Chrome Passes 25% Market Share, IE and Firefox Slip

An anonymous reader writes: In April 2015, we saw the naming of Microsoft Edge, the release of Chrome 42, and the first full month of Firefox 37 availability. Now we're learning that Google's browser has finally passed the 25 percent market share mark. Hit the link for some probably unnecessarily fine-grained statistics on recent browser trends. Have your browser habits shifted recently? Which browsers do you use most often?

Comments

Chrome - the web browser that's added as bloatware

[Z00L00K]

Chrome is added as bloatware to a lot of products which makes it hardly surprising that it gains an advantage in market percentage.

bad statistics

[geoskd]

Why is it that when I look at wikipedia , they show all the various counters more or less in agreement, except netapplications which vastly overcounts IE and undercounts Chrome, android and safari? Why is it that of all the various counters netapplications is the one most often quoted, even though they appear to be using a bad methodology.

Re:bad statistics

[benjymouse]

Why is it that when I look at wikipedia , they show all the various counters more or less in agreement, except netapplications which vastly overcounts IE and undercounts Chrome, android and safari?

Maybe because Net Applications is the only counter that tries to correct for known skewed sampling. Net Applications uses CIA internet usage data (how much of the population in each country has access to the Internet) to estimate absolute numbers for each country based on the measures distribution and the "Internet" population number. Net Applications is perfectly honest and upfront about this.

The other counters just report whatever stats has been collected. They also are perfectly honest and upfront about this.

Both correcting and not correcting may leave errors. Be your own judge.

But there's a perfectly good explanation as to *why* the numbers seem not to agree: They do not even claim to illustrate the same thing. Net Applications tries to create a number for "true" global distribution (and risk errors), the others do not even claim to compute such a number. In theory you could take the numbers from, say statcounter, by country and extrapolate the absolute number per country, sum them up by browser and calculate a number similar to net app. Could be interesting to see.

Also, be aware that there is also great popential for skewed demographics between the counters, not to mention the fact that Net Applications tries to measure unique visitors (discarding repeat visitors within a month) while most of the others just report page impressions. If for instance users of Chrome are more active on the 'net than users of IE, chrome would have a bigger share of page impressions than they would of unique visitors. There is no "right" in this: It all depends on the question you ask: If the Q is "which browser is the most popular?" you would look at unique visitors. If the Q is "which browser is used the most?" you would look at page impressions.

Why is it that of all the various counters netapplications is the one most often quoted, even though they appear to be using a bad methodology.

Maybe because they use the *least bad* methodology. The others do not even *pretend* to estimate global usage. They may report what *they* see of usage globally, but none of them claim to know how many users there are in each contry.

Re:bad statistics

[Solandri]

Maybe because Net Applications is the only counter that tries to correct for known skewed sampling.

They have to correct for skewed sampling because their sample size is so small, especially for non-U.S. sites. Of the big metrics sites:

StatCounter monitors over 3 million sites (reports page hits)
W3Counter monitors over 70,000 sites (reports unique visitors per month)
Net Applications monitors over 40,000 sites (reports unique visitors per month)

Net Applications is the only one which reports IE still in the lead. Which given the sample sizes I think more calls into question their correcting algorithms than it does StatCounter's sample.

I've switched back to Firefox

[Parker Lewis]

I switched back to Firefox few months ago.

In Ubuntu, Chrome is a resource hog. I usually have several tabs opened at the same time. Just compared the RAM usage: 7GB in Chrome, 1.1 in Firefox.

Additionally, Firefox is a bit faster (in UI), and it just respects my look and feel (colors, borders, font sizes, etc).

And for address bar searches, Chrome privileges the google search instead of navigation history, which I really don't like (I usually visit the same sites, and even with several hits in a day for the same site starting with the same word, Chrome prefers, for few ones, to search when I type the word instead of display the known URL as first result).

I just changed few settings in Firefox (increased scroll speed, click in URL behaviour to select the entire address), and voilà.

Just annoying that every Google service keep suggesting to use Chrome until you dismiss this message.

Very very very poor multi-tab open

[goombah99]

Chrome is truly awful at opening multiple tabs at once on my mac. unbelievably slow loading times compared to Safari. And when a page is loading in one tab, other tabs don't continue to update swiftly. I find this really a weirds because chrome uses a separate process for each tab so one would think they would not step on each other. My guess, wild, is that tabs are contending for some resource like network or GPU and actually slowing each other down. In general I much prefer safari or firefox, but I use chrome because I also own a chromebook and I can't run safari on that. Basically, google is doing the same thing microsoft did to make IE dominant by not allowing other browsers on their platform.

Re:Very very very poor multi-tab open

[war4peace]

Chrome has a lot of issues:
1. It's a fucking RAM guzzler. 14 simple tabs eat up 2 GB RAM after 24h of usage. If I leave the browser open for a week, it's going to eat up over 4 GB RAM with the same tabs open, without working with any of them. I inadvertently discovered that when I went vacationing for a week and left Chrome running on my PC. Firefox, with the same tabs, eats 600MB RAM (as reported by Chrome's own about:memory).
2. Opening several tabs at once slows the OS to a crawl until they all load, which could take up to a minute (on a fast PC).
3. Tabs crash suddenly even if they're not used for a while (or maybe because of that).

With that being said, I depend too much of its deep interconnection with other Google services and it's amazingly helpful in managing my data, so I'll keep grumbling about its shortcomings while using it.

Re:Chrome - the web browser that's added as bloatw

[narcc]

I've seen it included with CCleaner and Avast. It's a plague.

sudo apt-get install chromium-browser

[tepples]

Chromium (which IS open source) apparently has build issues and isn't even in the normal Fedora repos.

Fedora's fault. In Xubuntu, a Debian derivative, all I have to do is sudo apt-get install chromium-browser.

And the memory footprint of all browsers is crazy now.

Is this the fault of the browser or of the sites you visit? Back when sites weren't as image- and script-heavy, like Better MF Website, a graphical browser could actually fit on a 16 MB machine. Nowadays sites are covered with carousels full of high-DPI photos, plus developers think they still need jQuery and all its bloat just to get the site out the door faster.

I also don't appreciate them throwing unnecessary crap into the browser like the web developer stuff

Browser developers distribute the debugger with all copies of the browser to keep sites from intentionally detecting a debugger's presence and stopping working if one is found. If everyone has a debugger, the site operator can't block people who want to tinker, learn, and make a site more usable without blocking everyone.

Chrome is the new IE

[Espectr0]

Some pages only load on it, because startups often require features that are only available on it. The new whatsapp for web comes to mind, at first it was available only for chrome.

Computer manufacturers often bundle chrome preinstalled.
In my country Venezuela few people went to download firefox, but venezuelans love google search, so you see ads to upgrade from your old IE 8 to chrome.

Here are my website's stats (insurance company):
Chrome (55.31%)
Firefox (21.87%)
Internet Explorer (19.00%)

OS:
Windows (89.72%)
Android (4.80%)
Macintosh (2.57%)
iOS (1.54%)
Linux (0.54%)

Windows versions:
7 (60.97%)
XP (29.26%)
8.1 (6.15%)
8 (2.33%)

Re:Chrome - the web browser that's added as bloatw

[tompaulco]

the browserchoice bullshit in europe expired at the end of last year... so all non-microsoft browsers, like firefox, lost that free exposure... so no os default like windows, no pay-for-installs distribution like chrome, means firefox falls. not surprising

So from a capitalist perspective, Firefox is the number one browser, because Firefox is the most frequently chosen browser for people who on purpose install a particular browser.