Antitrust laws (including the Sherman Act.)

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[RobbieCrash]

Should they not promote their own products on their own pages? Should Apple include a link to Dell in its search results?

Yeah yeah, Google's a search engine used to find information on other sites, fuck off. That argument holds no weight and is complete bullshit. When I go to Dell's support site, I am looking for support results, but still get offers on other Dell products, same with Microsoft, same with Ubuntu, same with any other fucking company.

Google is under no obligation to hide their other products. Now, if they were spoofing the search results and spamming Chrome links in the results any time anyone searched for internet browser I'd agree with you. But they're not, they're putting a sparkly ad on their front page, and one ad in the Ads section on the main page. Big, fucking deal.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[DragonWriter]

ActiveX is single OS / Single architecture; Native client is trying to become cross platform.

Native client is weakly cross architecture (in that Native Client exists on both ARM and Intel, but won't run the same binaries -- Portable Native Client aims to resolve that) and more strongly cross OS (in that it is supported on every OS Chrome is available on, and will run the same binaries on every OS using the same [ARM or Intel] architecture.) "Trying to become cross platform" implies that it isn't cross OS or cross architecture now, which is misleading.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[DragonWriter]

Nope. It explicitly sniffs for WebKit and refuses to run on other browsers.

Sniffing for WebKit doesn't make it Chrome-only.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[cpu6502]

>>>The IE monopoly might very well have lasted a lot longer with concerted effort and government support.

You accidentally hit the nail on the head. The only way for a monopoly to survive is via Government protectionism of said monopoly. (Example: Comcast in my county is protected by government grant of monopoly.) In a free market a monopoly will only last as long as it keeps customers happy, but if the monopoly abuses its customers, then they will flee to other alternatives.
Like how they fled from Microsoft Explorer to Google Chrome.
Or from Kmart (once THE dominant retail chain) to Walmart.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[BZ]

What does it make it, for you? WebKit-only?

Note that it sniffs for WebKit and if it doesn't find it tells the user to go download Chrome.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[AmberBlackCat]

You don't suck until you start cutting deals to have your product be the default included with everything, so they never find out something better is out there.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[Anonymous Coward]

it works just fine for me in firefox.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[AvitarX]

Google+ fucked up by trying too hard.

I liked Buzz, it played to google's strengths (I always had a gmail window open for chat and email), and automatic tight communities (people I regularly chatted with). They should of slowly scaled it up, integrated with Picassa, etc.

Instead they dumped it, made something new, and tried to get everyone to switch. 30% tired it out, didn't want to go to yet another site, and staid with the 70% who didn't try it.

Facebook grew naturally, and destroyed Myspace over a long period of time, google fucked that up with google+, but I think Buzz could of done it.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[Anonymous Coward]

> What??? It doesn't run on HTML5 Firefox or IE9?

Nope. It explicitly sniffs for WebKit and refuses to run on other browsers.

Bullshit, chrome.angrybirds.com works perfectly on Firefox 12.0 on Linux x86_64.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[similar_name]

A brand new, fresh install of Windows of any OS variation going to google.com will see a "get chrome" button.

The user will be using Internet Explorer because it was installed when Windows was. The home page will default to a Microsoft site like MSN or Bing then the user will have to navigate to Google (by actually typing something in), click on the Chrome is great button, download it and run it after accepting a warning that files from the internet my be dangerous. It is hard to argue Google has some kind of unfair advantage here. If people are actually clicking on what amounts to another ad it shows that they like Google.

More rambling by me To go even further the Internet Explorer icon doesn't get removed. Changing the default browser doesn't have much of an effect since most people are likely to get online by open the browser directly. Hmmm, I wonder how many people download Chrome and use it because it defaults to opening on Google's homepage. Given that most people don't know how to change their homepage I could see people opening Chrome just because they think it is a link straight to Google search and with IE they have to type it in each time.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[WaywardGeek]

I find that button to download Chrome highly offensive in my nice accessible Firefox browser. Google's search results are pretty easy to listen to in NVDA or any other screen reader, but Chrome itself is a nightmare. That button say's "Click me, and never listen to the web again!" Google's Android OS sucks for accessibility. Google Docs is another attack against the low-vision community. If Google were some no-name outfit, I'd cut them some slack, but as the #1 browser, #1 cloud document editor, #1 phone OS... at what point do we get to class-action law-suite these a-holes into submission?

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[INowRegretThesePosts]

Netscape/Mozilla did it when they were dominant. Microsoft did it too. Now it's google's turn.

You talk as if Google was practising Microsoft-style evil. It is not. Google Chrome source code is under either the LGPL or BSD, so other vendors can easily copy Chrome's extensions.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[INowRegretThesePosts]

But did Google *pay* for Angry Birds to do that?

And what is your source for that Skype behaviour? A quick Google search found nothing.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[BZ]

> But did Google *pay* for Angry Birds to do that?

I have no idea what their contract, if any, with Angry Birds looked like.

But they have certainly been encouraging web developers to do just that, yes.

> And what is your source for that Skype behaviour?

Personal experience, for one thing. You can see a screenshot from the advanced install at http://people.mozilla.org/~khuey/skype-install-2011-10-3.png if you want.

As far as a Google search not finding anything.... https://www.google.com/search?q=skype+chrome+bundling shows http://www.webmasterworld.com/goog/4135280.htm and http://www.winrumors.com/skype-for-windows-updated-to-remove-google-product-bundling/ and http://mynetx.net/6494/skype-removes-google-integration

It also finds, not coincidentally, http://www.osnews.com/comments/25184 (do read the first response too!) and http://www.salsitasoft.com/2011/09/23/wonder-how-chrome-is-growing-market-share-ask-adobe/

A similar search on Bing also finds http://www.quora.com/Just-got-a-Skype-update-and-they-wanted-me-to-install-Chrome-Why

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[rtfa-troll]

That's old information. The version under development allows a portable representation.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[RobbieCrash]

I'd give mod-points, but I'm not allowed since I posted. Totally fair to call them on that; shouldn't be the case.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[shiftless]

Should they not promote their own products on their own pages? Should Apple include a link to Dell in its search results?

If they were truly secure about their position, worth, value, etc?

Damn right they would, with an itemized comparison.

Let their customers look at the shit Dell sells and prices, and compare it to Apple's quality products, and see what a value it is.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[rtfa-troll]

Replying to myself; I misread your (grandparents) comment. I don't totally agree that ARM+Intel=cross platform (what about MIPS and Power at least), but generally your comment was right.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[Waccoon]

those sites are just HTML5

HTML5 is not yet a standard. It's still under development, largely by the various web giants competing with each other and implementing incompatible experiments. By the time HTML5 is standardized, nobody will use it because early prototypes of HTML6 will be the new hotness and the same story will repeat all over again.

If you want standards compliance, you have to build around HTML4.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[Anonymous Coward]

It also helps that MS ties its browser to its own operating systems. As tablets and smart phones are used more and more to access the Internet and with so many of those devices running non MS operating systems, Internet Explorer market share will continue to fall. Four short years ago Windows had 95% market share. For 2012 it is at 85%. The real danger for MS is that as more and more people become familiar with other operating systems like iOS and android they will eventually become more comfortable with the idea of a non-MS pc. If I were MS I would segregate my products and let each compete on its own on any OS. Even for businesses, there is a move to web apps and making sure they work on iOS and android so there is becoming less and less need for Windows (there are still a lot of businesses that need Windows but the trend is clear).

Microsoft couldn't provide IE for iOS even if they wanted to, Apple doesn't allow alternative browsers on the platform (that are not just front-ends to the built in Safari engine, or as Opera Mini offloading the rendering/script engine to a server)

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[INowRegretThesePosts]

Thank you for taking the time to supply me with the links.

I do, however, think you exaggerated a bit when saying "jump through some hoops".
Unchecking two checkboxes is not jumping through hoops.
Anyway, I still hope Chrome to eclipse MSIE; it is open-source (and under permissive licenses),
so other browsers can implement its features leading to a more advanced Web.

Regards

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[Anonymous Coward]

You accidentally hit the nail on the head.

I'm confused. What government grant enabled the IE monopoly?

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. It explicitly sniffs for WebKit and refuses to run on other browsers.

Liar.

Works on Firefox.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[BZ]

> Unchecking two checkboxes is not jumping through
> hoops.

Last I installed Skype, you had to select the "Custom Install" option to even get to the part of the install process that had the checkboxes. If you did the default install, Chrome just got installed silently without ever asking you.

> Anyway, I still hope Chrome to eclipse MSIE; it is
> open-source

Except it's not. Large parts of it are open-source, but some pieces relevant to actually providing a good user experience are not.

And even the open-source parts are not under a license that allows, say, Microsoft or Opera to use the code.

And of course "open source" doesn't even mean the code is reusable: for example the Pepper implementation is open source, but very tightly coupled to Chrome's internals in ways that make it pretty much impossible for someone else to reuse.

Furthermore, Chrome is busy trying to push features like NaCl which would tie the web to particular hardware architectures if they actually gained traction. So Chrome dominance would be terrible for the evolution of the web, just like MSIE's dominance was terrible.

The best outcome here would be a 3-way or 4-way or 5-way (or more!) split in the market with approximately equal market share so that web developers actually code to standards instead of to particular browsers...

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[Dishevel]

Cutting deals to have your product defaulted into something is good business practice.
There is such a thing as anti competitive behavior, but that is not it.
But do not let me stand in the way of your blinding hate.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[Krojack]

I've owned 2 Dell laptops and they are still working great. The one I'm using right now I've had for going on 3.5 years and I still don't need to update. It's still fast and smooth. The battery on the other hand is shit but that's my own fault for keeping it charged to 100% and never unplugging it. I pretty much killed it.

Dell desktop computers on the other hand I won't touch.

long story short, I'll buy a Dell laptop over an Apple laptop any day. #1 reason why.. Apple's over priced hardware. It's not worth it unless you have money to burn or need to appear as though you have money to burn but swim in debt.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[Dusty101]

Not this again...

Last time I was speccing a laptop (admittedly a few years ago now), I ran through the Dell site & configured something as close to the MacBook Pro I was using as my reference baseline, and the price of the comparable business-class Dell was only $50 less than that of the Mac. The Dell was also a nice machine, but it had less full software bundled (there was nothing like the iLife suite, for example), and lacked a couple of the hardware bells & whistles such as the backlit keyboard. Overall, though, it was basically a draw.

Now, I grant you that I could have started off with a specific Dell model instead, tried to find a matching Mac and simply not been able to find one, but that's a different issue. The Apple product matrix is much sparser, particularly as they don't target the low-priced end of the market, but like for like, Macs really aren't all that overpriced compared to the Dells.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[DragonWriter]

That's old information.

No, its current information.

The version under development allows a portable representation.

The version under development is under development, and the capacity you reference that is under development (Portable Native Client or PNaCl) was specifically addressed in GP.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[DragonWriter]

What does it make it, for you? WebKit-only?

Yes, if it sniffs for WebKit and only runs if it finds WebKit that makes it WebKit-only. I would think that would be fairly obvious.

Chrome is a proper subset of the set of all WebKit browsers, so something that is WebKit-only but does nothing to assure that it is running on Chrome beyond sniffing for WebKit isn't Chrome only.

Note that it sniffs for WebKit and if it doesn't find it tells the user to go download Chrome.

That doesn't make it Chrome only. It makes it a WebKit-only app that recommends Chrome to non-WebKit-users that try to access it.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[BZ]

If you really care I can find you examples of Google encouraging truly Chrome-only pages (as in, sniff for "Chrome" in the UA).

But in any case, how is encouraging WebKit-only things any better than encouraging Chrome-only ones?

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[Dogtanian]

Other than those cases the ability for a monopoly to exists comes only from its ability to server its market extremely well.

That's exceptionally naive. What about monopolies formed from companies intentionally buying out their competition (which doesn't even *have* to be done via "abusive practices")?

What about them? Are they doing something wrong? If not....

You appear to have missed the point, which is strange as I had included your original quote to make the context clear. You asserted that "other than those cases the ability for a monopoly to exists comes only from its ability to server its market extremely well ". I provided a counterexample.

What would you suggest? Dismantle the company before it can do anything wrong solely because it made the investment and succeeded?

Pour taxpayer funds to start a competitive company? Again.

That was your suggestion not mine. I don't claim to have all the answers, but your assertion (as is often argued by those in your position) that anti-monopolistic actions are being taken *because* the company succeeded (or as some others have gone so far as to suggest, to punish them for this success) is missing the point. Regardless of how a company got there, the (potential) issue is that the company is a monopoly and in situations where that isn't desirable... it isn't desirable.

The opposite of the "punishment" argument is the sort-of-implication by some that companies should be allowed to retain their position- even if that would otherwise be considered not desirable- as some sort of reward for doing well, or pioneering or whatever. But viewing it in terms of punishment and prize, either way is missing the point.

If they are serving the customer and not doing anything illegal then I am cool with it.

By definition "illegal" doesn't say anything about the way things should or shouldn't be, only the way the existing laws are set up. Saying you're not bothered because they're not doing anything illegal or (later on) "not a crime" is somewhat circular and pointless(!)

There is nearly a monopoly in the search industry. Because Google did so well for so long. Now Microsoft is spending massively to become better. This makes Google need to step up their own system to keep on top. This is good for us. Which ever way you go you get served better.

And what happens in situations where it would cost a massive amount of money to enter a market, and it still wouldn't be worth it because the monopolistic market leader was so far ahead and likely to remain there due to the network effect and/or economies of scale? Facebook is bordering on this, Google+ has not proven to be a success so far despite probably being the most likely to topple them. Are Facebook being abusive in order to maintain their position?

Not a crime. No problem here.

Again, you appear to have missed the point. Your originally implied that if there's a monopoly (e.g. Google) then any potential competition (e.g. Microsoft) will up their game and work harder and "This is good for us. Which ever way you go you get served better."

I provided a counter-example.

If they are being abusive then people can choose to stay or go. Facebook is not a need.

This again is where you get naive. In a society where the majority of people are using Facebook, where social interaction increasingly takes place through Facebook, where not having or not using Facebook means that you are left out of important parts of interaction with that society (even in a non-work context) and placed at a disadvantage... where does one draw the line between a luxury and a need?

And yes, I *do* consider non-essential, non-work-related social interaction a "need" to some ext

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[INowRegretThesePosts]

Last I installed Skype, you had to select the "Custom Install" option to even get to the part of the install process that had the checkboxes. If you did the default install, Chrome just got installed silently without ever asking you.

If that is true, it is indeed wrong. I hope it was a misunderstanding on Skype's side. I hope that Google did not do this intentionally. Or that the Google employee that did this is an exception to the rule of don't be evil. Anyway, it shows that we consumers must be constantly vigilant.

Except it's not. Large parts of it are open-source, but some pieces relevant to actually providing a good user experience are not.

AFAIK, chromium has an excellent user experience.

And even the open-source parts are not under a license that allows, say, Microsoft or Opera to use the code.

The Google-authored parts of Chromium (including V8) are under the BSD license, so Microsoft/Opera can use them at will. Webkit is under the LGPL, so Microsoft/Opera can incorporate parts of it under the reasonable condition of providing source code of the changes they did to the Webkit code (while their proprietary code remains closed).

Furthermore, Chrome is busy trying to push features like NaCl which would tie the web to particular hardware architectures if they actually gained traction. So Chrome dominance would be terrible for the evolution of the web, just like MSIE's dominance was terrible.

But NaCl is under a BSD-like license. And Google is busy developing Portable NaCl, which removes CPU architecture-lock-in.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Native_Client.

And when I said Chrome should eclipse MSIE, I didn't mean Chrome should reach 100% of market. Ideally (in my opinion) the market would be 34% Firefox (my preferred browser), 33% Chrome and 33% Opera.

Finally, I agree that Google is no saint; but I ask you to agree that it is not as evil as Microsoft. MSIE needs to die.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[Dogtanian]

Monopolies are NOT illegal.

Yes, I'm well aware of this. The post of mine you were ostensibly replying to had nothing to do with that, mentioning nothing- not even by implication- about the current legality or illegality of monopolies... because that wasn't what was being discussed!

Quite why you chose to post the above in "response" then is unclear, as it's bordering on a non-sequiteur in the context of my original comment.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[DragonWriter]

If you really care I can find you examples of Google encouraging truly Chrome-only pages (as in, sniff for "Chrome" in the UA).

Its your argument that they are doing it. I don't really care one way or the other if you present evidence for it or not, though if you keep making it while presenting evidence that doesn't support it, I might keep pointing that out.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[BZ]

> AFAIK, chromium has an excellent user experience.

As long as you don't want the PDF viewer, or Flash, or the H.264 video, or the MP3 audio, or a few other goodies.

> But NaCl is under a BSD-like license.

I have heard people from Opera and Microsoft explicitly express concerns about the licensing of NaCl; whether it was copyright or patent issues I can't tell you.

> And Google is busy developing Portable NaCl

If they ever manage that (which is somewhat doubtful), we can revisit the situation. In the meantime, PNaCl is vaporware, and Google is pushing hard to get people to use NaCl.

> but I ask you to agree that it is not as evil as
> Microsoft

See, that's the funny thing. It's not as evil as Microsoft in 2000. It's just about as evil (in the browser space) as Microsoft today. More evil in some ways, less in others. Apple is more evil than both of them, of course. ;)

So no, I don't agree that MSIE needs to die in general. IE8 and earlier sure do, though.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[BZ]

http://grouek.com/ctrlpaper/ is a good example.

Google could pretty easily prevent this for its "chrome experiments" via a simple policy of requiring capability sniffing, not UA sniffing for them, the way other UAs do for branded demos. But they sure aren't doing that.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[INowRegretThesePosts]

As long as you don't want the PDF viewer, or Flash, or the H.264 video, or the MP3 audio, or a few other goodies.

You can use any PDF plugin, and flash plugin is also available. Regarding MP3/H264: if there were strong demand
for them, Open Source developers would have already implemented it. Also, dropping MP3/H264 is arguably a
good thing.

I have heard people from Opera and Microsoft explicitly express concerns about the licensing of NaCl; whether it was copyright or patent issues I can't tell you.

I would thank if you provided links.

If they ever manage that (which is somewhat doubtful), we can revisit the situation. In the meantime, PNaCl is vaporware, and Google is pushing hard to get people to use NaCl.

I read nativeclient.googlecode.com/svn/data/site/pnacl.pdf and it seems that PNaCl is well within the reach of Google and LLVM. And the creation of optimised portable bitcode will benefit the whole software market. And PNaCl seems very active - http://code.google.com/feeds/p/nativeclient/issueupdates/basic.
As for Google pushing hard, it may be a good thing. This will showcase the superiority of Chrome, helping make it more popular. And we need Chrome to be very popular by late 2012, when Microsoft will launch Windows 8. Microsoft wants to lock WIndows 8 to MSIE, which could be a disaster. But if Chrome is popular by late 2012, then it will be in Microsoft's best interest to support Chrome.

I still want MSIE to die. One of the reasons for my hate is that I find it outrageous that a clearly inferior product is used only because it comes bundled with Windows.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[INowRegretThesePosts]

And I am sorry for the bad English. I typed in a hurry and English is my second language.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[BZ]

> if there were strong demand for them, Open
> Source developers would have already
> implemented it.

Oh, it's implemented. It just can't be legally shipped.

> I would thank if you provided links.

I said "heard". As in, people talking, with their mouths. So no links, sadly, sorry.

> and it seems that PNaCl is well within the reach of
> Google and LLVM

Maybe. Maybe not. Depends on how you define "within reach". And in particular, there is a good chance that by the time it's portable enough it'll be no faster than JavaScript in most cases.

> This will showcase the superiority of Chrome

Assuming you accept the proposition that Chrome is superior, of course.

> Microsoft wants to lock WIndows 8 to MSIE, which
> could be a disaster.

Sure. Just like Apple locking iPhone to Mobile Safari could be a disaster. But the latter hasn't happened yet, and the former is not necessarily going to happen.

Furthermore, having Windows 8 limited to "MSIE or Chrome" is just as much of a disaster as having it be just "MSIE", in my opinion.

And for what it's worth, for a lot my browsing on Windows (which is somewhat limited; I don't usually use Windows) IE9 is a much better browser than Chrome. So while I agree that old IE versions need to die, that has no bearing on Windows 8, which won't be running those old IE versions.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[Dishevel]

I really have no idea what you want.
You seem to believe that monopolies are inherently bad due to the fact that they can be abused.
You have no suggestion for what to do about it. Just a blanket statement that because of the potential for abuse monopolies are bad.

Drugs are not bad, Guns are not bad, Money is not evil, Power is not a thing to be avoided, Love is not for all intents and purposes "a bad idea".

All can be and have been used against people in horrible ways.
I would like to be able to get the drugs I think I need, buy the guns I want, make a shitload of money, have a bit of power and continue to be in love with my wife.
I am not evil, but I must add that I would love to come up with an idea and implement it so well that every time someone thinks of a way to make it better I am already one step ahead. I would love to be the only viable company providing this service or product.
I see nothing wrong with striving toward these goal and neither I think should you.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[DragonWriter]

http://grouek.com/ctrlpaper/ is a good example.

No, nothing on that site is an example of Google encouraging anything, except demonstrations of web technologies that work in Chrome, independently of whether they are Chrome-only or not.

Google could pretty easily prevent this for its "chrome experiments" via a simple policy of requiring capability sniffing, not UA sniffing for them

Arguably so, but there is a big giant excluded middle between "preventing" and "encouraging"; absence of the former is not the same as the latter.

the way other UAs do for branded demos.

Please provide evidence that other UA's require capability sniffing for branded demos. I can't, on a very cursory examination, see any. For instance, Mozilla DemoStudio's only firm requirements appear to be providing source code under an open license, packaging in a zip file and certain file organization requirements in that file, and using client-side technologies. Supporting multiple browsers is a "should", and there is no stated requirement or recommendation regarding UA and/or capability sniffing.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[INowRegretThesePosts]

I still disagree, but I fear I am wasting your time.

Only on Slashdot would two nerds discuss whether or nod MSIE needs to die.

Regards

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[BZ]

> but there is a big giant excluded middle between
> "preventing" and "encouraging"

Sure. I've encountered Google evangelists "encouraging" as well. No links, sadly: this was in-person conversation.

> Please provide evidence that other UA's require
> capability sniffing for branded demos

I've seen demos that were using UA sniffing taken down by other UA vendors before. It's hard to provide evidence that something has been removed, obviously...

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[freudigst]

They have similar deals with Adobe (installing Flash will install Chrome too)

Brilliant marketing partnership, considering Chrome didn't even run Flash in a stable fashion the last time I could be bothered to tolerate the pain of Chrome use half a year ago

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[DragonWriter]

I've seen demos that were using UA sniffing taken down by other UA vendors before. It's hard to provide evidence that something has been removed, obviously...

So, you are asking us to believe, with no evidence beside your word, that browser vendor demo sites that have posted rules on submissions also have secret rules prohibiting UA sniffing, that they don't announce (when announcing those rules would, unlike keeping them secret, actually encourage demo developers to build demos accordingly.)

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[BZ]

I'm not asking you to believe anything. I'm providing you with information. You can choose what you want to do with it.

You can also choose to think that Google can do no evil, if you want. Nothing wrong with hope and all that.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[Dogtanian]

I really have no idea what you want.

*I* started out by pointing out the flaw in the "monopolies don't last forever, therefore monopolies aren't a problem". You were the one who brought up the issue of monopoly legality and other issues in your reply that weren't directly relevant to my original post, and now you're complaining that *I* don't have all the answers?!

I do know what you want apparently- you want us all to accept that "monopolies are not anything other than good" (even though you yourself had to qualify this assertion immediately after you made it(!)).

I would love to be the only viable company providing this service or product.

Well, maybe you would. Of course, if you were the only "viable" company, then there would be no competition and nothing pushing you to stay "one step ahead".

I see nothing wrong with striving toward these goal and neither I think should you.

You're telling me how I *should* think about your desire to be a monopolist? This does come across as a little preachy and egotistical.

My feelings towards capitalism is that it works best when it's not tied down too much (giving it no reason to make the effort nor space to make the effort it)- but also when it's not allowed to run amok with no check on its own self-interest. I don't trust anyone that far, even if *they* think (or claim) that they're entirely benevolant.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[Anc]

DragonWriter, you might want to know the person you are talking to is Boris Zbarsky - a lead Mozilla developer for over a decade, member of multiple W3C working groups and generally one of the smartest and most respected figures in the industry. So yeah, I do think you can trust him :)

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[DragonWriter]

You can also choose to think that Google can do no evil, if you want.

I think that Google can do evil.

I also think that people who want to say that Google is doing evil ought to substantiate those claims. And, particularly in the immediate case, that some claiming that Google is doing evil by failing to adopt a policy that requires capability sniffing instead of UA sniffing for browser demos when supposedly there is some undefined group of other major browser vendors (which narrows the options down quite a bit) that, as a matter of policy, require capability sniffing instead of UA sniffing for a browser demo site analogous to Google's Chrome experiments site ought to be be able to point to evidence of other major browser vendors that do, in fact, have such a site with that requirement.

Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users

[Dishevel]

Well, maybe you would. Of course, if you were the only "viable" company, then there would be no competition and nothing pushing you to stay "one step ahead"./quote?

History is filled the the dying remains of companies and countries that rested on their laurels.
If you do not stay one step ahead you create room for a competitor. When there is room for one someone else who wants to make it big will show up. They always do.

Superior browser

[Anonymous Coward]

It's superior to the other browsers in every way. Not surprised.

Re:Superior browser

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's see:
-The toolbar can't be customized
-No real AdBlock
-Extensions are glorified userscripts
-Installs Google Updater
-Memory usage goes through the roof with a lot of tabs opened (higher than Firefox could ever hope it to go)

Yeah...

Re:Superior browser

[characterZer0]

Except for plugins.

Re:Superior browser

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Superior browser

[Randle_Revar]

Well said, sir!

Re:Superior browser

[Anonymous Coward]

- 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.

Re:Superior browser

[MightyYar]

For a while I was willing to forgo my favorite plugins because, while they are great, they cause huge memory problems in Firefox. But then Chrome killed support for side-tabs and so I went back to Firefox with Tree-Style-Tabs.

Re:Superior browser

[Anonymous Coward]

- 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.

Speak for yourself. My box is 5-years old and only has a GB of RAM. :-(

Re:Superior browser

[paladinsama]

- Don't have a problem with Google Updater. Does it not work on your system or does it consume too many resources?

Google Updater runs as a service, that has no visible setting to disable, calls home and install whatever is flagged as an update with the default settings Google wants. You are giving Google full administrator access to a computer and if some other company ever though of doing that, there would be uproar.

Re:Superior browser

[arkane1234]

sigh...

Let's see:
-The toolbar can't be customized
-No real AdBlock
-Extensions are glorified userscripts
-Installs Google Updater
-Memory usage goes through the roof with a lot of tabs opened (higher than Firefox could ever hope it to go)

Yeah...

Let's see:
-Toolbar isn't manipulated to hell and back, but does have movable components.
-I have AdBlock running on mine right now.
-Extensions are components created by someone to do something inside of the browser. It doesn't matter what they are made from, unless it slows things down. (That wasn't meant as a jab against Firefox)
-The updater can be turned on/off in settings.
-I have 4Gb on my laptop and I've had 20+ tabs open with Windows 7 (work computer... not personal). No issues.

yeah... jesus, you sound like a Mac hater or something, just making shit up randomly.

Re:Superior browser

[hawkinspeter]

Agreed. Noscript is what keeps me using Firefox despite it's sometimes sluggish behaviour.

Re:Superior browser

[LordLimecat]

Installs Google Updater

You havent installed Firefox 12, or looked at their blueprints, have you?

Heres a hint, the mozilla folks see the Updater and its ability to do less-than-frustrating updates as a good thing, and are working on (and have already released) an updater service for Firefox.

Of course, it can be uninstalled....but then, so can google updater.

I might also add, since we're taking potshots at browsers...
Firefox:
- Most frustrating upgrade experience for users in existence. No MSIs, no update service, randomly begs for admin rights, cripples extensions on upgrade... (though all of that sans the MSIs is in the works for a fix)
- Much slower than Chrome
- Tab performance leaves much to be desired
- Stock HTML inspection isnt really comparable to Chromes inspector

Re:Superior browser

[hairyfeet]

And all the rants above about Chrome and the rest of the Chromium based browsers is missing one thing...there is a REASON why FF usage has been dropping like a stone, and that is the devs at FF have taken a 'fuck you, we're going this way!" attitude that is running off their users!

This is one thing I give credit to all the different Chromium based browsers for because there have been VERY few UI changes and the ones that have happened have been fairly subtle. the FF devs seem to get a bug up their ass and totally crap all over the UI without a care in the world as to what the users think. Hell look at these mockups of the next UI by Mozilla and they might as well say "We ONLY want Windows 8 users! If you aren't into Metro UI then piss off" and is it ANY wonder that Chrome and its ilk have blown away FF?

I used FF before it was even called FF and the Moz Suite before that but it has been obvious at least to me that somewhere between V4 and V7 that they quit giving a fuck what the users thought and became nothing but devs scratching itches. The rise of Chrome is a classic case of users voting with their feet as if the FF devs had just held a damned poll and ASKED WHAT WE WANTED then frankly they wouldn't have seen their users nosedive as its pretty damned clear that like me most users do not want to go where they are heading.

Re:Superior browser

[Malvineous]

Let's see:
-The toolbar can't be customized
-No real AdBlock
-Extensions are glorified userscripts
-Installs Google Updater
-Memory usage goes through the roof with a lot of tabs opened (higher than Firefox could ever hope it to go)

Don't worry, I'm sure Mozilla are working on getting these features into Firefox as we speak!

Re:Superior browser

[Anonymous Coward]

>Chrome is faster
How? They're just as fast for me, and while I can cherry-pick sites where one is faster than the other my daily browsing is just as fast in Firefox.

>more stable
Not for me. Although Chrome does have nicer tab process management for when Flash decides to barf, since tabs crash far more frequently for me in Chrome, so..

>doesn't require admin rights to update it
Blaming Firefox for Windows administration flaws that are easy to overcome isn't winning you any points.

>doesn't have clutter all over the screen
My Firefox version has less "clutter" than my Chrome, so YMMV.

Re:Superior browser

[smash]

What he said basically. I used Firefox since it was called Phoenix, and they totally lost the plot several years ago. There are plenty of other better options out there than both Chrome OR firefox, it's a shame people don't bother with them.

Re:Superior browser

[hairyfeet]

Thanks and I too don't use either FF or Chrome. For my customers I offer a choice of Pale Moon which has forked away from Firefox specifically because they did not want to go with the whole metro UI change or Comodo Dragon which is what i personally use as its based on Chromium but with some nice extra security features and no phoning home to Google. Finally for those that need cross platform I would highly recommend QTWeb which runs on Linux, Apple,BSD or Windows, is fully portable so you can just run it on a flash, and has Flash support and Adblock.

But I was a BIG supporter of Mozilla, both when FF was still in beta and the Moz Suite before that, but frankly their devs might as well change the opening screen to someone giving the finger as that seems to be their attitude as of late. You would think seeing how their numbers climbed right up through FF V4 and then started nosediving and never recovered they would get the hint that the users don't like the current direction, but frankly they don't seem to give a shit. This is sad as FF had ONE killer feature, the same one that caused some of my customers to go to Seamonkey or Pale Moon rather than give up the Gecko engine, and that is the awesome extension framework. if they would quit pissing on the users with the UI and do something about the CPU spiking I would go running back to FF in a heartbeat but its pretty obvious from their roadmap that the ONLY users they want are those on Windows 8 using appstores and that just ain't me. So long FF and thanks for all the fish.

Re:Superior browser

[GigaBurglar]

Not to mention that, on Linux, flash is completely borked with Chrome - it causes graphical artefacts across all workspaces. Some youtube videos don't play, sound doesn't work in some videos. On top of that some website, like facebook, fail to render javascript correctly on first load; it lacks on many features and we will soon see triple digit version numbers. For all of Firefox's imperfections at least it works..

Re:Superior browser

[labnet]

I uninstalled chrome after they took away side tabs. Not sure how anyone browses with them given the stupid 16:9 screens we have now.

Re:Superior browser

[Anonymous Coward]

And all the rants above about Chrome and the rest of the Chromium based browsers is missing one thing...there is a REASON why FF usage has been dropping like a stone, and that is the devs at FF have taken a 'fuck you, we're going this way!" attitude that is running off their users!

As a former Firefox developer who left three years ago to work on Chrome, I am surprised to hear you say that. I see it the other way around: A small minority of Firefox users scream bloody murder at any change in anything. From UI to release schedule to internal interfaces that are explicitly documented as "unfrozen", every discussion turns into a rant against the evil bastards who would even consider changing X, for truly stupid values of X. I am so glad I left. Nothing destroys moral like a bug report cursing me out for making a button one pixel too tall. I hope the crazies stay away from anything I have to read.

Re:Superior browser

[J-1000]

What's wrong with ScriptNo? Works fine for me.

Re:Superior browser

[Waccoon]

- Toolbar for what? Just to take up space and give me more shit to click?

Apparently, you missed the important key word: customized

Is there some kind of brainwashing going on where geeks start witch hunting themselves? Normal people wouldn't like a feature, therefore it MUST be removed at all costs?

Re:Superior browser

[Anonymous Coward]

- 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.

I have an iMac with 16 GB of RAM. if you open more 30 odd tabs on chrome, all the tabs would start blinking if they have even the minimal fancy javascript.
It isn't like RAM is the problem because total RAM usage reaches 2.5 GB at max. Chrome may have separate processes but does keep the same process multiple which have been opened from the same tab. It seems either single process handling multiple tabs or the single window process for all the tabs is just not able to scale up.

Re:Superior browser

[satuon]

Not to mention that, on Linux, flash is completely borked with Chrome - it causes graphical artefacts across all workspaces. Some youtube videos don't play, sound doesn't work in some videos.

Well, I'm using Chrome on Linux as well, and it basically works as well as on Windows, no artefacts or anything.

Re:Superior browser

[Anonymous Coward]

> It's inconsequential on my modern computer with 8 GB of RAM.

Also in my old 2 GB Pentium IV. I sometimes find myself with 3/4 windows and 10-20 tabs each (on Linux). Everything works just great.

Re:Superior browser

[Tubal-Cain]

Back when Firefox 4 was still in beta, I was on an ancient Dell laptop (10 GB HDD, 300ish Mhz). Chromium ran... well, it was a bit more sluggish than my desktop but it was still perfectly reasonable for such a weak machine. Firefox, on the other hand, took a solid few seconds of lag to do anything, from opening menus to clicking links to changing tabs.

Re:Superior browser

[Anonymous Coward]

- AdBlock works perfectly fine in Chrome for me. I don't know where this shit keeps coming from. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cfhdojbkjhnklbpkdaibdccddilifdd

Because you're ignorant.

Webrequests. Up until Chrome 17, Adblock extensions had to inject javascript into the webpages which then scraped the contents and hid the ads. This didn't stop the ads from loading, only made them invisible once the JS had run so you still got to experience all the tracking, cookie and HTML5 localstorage crap. Such code also didn't work perfectly for pages which created ads after the initial loading using scripts which required the adblock scripts to reprocess the page every time something changed, all this junk bloated Chrome's memory usage and was well-known among Chromium developers to create significant (showed up in their telemetry) UI lag and crashes.

Adblock Plus in Firefox, by contrast, blocks ads at the network layer, it intercepts every network request to download a file and checks the target URL against the filters, returning about:blank instead if a filter hits. Until Webrequests were added to Chrome (earlier this year, Firefox has supported this since before 1.0) it was impossible to provide the technically correct and efficient solution.

So, yes, Chrome's Adblock works now but it didn't for years.

Re:Superior browser

[dpak1170]

Let's see: -The toolbar can't be customized -No real AdBlock -Extensions are glorified userscripts -Installs Google Updater -Memory usage goes through the roof with a lot of tabs opened (higher than Firefox could ever hope it to go)

Yeah...

- Still faster than IE and FF. - Does not crash that often as IE.

Re:Superior browser

[Anonymous Coward]

Spoken like a true developer aka person oblivious to how the world around them functions. The only people who care about the points mentioned are developers.

The majority of non-tech users come across Google from ads and through bundled software installations.

Re:Superior browser

[Anonymous Coward]

You are a minority though. Most people don't really care about that at all.

Re:Superior browser

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox uses just as much memory as Chome when many tabs are open.

Re:Superior browser

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't have many tabs open without them getting very hard to figure out which is which and with even more of them theyre just blank little tabs with no information, not even an icon.

Thats quite the minus for Chrome.

Re:Superior browser

[Anonymous Coward]

Citation needed or shut the fuck up.

Re:Superior browser

[Rysc]

The Chrome devs are on record as saying that they don't really support more than 30 tabs.

Sorry, but that's a failure.

Re:Superior browser

[Rysc]

I've had 20+ tabs open with Windows 7 (work computer... not personal). No issues.

20 tabs?! OMG, this guy is a PRO!

Let me count... I have 42 at the moment, and I'm *not even doing anything*, just a bit of news. When I get working this will balloon rapidly into the ~100 tab territory, and when I'm at juggling multiple projects I often sail up to ~500 tabs. I have had 800 tabs open at a single time.

In Firefox this gets a bit slow; it starts to become noticeable after ~200 tabs. In Chrome you will start getting responsiveness issues depending on your hardware somewhere between 30 and 80 tabs. I've never had a session of Chrome with over 100 tabs that didn't end up needing to be killed after locking up. I am using modern hardware with modern CPUs, many cores and tons of ram.

Tabs
Firefox: 1
Chrome: 0

Don't even get me started on "tab management" - Chrome's 'brilliant' solution is "Don't have too many open," and then "Uh, use more windows?" Whereas Firefox has tab groups, an absolutely essential feature, and a ton of extensions with many neat solutions.

Inb4 "This is crazy," "WTF are you doing?" "That's abnormal," etc.. Some people actually use their browsers, some just browse Facebook. I don't claim that this is the average workload, but it should still be *possible*. It's not possible in Chrome. Chrome is for casual users. That's fine! If it keeps them off of Internet Explorer, I am totally okay with someone using Chrome... but to claim it's "The best" is naive at best.

For serious users the choices are Firefox, maybe Opera, and then nothing.

Re:Superior browser

[Rysc]

Pale Moon looks great, thanks for the link! The only problem with it is that it appears to be Windows-only...

I was a netscape fan and an open source fan, I used Mozilla from M14 (back when it really was slow and unstable!), caught tabs when the Tabbrowser plugin was originally released, tried Phoenix when became available, told my friends, watched excitedly as IE marketshare dropped, etc... I have been a staunch fan for years but recent developments for Firefox have been between worrying and horrifying. Broken version numbering? Automatic updates? A series of ever-less-useful UI changes (WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THE STATUS BAR?!)?

I can't possibly use chrome/chromium for lack of features, essential extensions, etc.. I don't think I could ever have a primary browser not based on XUL (or something like it), it's just too useful. My ideal browser would be a Gecko and XUL-based browser which is... well, pretty much exactly like Firefox 3.6 in UI and Firefox $LATEST in terms of features. Does anyone maintain a browser like that? That provides Linux binaries (or even just source that will compile?)

Chromium,

[pecosdave]

Like Chrome without the invasive EULA.

Re:Chromium,

[cpu6502]

I tell friends the same, but they don't listen. They don't seem to care that Google is monitoring their travels across the web and building a profile on them.

Re:Chromium,

[Anonymous Coward]

Point of Chrome is auto-updates. The vast majority couldn't care less about clicking update dialog every week.

Re:Chromium,

[Anonymous Coward]

I update my system at least once a week anyway (pacman -Syu) so it's not really an issue.

Re:Chromium,

[Anonymous Coward]

I keep hearing that the EULA is invasive. That Google is producing some massive database of information on me. But nobody points out the point in the EULA that's different from any other, any proof that my information is being captured, and anywhere I can see that data.

If I were to say this about Mozilla, or Linux projects ("Stay away from Linux, it's built by anonymous hackers with no legal recourse when they steal your data or break your stuff!") it would be discounted as FUD. But for some reason, lies against Google are acceptable here. Could anyone tell me why?

Re:Chromium,

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't seem to care that Google is monitoring their travels across the web and building a profile on them.

That's correct. I don't care that they build a profile to more effectively target ads that I ignore toward me.

Re:Chromium,

[Mashiki]

I tell friends the same, but they don't listen. They don't seem to care that Google is monitoring their travels across the web and building a profile on them.

Or it could be because people looking for Chromium give up after they can't find it on the first page of their site. And the first link points right back to Chrome.

Re:Chromium,

[lance_of_the_apes]

Doesn't Chromium actually require building? I have no idea where to find a compiled exe.

Re:Chromium,

[pecosdave]

Agreed, I use Kubuntu, it updates with the rest of my packages.

Re:Chromium,

[pecosdave]

I have installed it on Windows before, and I didn't have to build it. I do remember it was a pain to locate a pre-built exe and I only use that system on rare occasion (someone else's machine I care for). I don't have any experience with maintaining an up to date Chromium on a Microsoft system.

Re:Chromium,

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because what you're saying is BS. No history is ever sent to Google. hashes of file downloads are *optionally* sent. Stop spreading lies and misinformation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome_complete_version_history#Release_history

Re:Chromium,

[Mashiki]

Doesn't Chromium actually require building? I have no idea where to find a compiled exe.

It doesn't require building, but after nearly an hour of searching their website I still couldn't find a direct link to this: http://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/download-chromium

Which has a prebuilt version.

Re:Chromium,

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes

(I was so confused it was only when told that I learned that there was a difference between Google Chrome and Chromium)

Re:Chromium,

[Anonymous Coward]

That is because Linux and Mozilla operate using the GPL and open source code that you can verify. not all of Google is open.

Re:Chromium,

[Anonymous Coward]

Like Chrome without the invasive EULA.

Thing is chromium is in itself invsaive has anyone bothered to ask just how many people have no idea at all just how the hell they come to have it installed in the first place like several people at a meeting i was at tonight firefox users that all of a sudden find FF sidelined and Chromium taking pride of place .

That is i spose sort of ok ISH apart from the fact that Chromium Barfs at our HTML5 CSS3 based web site but FF is perfectly ok .. go figure so maybe there is some adjustment of figures need like maybe a reduction by 33% .

Re:Chromium,

[pecosdave]

So you mod me as a troll and then reply as an A/C.

That's so keeping it real and not being a troll yourself.

Re:Chromium,

[richlv]

that surely is the chromium we all knew for a long time :)
http://www.reptilelabour.com/software/chromium/

Re:Chromium,

[pecosdave]

I like that Chromium also, but I tend to spend my time on Power Manga instead.

Re:Chromium,

[dudpixel]

I tell friends the same, but they don't listen. They don't seem to care that Google is monitoring their travels across the web and building a profile on them.

...so that they can show them ads they might be interested in. (oh how sinister!).

Has anyone got evidence of any other activity done with this "profile"?

The only arguments I've heard that carry any weight is the "what if someone hacked google" or "law enforcement getting their hands on it without a warrant" - but these would be a concern for many things we use every day, not just Google.

For me, the decision has always been to either live in a cave or just accept that there's a (very very small) risk and just enjoy what everyone else enjoys. The benefit far outweighs any risk IMO. I suspect most people feel the same way (rather than being completely ignorant as many on here seem to assume).

Chromium still wants you to "sign in" anyway - so isn't that the same thing?

Re:Chromium,

[Waccoon]

Precisely why I still refer people to SRWare Iron.

Some people say Iron is a scam, but it does offer something Chromium doesn't: a consistent download link.

If you want a real scam, look at Comodo Dragon. It's also based on Chromium, but it installs extra junk on your PC, including software that affects all networked software, not just the brower itself. No thanks.

Re:Chromium,

[cerberusss]

It doesn't require building, but after nearly an hour of searching their website I still couldn't find a direct link to this:

It cost me all of 5 seconds. What are you trying to accomplish here? I definitely have the feeling you guys are trying to create the impression that Google is trying to hide the Chromium builds, or something.

- Go to google
- Type "download chromium"
- Click first link
- Again, click the first prominently displayed link, which is in a bigger font, and printed bold

Re:Chromium,

[chris.alex.thomas]

which makes you wonder, if they can't build a simple webpage with even the simplest of functionality, like putting a link to the download of their own projects on the front page. what will their other projects be like?

I *hope* better cause it can't get much worse....

Re:Chromium,

[Anonymous Coward]

It does seem to be available prebuild in many from many linux distributions. Currently running chromium-19.0.1084.46-2 on arch linux and I think Ubuntu has it through apt also.

Re:Chromium,

[Prof.Phreak]

Thing is, depending on how well they profile you, you may not be ignoring those ads! Oh the calamity if all the ads you were shown actually resulted in an unavoidable sale... [I think this is google's real plan... no joke.]

Re:Chromium,

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right.

Google 'chromium browser'.
Fourth link down takes you to Softpedia download page for Chromium 21.0.1146.0

Not that hard to find

Re:Chromium,

[cpu6502]

>>>Has anyone got evidence of any other activity done with this "profile"?

Google supports CISPA.
CISPA mandates companies turn-over collected data to the DHS.
Therefore the use of the profile is sinister. (Even before CISPA passed, google and others were routinely turning data over to the government via FBI or CIA requests.)

Re:Chromium,

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course the commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-snapshots/ shows an empty folder for anyone wanting snapshots!

Re:Chromium,

[Anonymous Coward]

Has anyone got evidence of any other activity done with this "profile"?

When Microsoft is accused, nobody asks for "evidence"!

Re:Chromium,

[Zanadou]

This.: make a folder for it somewhere on your system, and always use it as a shortcut to "start" Chromium.

Also keep it in an empty folder on a USB key ready to copy over onto another system: not truly portable, but still useful.

Re:Chromium,

[Anonymous Coward]

It all depends on how you look.
- Go to google
- Type chromium web browser
- Go to first link (www.chromium.org)
- See link to download chrome
- After searching site, find no links to download chromium builds.

I can certainly understand why some people would get frustrated with that. Going back to google and doing a more specific search is certainly an option, but I would have expected the download link to be more obvious on the chromium web site.

Re:Chromium,

[dudpixel]

Has anyone got evidence of any other activity done with this "profile"?

When Microsoft is accused, nobody asks for "evidence"!

That doesn't answer the question now does it?

The question I posed is not rhetorical. If there is real proof, I'll change my views on Google.

Re:Chromium,

[dudpixel]

>>>Has anyone got evidence of any other activity done with this "profile"?

Google supports CISPA.

citation needed.

In any case, I already mentioned this argument as "law enforcement getting their hands on it without a warrant". Sure, my definition might be too narrow, but the general idea is the same.

Without proof that Google does actually collect info for malicious purposes, this all sounds a bit alarmist and conspiracy theorist to me.

Sure, if there is proof, then we all need to change our views on Google, but so far this whole 'Google is evil because they MIGHT blah blah blah' and a bunch of what-if scenarios, is just getting old and tired. As soon as Google does any of these things, their business is finished. Why would they risk that?

Re:Chromium,

[Mashiki]

Again. Where is the nice simple easy link on the website itself? It's not there.

Re:Chromium,

[Rysc]

This is why in Debian the binary is called chromium-browser, to differentiate it from the original chromium.

False

[Anonymous Coward]

Statcounter just tracks requests. Google Chrome started using pre-loading pages, which artificially inflates page views.

Move along.

Re:False

[partofme]

This should be modded up, it's exactly what Google is doing and how it is inflating statistics.

Re:False

[Kjella]

Statcounter just tracks requests. Google Chrome started using pre-loading pages, which artificially inflates page views. Move along.

Actually they've changed that:

Prerendering adjustment

Further to a significant number of user requests, we are now adjusting our browser stats to remove the effect of prerendering in Google Chrome. From May 1 2012, prerendered pages (that are not actually viewed) are not included in our stats. More information on this is available in our FAQ.

Re:False

[cpu6502]

I found this online: "pre-rendering (loading pages in the background which the user never sees and may never even click on)"

What a shitty deal especially if you have a slow connection or Datacap. Chrome is wasting precious bandwidth. :-(

Re:False

[arose]

That hardly explains why Chrome's gains match up with IE loses with Firefox staying about the same.

Re:False

[justthinkit]

Is there a robots.txt setting to stop Chrome from doing this to your site?

Re:False

[Brian Feldman]

You think it's a mandatorily-enabled setting, do you?

Re:False

[sexconker]

You think it's a mandatorily-enabled setting, do you?

Every default setting is mandatory for 99% of users for the simple fact that they don't know they what it is or how to change it.

Re:False

[rtb61]

Chrome on Android and windows phone with IE just absolutely dying. So windows phones being actively replaced with android phones. Firefox not so big on phones.

Re:False

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it's all a conspiracy.

Re:False

[arose]

That is one possible explanation, however I was asking in the context of technical Chrome features skewing the numbers. For the graphs to come out like that if it was so Firefox would have to have gained almost precisely the marketshare that such a skew would introduce, at exactly the right time.

Re:False

[Anonymous Coward]

The above comment is false.

Move along.

Re:False

[Anonymous Coward]

So? Other browser's shares may have changed in some way during the last year. Nobody claimed that Chrome's pre-loaded pages feature explains all of the changes on the chart.

Slightly expanded theory: Chrome's stats are inflated due to pre-loaded pages and Firefox took market share from IE in the past year.

Re:False

[Anonymous Coward]

No. You would need to hack it in Javascript by not sending Chrome any of the correct links as-is but instead using Javascript to load a new page when the user clicks a link.

Re:False

[man_of_mr_e]

Do you understand how percentages work? If one goes up, the others have to go down.

Re:False

[arose]

The others didn't go down, only IE did. That's the point.

Re:False

[man_of_mr_e]

Yes, the others did go down. Chrome surpassed FF a while ago, and surpassed IE recently (Although those numbers do not reflect in any server statistics I have access to.. IE is still 80%+ in my experience).

While certainly, if you have three numbers, and one goes up, then both of the others do not have to go down, but in this case that is in fact what happened.

The point is that percentages represent a closed system. If numbers go up in one place, they have to go down in another.

Re:False

[arose]

Go over to statcounter and take a look at the fine graph. IE is markedly down, FF is more or less stable durring the time period IE started seriously declining and has actually bumped up recently. This would not be the case if Chrome's stats were merely inflated. Make your argument based on facts, not a preconceived notion of what they should be.

Re:False

[man_of_mr_e]

Where exactly did I say anything about inflated stats? I said that if one number goes up, others must go down (i guess from that perspective, "inflated could mean going up" but i don't think that's what you meant).

FF's stats did go down, at leat .5% during that time period. That is fact, based on the very link you gave. Don't try to use weasel words like "more or less". It's less. There's no more.

Re:False

[arose]

They also went up by some tiny amount. So I guess that makes you just as "wrong", not that your tangential nitpicking could be right considering the context was nothing but inflated stats and how those would have significant impact across the board barring massive coincidences. Now move along unless you have something useful to add.

Do not go gentle into that good night

[Anonymous Coward]

Rage against the machine, Mozilla.

Re:Do not go gentle into that good night

[binarylarry]

Mozilla: the company that dropped Linux support on their latest work.

Re:Do not go gentle into that good night

[Anonymous Coward]

Kinda slimy of you not to mention that that latest work is an "app store", something totally redundant on most Linux platforms.

Re:Do not go gentle into that good night

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would that be redundant on Linux? I see no reason it would be any more redundant there than on other OS'es.

Re:Do not go gentle into that good night

[awshidahak]

Mozilla: the company that dropped Linux support on their latest work.

Please do tell sir. What product did Mozilla drop Linux support for?

Re:Do not go gentle into that good night

[LordLimecat]

Hes talking about the update service I presume, which is retarded since Linux has built in mechanisms to keep Firefox current and doesnt need a dedicated daemon to do so.

Re:Do not go gentle into that good night

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean 'drop support' in the sense of 'was never supported because it's a new feature, but Linux support is being worked on currently'

I.e. Bunch of lies.

Re:Do not go gentle into that good night

[binarylarry]

I'm talking about the new Mozilla web apps system.

You fuck up.

But what are the weekday numbers like?

[jeffmeden]

The "Chrome effect" is the spike of internet trends that only happens on the weekends because geeks and other home-enthusiasts are using alternative browsers since there is no real restriction. What is the percentage of use during 9a-5p monday through friday? Looking at intra-week stats shows this heavily favors IE, or at least it has in the past. What is the trend for business adoption of alternative browsers?

Re:But what are the weekday numbers like?

[Kjella]

I don't know any stats company that gives out data on a per hour basis so you can compare business and non-business hours, not to mention not everyone is working but the weekends usually look like this: Chrome +2%, IE -2% and Firefox about even.

Re:But what are the weekday numbers like?

[jedidiah]

Stats companies can't break out their stats?

Sounds a bit worthless really.

You can miss an entire new emerging market like that.

Re:But what are the weekday numbers like?

[PPH]

IE6 on Windows XP. And that will hold steady until the sun goes dark. Because management won't authorize the funds to update apps coded to that standard.

Re:But what are the weekday numbers like?

[jeffmeden]

Some do, some don't. Here is an article from a month ago about what I am describing: http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/10/report-chrome-doesnt-win-weekend-browser-battle-after-all-but-still-popular-after-work/

Re:But what are the weekday numbers like?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're working in IT for a company that still mandates IE6 -- leave. There is high demand for IT workers from good companies that are not on the IE6 FAIL wagon. Failure to upgrade past XP/IE6 is just a symptom. You might as well leave on your own terms. Your job is not going to be around long anyway.

Re:But what are the weekday numbers like?

[PPH]

If you're working in IT for a company

A small fraction of the corporate web browser seats that generate these statistics. If we build airplanes, for example, you are going to have a difficult time convincing management that your choice of web browser matters. Want to leave? Fine. That just provides ammunition for the people that want to outsource the whole IT process to India.

Re:But what are the weekday numbers like?

[jeffmeden]

If you're working in IT for a company that still mandates IE6 -- leave. There is high demand for IT workers from good companies that are not on the IE6 FAIL wagon. Failure to upgrade past XP/IE6 is just a symptom. You might as well leave on your own terms. Your job is not going to be around long anyway.

That's what a lot of people said about COBOL... Thirty years ago...

Installbase is all that matters. Safety in numbers, and all that. If there are XP and IE6 deployments, there will be demand for apps, which will sustain deployment.

Re:But what are the weekday numbers like?

[Kjella]

Stats companies can't break out their stats?

Of course they can, but the first taste is free and for publicity. If you want details, they want to get paid. Seems to be a working business model to me.

Re:But what are the weekday numbers like?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where I work, we see almost a 20% shift away from IE on the weekend traffic vs. weekday traffic. We also see about 10% of our userbase is on tablets now. This is on a major automotive website.

Re:But what are the weekday numbers like?

[Anonymous Coward]

Define 9a-5p

Sincerely,
Someone in another timezone than you

Re:But what are the weekday numbers like?

[Anonymous Coward]

I gotta wonder how many avid Slashdot readers would be excited by the prospect of maintaining ancient COBOL programs. Sounds like the perfect job to outsource to Elbonia.

Re:But what are the weekday numbers like?

[maxwell demon]

Given that StatCounter gives the data per country, I don't think it should be too hard for them to also figure out the time zone. Yes, there will be some error, but then, all the data they have contains some error. They could for example just use JavaScript to read local computer time and send it to them. For computers without JavaScript enabled (or computers whose time is obviously wrong, like showing a date from years ago), they could use the IP to guess the time zone of the computer.

Re:But what are the weekday numbers like?

[smash]

Outsourcing to india is so last decade. It will be india outsourcing phone support to the US before too long.

Re:But what are the weekday numbers like?

[tywjohn]

I don't know how relevant this argument is since now it's possible to install Chrome on the local profile of a Windows computer and you can use a "portable" version of Firefox for non privileged users. I am currently writing this at work using Chrome in a locked down environment. Internet Explorer cannot really be forced any more.

Re:But what are the weekday numbers like?

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally I have no qualms about what technology you get me to work on, I will happily program on punch cards if you are willing to continue to pay my contract rates. I long ago got over the need/desire to play with the latest tech during work hours, that is for home use, at work I do whatever the hell you want for $175/hr

Re:But what are the weekday numbers like?

[AmiMoJo]

That's what Compatibility Mode in IE9 is for. IE6 is a security nightmare and any admin still using it is putting his users at risk. Anti-virus software won't save you. The only sensible thing to do is upgrade to IE9 and set up Compatibility Mode whitelists for the apps you need to run.

Alternatively install Chrome/Firefox and limit IE6 to just those webapps. There are even plugins for Chrome and Firefox that will automatically load certain web site in a tab using the IE HTML rendering controls (complete with ActiveX support). Yes, it requires effort, but so does coping with virus infections.

Re:But what are the weekday numbers like?

[Rysc]

If they permitted you to plug in a USB flash drive or execute something from %USERPROFILE% then it's not really locked down.

Re:But what are the weekday numbers like?

[tywjohn]

Good point

Yay?

[cpu6502]

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.

Re:Yay?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is still a lesser evil overall, though.

Any victory against Microsoft is worth celebrating.

Re:Yay?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe? But I'd rather have a third company who didn't earn money selling me to advertisers, supplying my browser.

Re:Yay?

[Bigby]

They don't sell you. They sell information about you.

How does this supplier make money?

Re:Yay?

[EvilBudMan]

Everyone knows that Facebook is the evil company now, with their new FaceBook OS, and new FB phones, and gadgets. They are everywhere now with even more spy data than Google has.

Re:Yay?

[EvilBudMan]

Uh, just write us up one and we will use it. It's only 10 million lines of code.

Re:Yay?

[qu33ksilver]

I just hope that I don't have to write a workaround for a page to look the same in IE anymore. Web designing in GC rocks. Period.

Re:Yay?

[Baloroth]

So use Opera, or Firefox, or one of dozens of quite often open-source alternatives.

Re:Yay?

[rtfa-troll]

Maybe? But I'd rather have a third company who didn't earn money selling me to advertisers, supplying my browser.

The crucial thing about this is that you can. Firefox is very compatible with Chrome. Safari is extremely compatible with Chrome. Chromium and it's various derivatives are ultra-compatible with Chrome. Each of those choices is still available and will work fine with sites designed for Chromium in a way in which sites designed for Internet-Explorer never will.

The crucial thing is that now, when some idiot running a stupid little web service you depend upon says "I only want to test for one web browser and Internet Explorer is 90% of the market anyway" you can give him hard solid facts like "well, actually Chrome is leading, and it's where the market is going" and then suggest "you don't want to be left behind, do you". If he starts testing for Chromium you will get most of the rest along with you. Certainly you will get Chromium and it's derivatives and certainly, once the idiot gets switched out to senior management, you will find it easier to get his successor to allow other browsers as well.

Re:Yay?

[wvmarle]

You can use Firefox instead. Or one of many other browsers.

The important thing here is not so much IE losing the #1 position. It's actually irrelevant since they went under 60, 70% or so. Now pretty much all web pages work fine for pretty much all browsers - compare that to 10 years ago when a large part of the web was IE-only. To view those pages you had to use IE, and companies got away with it because >90% did use IE which came with some convenient but proprietary extensions, and it was not worth catering for the other <10%.

Developers now code to standards, to make it work for all their users. Sure it's all not perfect and so (yet) but having a browser ecosystem with three major browsers with a large userbase (plus a whole lot of alternatives) but each well under half the total market is what counts. You have real choice now. You're not forced anymore to use IE to see a web page, you can use any browser you like. If you don't like IE and Chrome/Chromium, use FF, Safari, Opera, whatever: they all will do the job just fine.

IE falling from the #1 spot is just psychologically important. It goes to show how far MS has fallen. And it proves that Windows may be next - if only a truly viable competitor shows up.

Re:Yay?

[lgw]

I paid $50 for a Mozilla license. I'd happily pay the same for a secure, responsive, lightweight browser that didn't spy on me.

Re:Yay?

[Junta]

Critically, the spread of 3 *roughly* equal browsers is healthy. Any monoculture would be (was) bad. If you have to make your site reasonably render in Firefox, Chrome, and IE, there's a good chance you'll figure out the 'easy' way that's more likely to work with everything (rather than the hard way where you have lots of 'if chrome, do this, else if firefox, do that, else if ie, do something else', which seemed unavoidable in the IE6 days...)

Re:Yay?

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot should have a "level of evil" monitor for major tech companies.

Re:Yay?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or slashdot should grow up and realize things aren't as simple as their comic books.

Re:Yay?

[vinayg18]

You, sir, are in luck! You can keep your $50 because Chromium is free.

Re:Yay?

[noh8rz3]

I really like safari on Mac, win, and iOS. The win version is a little annoying in that they try to recreate the Mac experience and I think they go too far with the chrome etc, but it's still fast and sturdy. Also they don't sell your data.

Re:Yay?

[cpu6502]

>>>To view those pages you had to use IE,

Or not. I rarely used IE. It was Mosaic, then Netscape, then Firefox as my main browsers, and all of them appeared to render everything just fine.

Irony - My dialup ISP is called "Netscape". But they have never supported netscape or its sequel Mozilla. Only IE. I'm surprised they never supported their own browser but maybe it's because they are owned by AOL.

Re:Yay?

[hairyfeet]

But why would you care? Ever since web devs quit building "this site is made for IE 6" websites frankly it really doesn't matter WHAT browser folks use as finally all the websites can be rendered in any of the major (and even most minor) browsers without the least bit of trouble. And funny you should talk about evil and mention Netscape as they were just as proprietary and nasty as MSFT, or did everyone forget the "blink" tag and other NS only crap?

But as you noted in your sig we now have Seamonkey , plus Pale Moon, FF, Chrome, Chromium, Dragon, QTWeb, SWIron, Safari, Opera, Kmeleon and Kmeleon CCF ME, hell probably a dozen more I haven't named and they all just work across the vast majority of the web without hassle or rendering problems.

So as long as MSFT can no longer dictate the web "Works best in IE (version number)" frankly I don't give a rat's ass what the majority uses because the rest of us have a wealth of choices. And isn't THAT what really matters? that nobody is tied to a single browser just to be able to use the web?

Re:Yay?

[smash]

As do I. Sadly though, people see "Apple" and think "iTunes on the PC is shithouse" and ignore it. Safari is good.

Re:Yay?

[wvmarle]

>>>To view those pages you had to use IE,

Or not. I rarely used IE. It was Mosaic, then Netscape, then Firefox as my main browsers, and all of them appeared to render everything just fine.

Many company web pages I have had issues with. Banks were especially notorious to require IE.

And the thing is: everything APPEARS to render just fine. Until you talk to someone on the phone and discuss things you can find on that page, and you can't find the link because that part of the page is simply not rendered. I also have had many issues with links (often javascript) that just didn't work in Mozilla, while it worked fine in IE.

Re:Yay?

[EvilBudMan]

iTunes on the PC is crap. They must have done a very poor port. It's about as bloated of a piece of software that does what it does that I have ever seen. Maybe they should have just wrote in something like JAVA that runs on all machines (supposedly).

Re:Yay?

[EvilBudMan]

Yes, everything is a simple as comic books and TV (sarcasm). /. does what they want and it's worked now for almost 20 years. I think Facebook needs a better moderation system too, but will I get it? (I doubt it).

Those IE9 browser commercials don't help

[Anonymous Coward]

Advertising Internet Explorer, after all Microsoft has put us through with the previous versions, is like advertising for the garbage service. Anyone in the know who sees that blue E on TV must have a little bloop of bile come up into their throats. Microsoft is just REMINDING us techies to tell everyone to switch!

Re:Those IE9 browser commercials don't help

[dreemernj]

Maybe they can make another nerdier commercial that says something like "Hey, remember IE? The first browser with XMLHttpRequest and favicons and innerHTML? It wasn't all bad, was it?"

Re:Those IE9 browser commercials don't help

[smash]

Or, IE, the only browser with easy group policy security zone definitions.

Chrome is not open source

[sl4shd0rk]

Some of, but not all of, Chrome is open-source. You really want that transparency in a web browser these days. Use Chromium instead.

Re:Chrome is not open source

[spacepimp]

Excepting the Flash player and PDF reader inclusion, reader what is the difference between the two browsers?

Re:Chrome is not open source

[Anonymous Coward]

Excepting the Flash player and PDF reader inclusion, reader what is the difference between the two browsers?

The amount of complaints.

Re:Chrome is not open source

[KugelKurt]

Excepting the Flash player and PDF reader inclusion, reader what is the difference between the two browsers?

How can we know? As Chrome is not FOSS, it's pretty hard to do a diff between Chrome and Chromium.

Re:Chrome is not open source

[markkezner]

I believe Chromium also excludes Google's software update functionality.

Re:Chrome is not open source

[Amouth]

same as REL and CentOS

badges

Re:Chrome is not open source

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't include RLZ tracking (it's not disabled, it is simply not there) and the dreadful Google Updater.

Re:Chrome is not open source

[Anonymous Coward]

All the Google spyware.

Re:Chrome is not open source

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats because Google took Chrome from Web Kit which came from...Apple. Or at least Apple made it usable and then let others use it. Very few Google kiddies seem to know this.

Re:Chrome is not open source

[Anonymous Coward]

And Apple took WebKit from KHTML which came from...Konqueror.

Re:Chrome is not open source

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately there are no stable "release" versions of Chromium Win32 for M$-Windows. Searching for the Chromium Win32 binaries in omaha-proxy corresponding to the Chrome release version shows that numbered revision is yanked off when Chrome is released. Why does Chromium/Google yank it off - to prevent users from using Chromium instead of Chrome, so that they can track users etc. ?

Re:Chrome is not open source

[Anonymous Coward]

Not at all. There is a lot of good proprietary code in Chrome not found in Chromium. The updater comes to mind first, there are resources comparing the two if you are curious.

False, according to Statcounter

[chrb]

BROWSERS: Do you adjust your browser stats for prerendering/pre-loading?

Two browsers are affected by preview-type requests - Chrome and Safari.

Chrome

Further to a significant number of user requests, we are now adjusting our browser stats to remove the effect of prerendering in Google Chrome. From 1 May 2012, prerendered pages (which are not actually viewed) are not included in our stats.

Some points to note:

Prerendering was announced by Chrome in June 2011. This change did not have any significant impact on our stats.
Chrome is currently allowing the detection of prerendering behavior via its Page Visibility API.
Google specifically states:
"Important: This is an experimental API and may change-or even be removed-in the future, especially as the Page Visibility API standard, which is an early draft, evolves."

This means that in the future it may not be possible to track/remove the effect of prerendering on Chrome.

If other browsers adopt prerendering then it may not be possible to track/remove the effect of prerendering on those browsers. In that case, the fairest solution would be to include all page views (prerendered or not) for all browsers rather than only excluding prerendering in Chrome. That scenario would require us to revisit this methodology change in the future.

Safari

The Top Sites feature in Safari shows preview thumbnails of frequently visited sites. These preview thumbnails are refreshed by Safari periodically. Unfortunately, it is not possible to exclude these previews from being tracked. To get a bit technical, this is because the "X-Purpose: preview" header is only sent with the request for the base page. The header is not sent as part of requests for images, CSS or JavaScript that have to be downloaded and executed as part of the Top Sites preview. With online web analytics (as provided by StatCounter) the relevant header information is not passed so these preview requests can't be detected and therefore can't be removed. Ideally Safari will change this to ensure to send the "X-Purpose: preview" header with all Top Sites HTTP requests, however this is not the case at present.

Time for cake!

[Anonymous Coward]

Where is the cake for Google, Microsoft?
You love to send one to Mozilla every so often, why not Google? Look at how far they have come! Isn't it amazing? Wittle Goog all growed up!

What? No cake policy? Aw, you're just no fun now.

Re:Time for cake!

[recoiledsnake]

Where is the cake for Google, Microsoft?
You love to send one to Mozilla every so often, why not Google? Look at how far they have come! Isn't it amazing? Wittle Goog all growed up!

What? No cake policy? Aw, you're just no fun now.

They stopped sending cakes to Mozilla when they switched to the fast release model for Firefox, once they realized that they were spending a million a quarter on cakes because of a Firefox version coming out every time someone sneezed.

I believe the same would hold for Chrome as well.

Re:Time for cake!

[Anonymous Coward]

What? No cake policy? Aw, you're just no fun now.

They have a flying chair policy. And they where never fun.

Re:Time for cake!

[rtfa-troll]

They stopped sending cakes to Mozilla when they switched to the fast release model for Firefox.....

We have a winner. Finally an explanation for the Firefox upgrade policy. Some girl (transgender model wannabe according to your preference) in the office who felt she(?) was getting fat with all the cakes got a message like this

George; you know this new fast updates policy; it may be a good longterm strategy but we shouldn't do it until we have safe transparent upgrades. Anyway, I like the cakes Microsoft sends and they'd have to stop if we did that LOL...

and changed it to:

George; you know this new fast updates policy; we should go straight on with it and not wait for the safe transparent upgrades. Also Microsoft will go bankrupt if they have to send so many cakes LOL...

Re:Time for cake!

[LordLimecat]

Once that was announced, Mozilla went back into discussion over whether it was even worth doing the rapid release model, since the primary incentive had been removed.

Re:Time for cake!

[Anonymous Coward]

That must be why Firefox stole Google's the ridiculous numbering policy anyhow: cakes! It all makes sense now. I use Opera for daily use, IE if Opera can't handle it, FireFox for web design. Chrome? Way too pushy for me. The ways they circumvented "admin priviledges required" right from the start makes it still too suspicious to me.

Chrome seems to be the new hype for a lot of people who pretend to know something but really can give not a single valid reason why they choose it (and yes, I know a lot of users also do know why they picked Chrome).

Not seeing this on a large UK website

[mjpg]

These are the figures for visitors to a 250,000 visits a month site in the UK:

Internet Explorer 44%
Safari 20%
Chrome 17%
Firefox 13%

In any case, I'm not sure what 'choice' many visitors have. Some people get what their IT department installs, others stick with what is on (eg Mac/Safari or Windows/IE), others with what their familt IT support insists on.

Re:Not seeing this on a large UK website

[Jeng]

Considering the rather large percentage of Safari users I have to question whether the content of the website in question might be the reason for the different figures.

Re:Not seeing this on a large UK website

[Shados]

Safari will always be significantly higher than it should unless you code specifically to ignore the splashscreen's preview feature's HTTP header, which you cannot do in javascript (have to do it with server code), if you're using Google Analytics (very likely).

Thats because that stupid splashscreen executes everything, from javascript to flash ads, and thus trigger all tracking scripts and stuff.

That ends up with you seeing ultra-inflated safari figures, as well as inflated safari bounce rate.

On our site (not huge my some standards, but still several hundred thousand hits per day), and catering to a younger demographic (so higher than usual safari), about 30-40% of our safari hits are "fake" because of this.

Re:Not seeing this on a large UK website

[mjpg]

The site is general and has no Apple content. The reason above (Safari previews) is correct and the figures are not adjusted to allow for that. From the Safari bounce rate and av. time on site, I'd say a third of the 20% may be previews. - So a better estimate may be:

Internet Explorer 47%
Chrome 18%
Safari 14%
Firefox 14%

Well deserved

[Compaqt]

Sorry, but it's not just because of marketing.

The fact is Chrome's a good browser, it moved the state of the web forward, and Chrome's win is well deserved.

In hindsight, Chrome's dropping of the menu was brilliant. I actually don't use 99% of the time.

Secondly, it's fast. It loads pages fast. It loads fast from a cold start. It loads a new tab fast. It loads a new window fast with Ctrl+n. Firefox is sluggish by comparison.

Thirdly, it doesn't have a propensity to crash. I don't bother quitting it if I want to restart it. I just kill it with xkill. I know that there won't be a problem (data corruption or whatever) when it starts up again. If there's some other problem (laptop battery down), it opens the tabs I had open if I tell it to.

By contrast, it's a joke how every time Firefox opens it has the "Well, this is embarrassing" tab ("We couldn't open the tabs you had open last time due to some error, etc.").

Fourth, there's the "senior moments". It's when the Firefox window goes gray in Ubuntu. Seems it happens randomly. Even little kids have picked up on that ("the internet's not working!"). No, Firefox is not working. Doesn't happen in Chrome/Chromium.

As for tracking, use Chromium and turn query completion off.

Re:Well deserved

[Kjella]

Thirdly, it doesn't have a propensity to crash.

Chrome itself doesn't have a propensity to crash, but individual pages sure still do. It's not nearly as annoying, but it happens. And it can definitively hang long enough for Windows to say Chrome is unresponsive, but if you choose to wait it'll almost always come around. It sure better too, because it seems even the simplest tab eats 20MB of memory...

Re:Well deserved

[partofme]

I know that there won't be a problem (data corruption or whatever) when it starts up again. If there's some other problem (laptop battery down), it opens the tabs I had open if I tell it to.

That's not true actually. I've had Chrome fucked up several times after crashing or computer suddenly going down. So much that it was unable to recover and I had to manually go into the hidden applications data folder and delete all files it used. At the same time Chrome also couldn't recover the passwords file, so I had to start writing them all in again (thank god I use password manager and didn't only rely on Chrome's ability to remember the passwords).

Re:Well deserved

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

The extensions are shite.

Real garbage - and the updating of extensions is primitive, at best.

With all the assets they own or control - Google Code, anyone? - you think that this would improve. No luck. From the Google POV, users should NOT have control over their browsing experience, any more than users of televisions do.

The fact is, Firefox is a browsing TOOLKIT. Chrome is a HTML TV.

Re:Well deserved

[overshoot]

Secondly, it's fast. It loads pages fast. It loads fast from a cold start. It loads a new tab fast. It loads a new window fast with Ctrl+n.

That depends a lot on how much the page itself loads third-party scripts, Flash apps, etc. If you can't block them, it may not matter how fast your browser is.

Re:Well deserved

[cpu6502]

>>>Chrome's dropping of the menu was brilliant

Opera did that a long, long time ago. Also Chrome put the menu on the right side. I remember when Netscape 6/7 did that, and they were roundly criticized for violating Windows Usability Standards (species left location). But google? It's okay for them.

>>>fast

Slow as snails on my PC due to opening ~9 different processes (silly) and hogging memory (poor coding). I still use Firefox because it doesn't randomly freeze-up for 30 seconds.

>>>it doesn't have a propensity to crash

Yeah Chrome doesn't crash for me either. It just doesn't respond for 5 minutes (usually with a popup asking if I want to kill all my open tabs). Eventually I get fed-up and force a close via Task Manager, just as if the browser had crashed.

>>>We couldn't open the tabs you had open last time due to some error, etc.").

I experienced that with Chrome just yesterday, except where Firefox lets you recover the broken tabs, Chrome just erased them! :-(

Re:Well deserved

[Randle_Revar]

>The fact is Chrome's a good browser,

If by "good" you mean "terrible" then yes, it is.

Now webkit is a pretty good engine, it is a pity no one has yet hooked it up to a descent frontend.

Re:Well deserved

[awpoopy]

I was starting to feel sorry for you and your experience with chrome, the you went and said the magic words "Task Manager". Then I realized you were describing a windows machine. The problem you are experiencing isn't chrome...

Re:Well deserved

[cpu6502]

If Opera runs well on Windows, and Firefox runs well on Windows, but Chrome does not, then the problem is chrome and its shitty tendency to open a gaggle of processes like a memory hog.

Re:Well deserved

[Daffy Duck]

The fact is, Firefox is a browsing TOOLKIT. Chrome is a HTML TV.

Wish I had mod points today. Kudos, sir. :)

Re:Well deserved

[zakkudo]

I've always thought that chrome looks remarkably a lot like Safari with its interface elements... including the lack of a menu. There are a lot of Safari overtones. Then again, since I haven't used Safari in a good long while it might actually be Apple copying from Chrome now.

Below are pictures of Safari 5 VS Chrome.

http://www.maximumpc.com/files/u69/Safari_5.jpg
http://blogoscoped.com/files/google-chrome-screenshot.jpg

In all honestly, (some people may not agree) I can't help feel that the lack of a normal menu in Chrome was a lucky mistake rather than a calculated move when working with the old Webkit code.

Re:Well deserved

[lgw]

If Chrome runs poorly on my OS that's a Chrome problem, plain and simple. OS bigotry is very 1990s ...

Re:Well deserved

[Anonymous Coward]

As for tracking, use Chromium and turn query completion off.

So your solution to tracking is to ... use a different browser??

Re:Well deserved

[Compaqt]

>If by "good" you mean "terrible" then yes, it is.

Um, care to elaborate?

Re:Well deserved

[Anonymous Coward]

Now webkit is a pretty good engine, it is a pity no one has yet hooked it up to a descent frontend.

Try this or this
I used the first for a while, but at the time their webkit rendering had some really nasty memory leaks. I should probably give them another shot. The second has been reasonably stable and reliable for my purposes.

Re:Well deserved

[Compaqt]

Most people want a car, not a mobility toolkit.

For 95% of what I do, that's great--i.e., browsing.

Of course, there's Firefox with FasterFox, Web Developer, ScreenGrab, and some others installed for the 5%.

Re:Well deserved

[Compaqt]

No, I mean loading a new blank page. (Also loading pages, but mean, come one, FF can't even load a blank page without feeling sluggish.)

But yeah, Flash, 3d party scripts: Turn off JavaScript. Most of the web is just better without it.

Re:Well deserved

[Stormwatch]

Lucky mistake? It's the reason why I find it pretty much unusable!

Re:Well deserved

[zakkudo]

Which makes it look all the more like a window from a native install of Safari. No?

Re:Well deserved

[Anonymous Coward]

So, Chrome lost one user because his computer is slow or whatever. Big deal...

Re:Well deserved

[Anonymous Coward]

Chrome users are the new AOL or Myspace users. People with signs on their foreheads saying "I'm a moron".

Because you are a moron to empower the world's biggest ad broker and one of the biggest anti-privacy entities, which sells you as the product, by using their double click web browser. You are an idiot. All it took was some shiny.

Re:Well deserved

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like you have a rootkit or something else hooking process creation.

Re:Well deserved

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Great! An automotive strawman, to extend my television metaphor beyond the point of application. :-)

Given the the explicit choice, most people don't want a car that reports their exact activity to police, advertisers and insurance companies, 7/24.

Many would resort to "tooling" for their cars, in the effort to disable this.

Radar detector? Reflective licence-plate shield? Yanking the seatbelt chime?

Every day occurrence.

Re:Well deserved

[Stormwatch]

Safari on the Mac is perfectly usable because it has the same menu bar as every other program, on the top of the screen. To put the menu into a goddamn drop down menu is utterly retarded.

Re:Well deserved

[Barefoot Monkey]

I must say, after writing extensions for all the major browsers Chrome is the best to write for by a large margin (even though I prefer Firefox for personal use by a small margin). My only gripe with Google is their habit of charging one-time registration developer fee after one-time developer registration fee after one-time developer registration fee. Ostensibly it's to verify my account, but after paying so much to verify my account for Google's other services already isn't my account verified enough yet? I decided to draw the line and will have to do without Chrome Web Store.

Re:Well deserved

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Where is the Chrome extension of any significant value that is equal to its Firefox counterpart?

Adblock and Ghostery are better on Safari, than Chrome - and Safari's versions BLOW.

What about the Chrome equivalent of Firebug, or RESTclient, or even Greasemonkey? What about DownloadHelper or DownLoadThemAll? What about FireFTP?

How about Zotero? Nothing this sophisticated, powerful and simple exists in the Chromiverse. The ports to Chrome and Safari can be best described as experimental.

In fact, it is the breadth of Firefox extensibility that best argues its case. The Chrome portal by contrast, is littered with simple CSS shifters for Facebook and YouTube.

Re:Well deserved

[zakkudo]

I give up. I was hoping someone was going to tell me who added that drop down first or give me something else instructively informational between the two.

Re:Well deserved

[slazzy]

Other than the extensions, Chrome is a great browser. And websites are always trying to install rogue extensions which I find annoying.

Re:Well deserved

[edmicman]

What's funny is that I actually moved to Chrome fully *because* of Linux. I used to use Firefox all the time, everywhere. But Firefox on Ubuntu was slooooow. Not necessarily the page loading or script performance, but the UI just seemed laggy and ugly, especially compared to using Firefox all day on Windows at work. But Chromium in Ubuntu was *fast*, UI was fast to respond, fast to load pages, fast everywhere. So I eventually switched to Chrome on Windows and Chromium on Ubuntu so I'd have the same UI across the board.

Re:Well deserved

[NerdmastaX]

The fact is, Firefox is a browsing TOOLKIT. Chrome is a HTML TV.

Wish I had mod points today. Kudos, sir. :)

f* that. I like tv. Not as much "work" is required in chrome. Yet the same amount of work can be done as any other browser.

Re:Well deserved

[Barefoot Monkey]

I'm not arguing any of that - in fact, I agree. The extensions available for Firefox is one of the reasons I said that I prefer using Firefox to Chrome. But as a developer I happen to find extensions more pleasant to write on Chrome, that's all.

However, as much as I like Firefox I must mention that Firebug and Greasemonkey functionality comes built-in with Chrome. There seem to be plenty of FTP client extensions as well.

Re:Well deserved

[saveferrousoxide]

I'm afraid I don't understand. Chrome has the "Inspect element" right-click menu option that lets you manipulate a webpage and futz with the css. There's a version of Firebug for Chrome. In what way is Firefox a browsing toolkit that Chrome is not?

Re:Well deserved

[arkane1234]

Since Chrome works beautifully on OSX Snow Leopard & Lion, Windows 7, and Linux in all of my cases, you might want to revisit that thought...

Re:Well deserved

[arkane1234]

Seems to be a standard now. Look at I.E., Safari, Chrome side by side.

Re:Well deserved

[arkane1234]

Last I checked, my browser (Chrome) has in no way guided by purchasing powers.
In fact, I've been the only one guiding my purchasing powers... by choosing where to buy what I want...

You're reaching for straws, my friend. Chrome users are just like Firefox users.

Re:Well deserved

[Guppy06]

From the Google POV, users should NOT have control over their browsing experience,

What did you expect from a company whose primary source of income is advertising?

Re:Well deserved

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

I can bet that writing the chrom stuff is better than plugging into the XUL and whatnot half-tools! :-)

But I do find Firebug super extensible and versatile. The Chrome equivalent is 80% coverage. Fits every case, but the exact one at hand. And the ability to run script in Chrome works - and is probably faster than FF. But it really lags in the user part.

I guess my next take is this: If the tools are so much better for developers, why hasn't this platform taken off in the past 2-3 years?

Re:Well deserved

[Barefoot Monkey]

I guess my next take is this: If the tools are so much better for developers, why hasn't this platform taken off in the past 2-3 years?

Developer registration fees, perhaps

Re:Well deserved

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Right. Futz w/ CSS.

Firebug on Chrome? Not the same!

Look at this: http://getfirebug.com/wiki/index.php/Firebug_Extensions

In particular, this has been an indispensable:
http://firequery.binaryage.com/#faq

 

Re:Well deserved

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Heh...

Re:Well deserved

[arose]

Are you comparing to XUL extensions or Add-on SDK extensions?

Re:Well deserved

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox is a browsing TOOLKIT....

Firefox is a browsing crescent wrench which most people use as a hammer (can't touch this). SeaMonkey is an all inclusive Snap-on roll away by comparison and not a lot bigger.

Re:Well deserved

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

My god, Navigator! Ugly as ever 'twas!

Re:Well deserved

[kiddygrinder]

you can block flash and other extensions in settings -> privacy -> content settings. you can also make them click to activate. there is no way i'd ever use a browser without some way of getting that click to play functionality.

Re:Well deserved

[Anonymous Coward]

Not all of us want a chrome lookalike. And Seamonkey's page editor has Firefox's completely beat..

Re:Well deserved

[modmans2ndcoming]

and what do you think crashes on those pages? the JS code or the flash or the Java.

Re:Well deserved

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

I'm actually up for trying it out. Does it support TabMix+? ;-)

Re:Well deserved

[Anonymous Coward]

Fourth, there's the "senior moments". It's when the Firefox window goes gray in Ubuntu. Seems it happens randomly. Even little kids have picked up on that ("the internet's not working!"). No, Firefox is not working. Doesn't happen in Chrome/Chromium.

I see grey screens in Chrome pretty regularly once I put the load I normally put on Firefox on it. Any browser can handle 1-2 pages (if it can't, that's an indication of a poorly coded page, which I've noticed Firefox has a tendency to choke on much more than it used to...).

Re:Well deserved

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like you have a bias or something else hooking impartiality.

Re:Well deserved

[Bitsy Boffin]

Right. Futz w/ CSS.

I think you need to take another look at the Chrome Developer Tools, there is a hell of a lot more there than "futzing with css".

Re:Well deserved

[psiclops]

Many would resort to "tooling" for their cars, in the effort to disable this.

Radar detector? Reflective licence-plate shield? Yanking the seatbelt chime?

but most people don't.
i've only known one person with a radar detector (my dad used to have one), and noone i know has a reflective license plate shield or similar.

Re:Well deserved

[TranquilVoid]

Fourth, there's the "senior moments". It's when the Firefox window goes gray in Ubuntu.

My tab use is excessive (usually several hundred) and I find once it gets past a certain point on Ubuntu, Firefox starts using a lot of cpu and will occasionally get the gray 'not responding' look. Using strace shows a lot of disk access, I suspect it is thrashing the SQLite database for some reason.

As for tracking, use Chromium and turn query completion off.

Almost no regular user is going to do this, and if you are on Windows Chromium requires manual update checking and installing.

I take it Chrome has a minor performance advantage over Firefox but there are two reasons I favour Firefox. First, the plugin ecosystem is superior. This could change in the future. Second, Firefox's community-developed OSS deserves more trust than Chrome's corporate-developed closed/semi-open source. This won't change.

Re:Well deserved

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny. I've been using Chrome and Firefox side by side for a couple years now, and neither's been any better than the other overall. In fact, Firefox is just as "snappy" in my use cases, and Chrome just as crashy.

Both have their strengths and their faults, so this is a YMMV thing. It's incredibly easy to find faults with what you've been using for years, especially when you try out something new. It only sinks in gradually just how flawed they both are.

Re:Well deserved

[smash]

Chrome works just fine on my Pentium D from 2004. In Windows 7. It works just fine in virtual machines with 512mb of RAM running XP. Snappy, in fact. If chrome doesn't work for you either your hardware is WAY out of date, under spec or you have malware.

I don't run it any more due to the total lack of trust I have in Google, but the browser performs well, regardless.

Re:Well deserved

[Anonymous Coward]

The extensions are shite.

How can that get modded "Interesting"?

Re:Well deserved

[Anonymous Coward]

Great! An automotive strawman, to extend my television metaphor beyond the point of application. :-)

Given the the explicit choice, most people don't want a car that reports their exact activity to police, advertisers and insurance companies, 7/24.

Chrome does none of these things. Run tcpdump and show me the packets, or stop making nonsence up.

Re:Well deserved

[Compaqt]

>Second, Firefox's community-developed OSS deserves more trust than Chrome's corporate-developed closed/semi-open source.

I'm with you on that at a gut level. I was there during the whole Get Firefox, "we're gonna change the world" thing. I stuck it out for a long time. I just couldn't abide by the thousand papercuts of slowness anymore, and that's when I had to bolt.

Re:Well deserved

[Randle_Revar]

I'll take a look, thanks

Re:Well deserved

[Anonymous Coward]

Great! An automotive strawman, to extend my television metaphor beyond the point of application. :-)

Given the the explicit choice, most people don't want a car that reports their exact activity to police, advertisers and insurance companies, 7/24.

Many would resort to "tooling" for their cars, in the effort to disable this.

Radar detector? Reflective licence-plate shield? Yanking the seatbelt chime?

Every day occurrence.

It is always interesting how different perspectives can be. To me these are "every day occurence" as in I know some people must be using things like that, as they exists and are being advertised, but I've never in my 40 years of life encountered anyone using any of it.

Re:Well deserved

[Anonymous Coward]

note that...
firebug: built in to chrome
flashblock: built in to chrome
fireftp: built in to any decent OS file explorer

Re:Well deserved

[helix2301]

Of course Chrome is number 1 it's bundled with everything you download these days.

Re:Well deserved

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

If you can compare the Chrome buitin to Firebug, your needs are modest.

Re:Well deserved

[cpu6502]

>>> I was hoping someone was going to tell me who added that drop down first

Opera browser.
It's almost always Opera that comes-up with an idea first (like tabs... or online storage of bookmarks), and then the other folks copy it.

Re:Well deserved

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Not everyone is a Google shill - like you and the swarm of "anons" on this.

Re:Well deserved

[robsku]

Yes it damn well is Chrome - I've experienced all the same problems on my Debian GNU/Linux, besides if other browsers don't have these problems, that too should make it pretty clear where the fault is.

Re:Well deserved

[robsku]

Well, it does not on my Linux.

Re:Well deserved

[robsku]

Chrome used way more than 512MB on my Debian system with barely ~20 tabs open simultaneously. Oh well, with your specs I can see why you have no problems - in fact I never had problems with Chrome when I had only 1 or two tabs open :p

good

[Quiet_Desperation]

Still mainly a Safari (Mac) man myself, but I'm happy to see anything knock IE off its perch.

Re:good

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahh, another jealous Mac user. I guess it sucks having to pay more for everything.

Re:good

[Quiet_Desperation]

WTF?! Where did that come from?

(shakes head)

Geeks. What can ya do?

Yes Yay, Celebrate the Competition

[eldavojohn]

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).

Re:Yes Yay, Celebrate the Competition

[Anonymous Coward]

I would like a chromium Android build that supports flash.
(Google chooses not to with the official chrome).

Re:Yes Yay, Celebrate the Competition

[spire3661]

Fuck Flash.

Re:Yes Yay, Celebrate the Competition

[amicusNYCL]

Am I the only web developer that noticed that Internet Exploder started getting passably decent as Firefox & Chrome were breathing down their necks?

I was thinking about something like that earlier. I seem to remember Microsoft making a claim around 2004 that they were stopping development on IE, that IE6 would be the last version with patches as needed (I don't have a source for that though). Then Firefox 1.0 came out in November of 2004, then Microsoft announced IE7 in Feb 05. I was thinking about the state we're in today, where we have 3 browsers competing for the top spot (sadly, my beloved Opera is still where it always has been), and realizing that IE9 and now IE10 are like day and night compared to previous versions. It made me think about what would have happened if development really did stop at IE6, and I involuntarily shuddered. IE9 can hold its own against any of the others on top, and I expect good results with IE10 also. I'm not sure exactly when it happened, but at some point a few years ago the IE team redefined their goals to be much closer to what they should have been all along.

Re:Yes Yay, Celebrate the Competition

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck everyone who wants to use existing websites without getting all religious about what technology they use.

Fixed that for you.

Re:Yes Yay, Celebrate the Competition

[BZ]

"Without loss" is debatable; for example the set of audio and video formats Chrome handles is larger than the set Chromium handles....

Re:Yes Yay, Celebrate the Competition

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck flash.

Fixed that for you.

FTFY.

Re:Yes Yay, Celebrate the Competition

[Anonymous Coward]

What a brilliant comeback. I sit in awe of your magnificent debating skills.

Re:Yes Yay, Celebrate the Competition

[fallen1]

Wouldn't you have to catch him first?

(Yes, I have read too many and not enough comic books...)

Re:Yes Yay, Celebrate the Competition

[Anonymous Coward]

"Without loss of HTML5 support and standards" is pretty much on the mark. What you are missing are extra commercial offerings such as Java, Flash, and Silverlight. For someone who never installs such things Chromium is a decent option. I still prefer iceweasel (firefox without the non-free artwork/branding) myself but mainly just because I've become familiar with it and, properly configured, it's pretty fast on my 900MHz, 1GB RAM netbook.

Re:Yes Yay, Celebrate the Competition

[smash]

Yup, IE9 is decent. No maybe it is not the fastest browser out there. But as a baseline that you know will be installed sooner or later by most Windows users, it is good. It renders things fast enough, has hardware accelerated graphics, can be secured fairly well.

I have no major problems using IE9 on PC, Safari on my Mac, and Firefox on my *nix installs. They're all "good enoough".

Re:Yes Yay, Celebrate the Competition

[Raenex]

I seem to remember Microsoft making a claim around 2004 that they were stopping development on IE, that IE6 would be the last version with patches as needed (I don't have a source for that though).

I think you're mistaking an announcement that they were going to stop supporting the Mac. While internally IE was probably stopped, I don't think they would have ever been so overt as to make it an offical, public policy.

Re:Yes Yay, Celebrate the Competition

[Anonymous Coward]

"Without loss of HTML5 support and standards" is pretty much on the mark. What you are missing are extra commercial offerings such as Java, Flash, and Silverlight. For someone who never installs such things Chromium is a decent option.

I believe BZ was referring to H.264 and AAC/MP3 support in the HTML5 video/audio tags.

Re:Yes Yay, Celebrate the Competition

[93 Escort Wagon]

The problem is what happens when a user first gets IE9. There's a helpful wizard to walk the user through setting it up - and the default is to enable "Compatibility View", which basically takes IE9 (and IE8 before it) and turns it back into IE7.

IE7 was worlds better than IE6; but it was still a crappy browser missing a lot of modern functionality.

Re:Yes Yay, Celebrate the Competition

[man_of_mr_e]

That's incorrect. What it does is enable Compatibility Updates, which is a list of websites that require Compatibility View to function. This list can be upgraded periodically.

This does not turn on compatibility view by default, except for the sites in the list.

Re:Yes Yay, Celebrate the Competition

[freudigst]

Opera was decent at the (IE6) time until it started crashing ad infinitum

Re:Yes Yay, Celebrate the Competition

[93 Escort Wagon]

Thank you for the correction. I don't think they make that clear in the First Run wizard - certainly it confused me.

Reading through the TechNet docs, it's obvious you're right. That's actually a much more reasonable decision than I was giving them credit for.

Re:Yes Yay, Celebrate the Competition

[highphilosopher]

Not that I don't agree, but who tagged this as "Insightful"????

Who gives a shit?

[Anonymous Coward]

Look, when I download a browser, it's becuase of the way I use it and Firefox works for me because of the way I work. When I'm researching something, I like to bookmark what I'm looking at and FF is best at that. Chrome/Chromium sucks at it and IE isn't on Linux. I then go back, a read and study my bookmarks. I then cull them - because let's face it; most of the web now is just advertisements and sales pitches - many of them disguised as "articles" - and the insulting thing is that those people think we're stupid enough to think they're real.

Anyway, I lock down my computer so that if some asshole is able to infect my machine via the browser, at least I can contain it. I also take precautions so that if I need to, I can nuke the box.

BUT, I wish to hell that FF on linux's spell check would work on Slashdot! FF's spell check sorks fine on Windoes but NOT on Linux, WTF? It's getting really annoying!!!

Re:Who gives a shit?

[Anonymous Coward]

FF's spell check sorks fine on Windoes but NOT on Linux, WTF?

Who cares? Spell check is for people who misspel words.

Re:Who gives a shit?

[psiclops]

not really, i use it to find typos.

I have to say the updater cost me $500

[Anonymous Coward]

The updater on the Mac ate my internet connection for my WiFi hotspot. It's fixed now, but it was really sucking down my bandwidth for a while.

Re:I have to say the updater cost me $500

[arkane1234]

Windows, Mac, Linux... they all have updaters... and if you're on a wifi hotspot, you need to be aware...

I would like Chrome a lot better if

[overshoot]

it weren't designed primarily as an advertising medium that optimises the browser as a vehicle for tracking users.

Re:I would like Chrome a lot better if

[Anonymous Coward]

Still pretty good value for money ;-)

Re:I would like Chrome a lot better if

[Anonymous Coward]

Chrome doesn't send any information to Google, except what's required for it to function. And even that can be turned off.

Re:I would like Chrome a lot better if

[Anonymous Coward]

I love Chrome, but I would like it a lot more if widgets were customizable like their are in Firefox. It has speed, and many cool features, along with many comparable extensions now (though NoScript is still pain to get working under Linux, granted I have not tried in 6 months), but the Main reason I use 40percent of the time is the lack of being able to re-arrange all the widgets ( the search bar, navigation buttons, add-on buttons, etc).

Re:I would like Chrome a lot better if

[StripedCow]

If your privacy is worth nothing, then indeed.

Re:I would like Chrome a lot better if

[AmiMoJo]

Chrome is actually pretty much the same as Firefox and IE in terms of what data it sends back to the mothership.

Stuff you type in the address bar is sent to provide you with Google Instant results, the same as it is if you use the Firefox or IE search boxes. In IEs case the default search engine is Bing though. Web sites you visit are checked against a known bad URL database that is periodically downloaded and updated, with sites not in the list reported back to Google/MS for phishing and malware protection. When the browser crashes the default behaviour is to send some supposedly anonymous diagnostic data back to the developers.

Actually I think Firefox is a little better because Chrome and IE send unique IDs when checking for updates, and IE is particularly bad because it is tied to your Windows install via Windows Update.

Chrome doesn't have any special features for advertising or tracking, and in fact Google themselves provide a permanent opt-out add-on for it. Cookie and browser data controls are similar to Firefox and better than IE. Chrome was, IIRC, the first to offer an anonymous browsing mode. The developers responded to requests for an API to allow ad blocking by creating one.

Do you have any evidence of tracking/ad optimisation?

Re:I would like Chrome a lot better if

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is why it has Incognito mode.

Great thinking there.

My humble theory

[trifish]

I see a problem with StatCounter stats -- biased demography. StatCounter (in contrast to other players) is used predominantly by small to medium sites.

Now who is the most frequent visitor to a small or obscure site? The webmaster! They keep looking at their site many times every day.

Hence, most of the StatCounter stats are from the webmaster demography. I can assure you that webmasters are biased towards Google. That means that they are more likely to use Google browser.

If you use a stats source that is used only by the biggest players (a la microsoft.com), you will see totally different stats:

IE: 54.09%
Firefox: 20.20%
Chrome: 18.85%

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=0&qpcustomd=0

Re:My humble theory

[Anonymous Coward]

A webmaster looking at a website is, like, 0.00001% of the hits.
Absolutely neglegible.

Re:My humble theory

[Anonymous Coward]

but what isn't negligible is the type of sites which use this script. it isn't a reasonably uniform sample of the web and therefore not a reasonably uniform representation of the users (it is also not a good stratefied sample either).

Re:My humble theory

[amicusNYCL]

Now who is the most frequent visitor to a small or obscure site? The webmaster!
Hence, most of the StatCounter stats are from the webmaster demography.

That seems like a pretty major jump to make without any evidence. The only time I visit a site I've built is when someone reports a problem. The site owner can update their own content, they don't need me with my fancy Opera to do that.

Re:My humble theory

[edxwelch]

Those stats are cooked using "geo-weighting":
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/faq.aspx#Country

You might want to this blog, which explains it better:

http://encosia.com/cooking-the-books-is-hard-and-doesnt-help-anyone/

Re:My humble theory

[Anonymous Coward]

Statcounter doesn't count the webmaster's own hits, as long as they've set the blocking cookie or told it to ignore hits from their IP address.

Re:My humble theory

[Idbar]

And many of the ones still using Firefox like me, very likely uses NoScript together with AdBlockPlus (plus other more), so many JS scripts from tracking pages, are automatically removed. Which I assume also shifts some of those the statistic sites.

On the contrary, less people changes their Agent strings, so webmasters tend to have more accurate information about their visitors.

Re:My humble theory

[Anonymous Coward]

I see a problem with StatCounter stats -- biased demography. StatCounter (in contrast to other players) is used predominantly by small to medium sites.

I don't see that as a problem if small/medium-sized sites are the majoirity.

Re:My humble theory

[psiclops]

what do you know, people going to microsoft.com are more likely to be IE users.

Re:My humble theory

[INowRegretThesePosts]

Out of the 5 trackers listed in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_browser_usage#Summary_table, only 1 agrees with statcounter - the other 3 report, on average, *less* usage of MSIE than statcounter.

So, sorry, your theory is flawed.

Re:My humble theory

[INowRegretThesePosts]

I meant, "only one agrees with *hitslink*"

"Geeks"

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't get to Chrome numbers by being a browser for geeks/enthusiasts. 95% of Chrome users are casual users like your parents. They come straight from IE after clicking on a Chrome ad, thinking their internet will get faster.

Don't get me wrong, I still think Chrome is a good browser and I'm glad people use it instead of IE, but without heavy marketing it would be nowhere.

Re:"Geeks"

[Frosty Piss]

...They come straight from IE after clicking on a Chrome ad, thinking their internet will get faster.

And indeed interms of how fast they can see a page / site the way the site would like them to - quick rendering with JS / scripting - "their internet" is quicker with Chrome. The various parts of Chrome complete their jobs faster than FF and IE.

Android?

[peppepz]

Do these statistics include the default browser on Android devices in the "Chrome" group? Otherwise I'm extremely surprised by them. I can't believe that there's more than a person installing Chrome for each one that uses a PC without knowing what a "browser" is (and therefore is an IE user).

Re:Android?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do these statistics include the default browser on Android devices in the "Chrome" group? Otherwise I'm extremely surprised by them. I can't believe that there's more than a person installing Chrome for each one that uses a PC without knowing what a "browser" is (and therefore is an IE user).

Given the default browser on Android is considerably NOT Chrome in any way, shape, or form beyond the renderer being Webkit (as well as there being a non-default Chrome browser Google's released for Android), I'd find it quite surprising if they did include it that way.

Re:Android?

[Anonymous Coward]

The default browser in Android isn't chrome.

Re:Android?

[Nemyst]

Yeah, I gotta say I find this a bit surprising too. My parents are okay as far as tech goes, probably a bit above the average for their age bracket, but they wouldn't be able to install their own browser even in a life or death situation. I mean, one year after I bought my Nexus S and kept raving about Android, they still hadn't realized that Android was the OS for it.

Most people are too technically illiterate to understand what a browser is. Only way for them to gain market share is through auto-installers bundled with something else (IE with Windows, Chrome with Google Earth, etc.) or "the tech guy/gal" doing a favor, whoever he/she may be.

Re:Android?

[PCM2]

I can't believe that there's more than a person installing Chrome for each one that uses a PC without knowing what a "browser" is (and therefore is an IE user).

A lot of people do use Google services, though. They're obviously the leading search engine, and Gmail is quite popular. I can't remember where I saw it last (because I use Chrome), but Google used to put little messages on their pages saying "try a fast, modern Web browser - download Chrome today!" Considering how many people downloaded Bonzi Buddy, etc., back in the day, I can imagine that a lot of people see "fast Web browser," click the link, and they barely notice that Chrome has become their new default Web browser (or understand the significance of it).

Re:Android?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do these statistics include the default browser on Android devices in the "Chrome" group?

No. These stats do not include mobile, and Android Browser is not (and does not identify as) Chrome.

Re:Android?

[AmiMoJo]

Well Google is the most popular search engine, and every time you go there you see a little message telling you that Chrome is better than whatever you are using.

Also in the EU you get a pop-up window asking you to choose a browser, with Chrome as one of the options. Some PC manufacturers install Chrome as the default too.

so, what you're saying is,

[Eponymous Hero]

there were two eclipses yesterday.

Chrome, Firefox, Opera....anything but IE

[mikematic]

I would have loved it if it was Firefox that toppled IE but Chrome have really done some mind blowing shit lately esp with the V8 engine..so big ups to chrome P.S: if there are aliens watching, the human race wouldn't appear as retarded now

Re:Chrome, Firefox, Opera....anything but IE

[maxwell demon]

In Germany, Firefox has close to 50%, according to StatCounter.

What's the difference?

[Kergan]

Best I can recollect, HTML5 is not standard yet. Or did I miss a boat at some point?

If anything, implementing or supporting HTML5 is militantism. Doing can arguably lead to de facto standards (see Apple with h.264), but that doesn't necessarily make it right.

Please don't use Google products

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me introduce you to the top assholes at Google:

• - Vic Gundotra : The asshole who ruined Google+ by insisting on his moronic Real Names policy.

• - Sundar Pichai: The utter asshole whose incompetence has resulted in the shutdown of Google's Atlanta office.

• - David Drummond: Chief Legal Asshole and author of the creepy privacy policy.

• - Andy Rubin: Another huge asshole. A hypocrite who puts carriers first and users last. An imbecile who brags about Android's openness while keeping all development behind close doors.

• - Ben Treynor: The very definition of arrogant asshole. Threatened Dell not to buy anymore hardware from them and then it turned out it was Google who hadn't signed the support contracts. Did he ever apologized for his 'arrogant asshole' behavior? Of course not!

--

Say NO to the Google creeps!

Re:Please don't use Google products

[Anonymous Coward]

I know there is a Google employee who keeps down-modding this. Screw you, you can't stop the truth from spreading out!

--
I value my privacy, so I NEVER use any products from the arrogant Google assholes.

Re:Please don't use Google products

[psiclops]

i'm not a google employee and i'd probably downmod this too because:

a) it's pretty irrelevent to the article. it's really just a list of people you don't like, with vague reasoning that you don't expand on at all. it doesn't mention chrome or web browsers at all

b) the fact that you said someone keeps downmodding this implies that you have posted this multiple times. spam deserves to be downmodded.

Effect of bundling

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder how much these numbers are inflated by the 'also install google chrome!' horseshit bundling they do. I work on so many hundreds of machines where the client has chrome installed and doesn't even know what it is.

Re:Effect of bundling

[Anonymous Coward]

The statistic in question is use, not installs.

Those kinds of users tend to still click on the big blue E since they don't know what that beach ball icon is for.

Re:Effect of bundling

[miffo.swe]

Even if we pretend the browser was installed against the users will, they still continue to use it extensively in preference to IE that has all the users bookmarks, settings and whatnot. While im very skeptic about users being forced to install Chrome against their will, they seem to like it either way since they really use it instead of IE, day after day after day....

Attention hipsters:

[gman003]

Chrome has now "sold out", and may only be used "ironically".

The current "hip" browser is now Lynx in an xterm window set to use Helvetica (it's "vintage"). Please adjust your usage accordingly.

Re:Attention hipsters:

[Hillgiant]

This whole "rendering" business is so gauche. I prefer to read the pure html. It can be quite refreshing.

Re:Attention hipsters:

[Anonymous Coward]

Get on my level.
w3m or wget plus a custom python render.

No Javascript, no Flash, no CSS. HTML only.
Final Destination.

Re:Attention hipsters:

[advocate_one]

real hipsters would be using Cello on Windows 3.1

Re:Attention hipsters:

[Anonymous Coward]

Whaaaat?! I thought, for sure, the current hip browser was uzbl, albeit you have to provide your own customization code. Lynx is soooo mid-90s it's not even funny anymore.

Besides, you can tweak your uzbl to make it look and feel like Lynx if you're feeling nostalgic, OR, just want to show off your mad coding skillz

(plz, interpret humourously, I'm a big FF fan, though I have Safari, Opera and Chrome sitting right next to them...though I might "switch" to Chromium this very night)

So it should work a little cleaner

[gelfling]

Better font rendering, better Java compatibility, etc.

Re:So it should work a little cleaner

[Anonymous Coward]

Better font rendering, better Java compatibility, etc.

No, Java applets in the browser need to die.

Actually, they're dead already, but the corpses need to be shot so that they'll stop lurching around.

I see something completely different

[Anonymous Coward]

The stats for my website paint an entirely different picture. I have Chrome as the second lowest primary browser at 8% share, only beating Opera who is at 1%. Even Android devices beats out Chrome at 9%. The top three are IE (54%), Safari (15%), and Firefox (13%).

Granted it is an e-commerce website that has a largely non-technical audience; but then again the majority of users (in America, at least) seem to be non-technical anyways.

I'd be interested in seeing what the browser spread for other high traffic websites are.

Doing the munchkin dance.

[multicoregeneral]

Now I just need to remember where I put my knee high socks...

Including or excluding Chromium?

[unixisc]

Do these numbers include or exclude Chromium? Btw, congratulations, Google!

By necessity, not choice

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not a big fan of Chrome's UI. I use Chrome because more and more sites don't work with IE. Slashdot, ironicly, works with IE. Some finance sites are actually using MS stuff on the back end (scary) but strangely enough the scripts crap out in IE but work well with Chrome. The JavaScript seems like IE's weakest link. The Google PacMan doodle was the first thing I noticed that revealed a slow, leaky scripting engine. It seems like web developers have given up on IE users. It might have been driven by the desire to attract mobile users (who are known to spend more). MS hasn't lost the users, they've lost developers and users are following.

Lynx? Please.

[Anonymous Coward]

Real hipsters use Gopher, and if you must use the web, telnet to port 80.

When did Asia get demoted to country?

[Anonymous Coward]

From TFA: "It seems like the only countries bolstering usage of Internet explorer, interestingly enough, are Asia and South America."

Re:When did Asia get demoted to country?

[Anonymous Coward]

The same time as South America? It seems obvious the mistake there is countries should be continents, not that Asia is in the list.

Re:When did Asia get demoted to country?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, in Asia's case, it was a promotion.

I'm no geography expert...

[kaizendojo]

But last time I checked, the US was part of the world. So exclduing it from the count skews the numbers and therefore the conclusions. No MS fanboy, but I'm really sick of these so called stats that say one browser or another is number one. Seems to be once or twice a quarter these articles get posted on /. and none of them ever turn out to be without major flaws.

Re:I'm no geography expert...

[Eponymous Hero]

i don't know about this. i mean, we have the superbowl to decide the world champions of football, and we're the only ones who play it. could be the fault lies in considering anyone but the us in the study. in fact, that would be downright unamerican.

Re:I'm no geography expert...

[cupantae]

I'm guessing you're no mathematics expert, either. The US figures are included in the overall percentages.

About the flawed tests, this is a count which is known to be difficult. It's absolutely impossible to get an accurate count.
But counts like this are indicative of something. While there might not currently be more Chrome users than Internet Explorer users, it is StatCounter's honest estimate that there are. Given the history of web browser competition, this is certainly important and arguably interesting.

Re:I'm no geography expert...

[PCM2]

But last time I checked, the US was part of the world. So exclduing it from the count skews the numbers and therefore the conclusions.

I don't think they excluded the U.S. What they mean is that when you exclude the entire rest of the world, the U.S.-only statistics look different. You can choose the statistics that are more important to you.

NoScript or javascript turned off?

[Anonymous Coward]

Having some trouble finding the method these statistics are created. Isn't javascript a requirement to gather this information? If that is the case, wouldn't NoScript have quite an impact on the actual results with regards to FireFox? And for other browsers as well with similar capability.

Personally I don't enable the scripts for anything more than what is necessary.

good for the free market

[Anonymous Coward]

This is good news for all of us. MS has been slowing down development of open stardards like HTML5 to secure Windows monopoly. Open standards could mean open competition and that is something MS does not want to enable. If IE's share is small enough, MS has to support open standards to keep IE in game.
Of course no browser sould be strong enough to control the market but Chrome is open.

In doing so, they support the intent behind it

[Burz]

They are just uncomfortable with how brazenly the current wording spells it out.

The right move would be to come out against the bill. Why is that so hard for them?

Re:In doing so, they support the intent behind it

[a90Tj2P7]

They are just uncomfortable with how brazenly the current wording spells it out.

The right move would be to come out against the bill. Why is that so hard for them?

It's a hell of a lot more constructive to diplomatically work on fixing the problems with something than it is to stamp your feet and say you don't like it and therefore it shouldn't happen - that's a sure way for something to pass without anything done to fix it. The biggest problems with CISPA revolve around the potential for abuse, the lack of definition and accountability, and the way it superscedes all other privacy laws. The "wording" is as important to a law as it is to code.

Re:In doing so, they support the intent behind it

[cpu6502]

>>>don't stamp your feet and say you don't like CISPA

Why not? That approach worked well for Google and others when they opposed SOPA. They killed the bill.

Re:In doing so, they support the intent behind it

[a90Tj2P7]

>>>don't stamp your feet and say you don't like CISPA

Why not? That approach worked well for Google and others when they opposed SOPA. They killed the bill.

If you'd have bothered to finish the quote instead of changing it, maybe you'd have understood it. They didn't just say "We don't like it, don't let it happen", they explained the unfixable problems with it. That wasn't just about saying "no" and having everyone take your word for it, it was about educating people about the issues with the bill. The entire purpose of SOPA was the problem - it existed just to make copyright infringement penalties harsher, to make it illegal to link to infringing content or have it appear in search results, to combat piracy with indiscriminatory censorship. The problems with CISPA are in the execution and the loopholes. Objectively, CISPA can be fixed to address the concerns of abuse while still improving the process for goverment inquiries into security issues, SOPA couldn't be fixed because its problems were its goals.

Re:In doing so, they support the intent behind it

[cpu6502]

CISPA's problem is also the goals. Its mission is to make all the data held by ISPs and websites be turned-over to the government, so they will know the websurf history of every American. The bill should not be "fixed" to make this task easier. It should be burned.

But you wouldn't understand.
Just as people cheered-on FDR when he rounded-up japanese-Americans.
Some people love serfdom more than freedom.

Re:In doing so, they support the intent behind it

[cpu6502]

>>> The biggest problems with CISPA revolve around the potential for abuse, the lack of definition and accountability, and the way it superscedes all other privacy laws

The biggest problems is that it shouldn't exist. It's nothing more than a way for RIAA/MPAA to monitor your downloads, and then send you extortionate letters demanding $5000 "or else we'll drag you to court". It is also a way for the DHS to spy upon you and censor your internet access if they don't like what you say (for example: supporting Campaign for Liberty). Or maybe just arrest you outright under the NDAA's "anti-terrorist without right-to-trial provision.

Nor do we need "cybersecurity". The best security is to pull critical systems (power plants, classified computers) off the internet.

Bottom Line: There is NOTHING defensible about CISPA, and that you chose to do so makes me wonder if you are an enemy of the Bill of Rights. I suspect that you are. MOZILLA came-out against the bill. Microsoft, Apple, RIAA, MPAA, and other known-evil companies support it. Google should be siding with Mozilla, not with Monopolysoft.

Re:In doing so, they support the intent behind it

[a90Tj2P7]

It's nothing more than a way for RIAA/MPAA to monitor your downloads, and then send you extortionate letters demanding $5000 "or else we'll drag you to court".

There's no provisions, whatsoever, for such a thing to happen. There's nothing in there that addresses piracy or copyright infringement.

Nor do we need "cybersecurity". The best security is to pull critical systems (power plants, classified computers) off the internet.

There's a lot more to network attacks than defense of utilities or classified networks - the latter of which aren't on the internet in the first place, and I'm not familiar enough with the former to speculate like that.

Bottom Line: There is NOTHING defensible about CISPA, and that you chose to do so makes me wonder if you are an enemy of the Bill of Rights. I suspect that you are.

I never said I did. I said it needed to be changed. These two things are mutually exclusive. And I don't even know where to begin with the accusation that I'm an "enemy of the Bill of Rights" - it's an insane leap, it's completely off-base, it's an ad hominem attack, it demonstrates a delusional and extremist sense of false dichotomy... I'm not sure how someone can even say that with a straight face.

Re:In doing so, they support the intent behind it

[a90Tj2P7]

CISPA's problem is also the goals. Its mission is to make all the data held by ISPs and websites be turned-over to the government, so they will know the websurf history of every American. The bill should not be "fixed" to make this task easier. It should be burned.

What you're talking about is the logical extreme that the lack of clear definitions and accountability could lead to. It's a completely legitimate argument to make as a concern, but it's paranoid and unprovable to claim that it's the intended goal. That kind of abuse can be mitigated with clear definitions of what constitutes a threat and vetted, overseen and controlled requests. Whether you're an NSA agent or a mail server admin, the solution to the possible abuse of authority is accountability.

But you wouldn't understand. Just as people cheered-on FDR when he rounded-up japanese-Americans. Some people love serfdom more than freedom.

Oh, lordy. The babydaddy of all logical fallacies and invalid arguments, the classic "you wouldn't understand". It really takes the edge off of the next two fallacies, though. Maybe you should've have saved that line for last, for the sake of effect. I'm more than happy to have an objective, informed and constructive discussion about the facts and possibilities of the situation. The only kind of person who "wouldn't understand" is the one who refuses to, the one that's closed to and unaccepting of other perspectives, consideration and evidence.

Re:In doing so, they support the intent behind it

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure how someone can even say that with a straight face.

It probably helps that he's managed to convince himself that he is a champion of the bill of rights despite admitting that he wants to take away our rights to peaceably assemble and petition the government for redress of grievances, both of which are first amendment rights.

To sum up the linked thread, he wants to disallow people from getting together with a few hundred others, calling themselves the Fruit Fuckers of America, or the EFF, or the NRA, or the NAACP, or PETA, and petitioning the government.

Wait

[travbrad]

I thought Microsoft's OS monopoly was forcing everyone to use IE by including it with Windows?

Re:Wait

[jcupitt65]

MS threatened to cancel OEM's cheap Windows licenses unless they stopped preinstalling Netscape for users. It was nothing to do with bundling IE.

You may be thinking of the media player wars, which were a bit dumberer :(

About Time

[thebeige]

Oh yeah, what was the first thing i did on Windows 8 preview? Install Chrome, baby!

Real reason why IE is falling.

[MtViewGuy]

By the way, there is a MAJOR reason why usage of Internet Explorer is falling: it lacks automatic spell check. I've read a lot of web browser users have switched to Firefox or Chrome in Windows XP/Vista/7 because IE 8.0 (Windows XP) and IE 9.0 (Vista/7) lack the ability to check spelling.

However, IE 10.0 for Windows 7 and 8 does include spell-checking for the first time, and that may dissuade a good number of users from using alternatives. And unlike IE 8.0 and 9.0, IE 10.0 is WAY more HTML 5.0 compliant, too.

Re:Real reason why IE is falling.

[tsa]

Does the standard browser on Android devices identify itself as Chrome? I think that is then the reason why IE is dwindling. MS doesn't have any market penetration to speak of in the mobile world.

IE is a POS

[Anonymous Coward]

The number of low life Microsoft astroturfers in this thread is pretty pathetic. Only a retard would continue to use that POS IE.

Huge directory hangs browser

[Anonymous Coward]

So to prevent that, grab the number from:
http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-snapshots/Win/LAST_CHANGE

and edit the following url replacing INSERT_NUMBER_HERE with that number:
http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-snapshots/index.html?path=Win/INSERT_NUMBER_HERE/

Re:Huge directory hangs browser

[Mashiki]

So to prevent that, grab the number from:

Okay good idea, but here's the problem. If you're trying to make an alternative product, you want it to be easy to find yes? Otherwise you're making something that only geeks would use. Isn't the point of making something to distribute it and gain recognition for it?

Re:Huge directory hangs browser

[tomofumi]

actually the chromium builds are all located here: http://chromium-build.appspot.com/p/chromium/console but i think it is too technical for average users to know how to use it and d/l stuff from there...Maybe that's what Google wants you to go back to d/l chrome instead?

Hold your horses.

[Anonymous Coward]

It has a long way to go....

1. Internet Explorer 27,966 34.69%
2. Safari 16,894 20.96%
3. Firefox 12,672 15.72%
4. Chrome 10,126 12.56%
5. Android Browser 7,185 8.91%
6. Mozilla Compatible Agent 3,232 4.01%
7. Mozilla 1,760 2.18%
8. Opera 313 0.39%
9. Opera Mini 177 0.22%
10. IE with Chrome Frame 107 0.13%

Re:Hold your horses.

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox 732,404 34.9 %
MS Internet Explorer 628,271 30 %
Safari 277,310 13.2 %
Google Chrome 163,652 7.8 %
Android browser (PDA/Phone browser) No 123,484 5.8 %
Mozilla 66,285 3.1 %
Unknown 34,468 1.6 %
IPhone (PDA/Phone browser) No 32,522 1.5 %
Samsung (PDA/Phone browser) No 10,091 0.4 %
Opera No 7,758 0.3 %
Others 17,112 0.8 %

hmmm

[smash]

Giving up IE, which is merely insecure, for Chrome which actively tracks you. Sigh.

In a post-webkit (and Opera!) world, there are plenty of other really great options out there, and I really think it is important that we push other browsers, other search engines, other blog services etc to prevent Google cementing their strangehold on virtually all facets of the online experience.

Go experiment with other search engines. Go try a different browser. Try living without google for a day. Because otherwise if they ever turn evil (whether or not they already are is open to debate), we're fucked.

Re:hmmm

[vst]

Try living without google for a day. Because otherwise if they ever turn evil (whether or not they already are is open to debate), we're fucked.

too bad I already spent my mod points. this one is the most enlightened and the most truthful I've heard lately... cheers!

According to Google.

[Anonymous Coward]

According to Google.

The gospel according to .....

Just like to point out something. I'm typing this on Firefox. Firefox is getting worse, but its still the best browser around. Ignoring proprietary joke ones, and ignoring Opera which failfailed, Firefox is still the only one that delivers everything you need. And that includes a Master Password and a Go button, Goog couldnt even goog that right.

Net Averages

[Anonymous Coward]

Adobe's (Omniture) Net Averages appears to roughly agree with those stats as of May. Those are aggregated stats from everybody that uses Adobe's web analytics, (some of the largest websites in the world).

Aside from Adobe, the only people that might have a better idea is somebody like Google or Facebook that pretty much everybody uses.

IE: 48.3%
Firefox: 19.4%
Chrome: 19.7%
Safari: 9.1%

Re:Net Averages

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, these numbers are DESKTOP browsers. In mobile, iOS's browser is obviously killing everything.

Other Misc Browsers

[Anonymous Coward]

They're forgeting to take into account the many other browsers out there that people use. I myself primarily use Lynx, but also have installed Midori, Arora, Opera, w3m, FireFox, and several others on this current machine. The Machine that sits behind me has AOL 6.0 which I often use just for amusement. With all of the tracking shit in Google Chrome, I don't use it. I radther go through the trouble of compiling a windows build of Chromium than to use Chrome.

Scriptno works for me

[anarcat]

What's wrong with Scriptno? https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/oiigbmnaadbkfbmpbfijlflahbdbdgdf

Never used it

[tsa]

I've never even tried it, as far as I can remember. I am quite satisfied with Firefox and don't need another browser. Are there more people like me out there?

Re:Lynx? Please.

[tsa]

I always read the newspaper. On paper.

IE 6 Must Die

[ibic00]

http://www.ie6-must-die.com/

Why any doubts?

[dpak1170]

Not sure why people have doubts it was inevitable as IE is a very poor browser compared to Chrome and Firefox.

Time flies

[wandernauta]

I realized that if anyone had, just five or six years ago, told me that KHTML would be the dominant rendering engine in 2012, I would have laughed at them until I turned blue.

Chrome

[Anonymous Coward]

Chrome also gets views for every tab you have open. Because its more easy for every day users to open tons of tabs, I think thats one of the main reasons Chrome gets ahead.

Firefox has many tabs too, but is slower about it and less mainstream.

Statistically Sound

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone who ate carrots between 1895 and 1897 is dead. Therefore carrots are 100% fatal. Take the blue pill.

Competition time

[hardeep1singh]

Dear Microsoft, Please step up your game. I will eagerly await Microsoft Browsing Essentials.

So now...

[randyleepublic]

If only Google would figure out how to hire some decent usability analysts. E.g. Chrome's bookmark manager has a search function that won't what? It won't search the names of the folders you create only the bookmarks themselves. Duh? Hello! WTF is wrong with them in Mountain View?

ff people use anonymity plugins making stats bs

[Anonymous Coward]

most of the people i know, have various plugins like noscript, adblock and others, making js statistics collection from firefox impossible

questionable stats?

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't reflected in our stats :

1. Microsoft 50.7%
2. Google 23.2%
3. Mozilla 17.9%

This is on a large UK based newspaper site.