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Google Chrome Tops 1 Billion Users
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Venture Beat: At the I/O 2015 developer conference today, Sundar Pichai, Google's senior vice president of product, announced that Chrome has passed 1 billion active users. Less than a year ago, Google revealed Android has over 1 billion active users. These are indeed Google's biggest ecosystems. Google also shared that Google Search, YouTube, and Google Maps all have over 1 billion users as well. Gmail will reach the milestone next; it has 900 million users.
Screw the open internet. Let's put EVERYTHING on Google! No.... Let's make Google be the internet!!
Who's with me on this?
What could possibly go wrong?
Captcha: amassed!
While there are certainly people who are running chrome on different unlinked devices, this measurement is probably still a lot more meaningful than when facebook says it has 12 billion users. Similarly, I'm not sure how meaningful the measurement of 900 million gmail accounts is; I have more than one myself.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Let's see, over 1 billion for Chrome, and for Android, Search, YouTube, Maps, Mail -- that's over 6 billion users!
I have more than one myself.
Why have any at all? It's not like there is any shortage of email providers who are in the business of providing email, rather than harvesting personal data. Hell, I dunno where you are located, but here in the US almost every single ISP includes free email with your account. I've never heard of one that doesn't provide POP3, and usually IMAP too. I'm sure somebody will promptly chime in and say, "well mine doesn't!", but the point is that nearly all do.
So there's free email if you want it, and lots of alternatives if you want those which still don't aggregate the entire world's email in the hands of a single advertising firm.
And here I am about to ditch Chrome for Firefox because the 4+gb of memory usage on desktop with a bunch of inactive tabs open is meaning I can't really do work properly anymore because my machine is liable to lock up from running out of memory. And this isn't hundreds of tabs - it's like, 30-40 tops.
Going with the free email from your ISP means that you lose your email address if/when you switch to another ISP.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Nobody teaches you how to handle 100,000,000 simultaneous user requests. Throwing more and more hardware at it is what you cannot escape when dealing with tens of millions of users a second. At least Google is not a bank, where things really need to be synchronized across accounts and be perfectly transactional. It doesn't matter to Google that there are no transactions. A piece of data presented to a user in the USA may be different than the one presented to a user in Japan, but it isaybe an answer to the same question, but the data did not propagate all the way everywhere yet. Even so, it is quite a challenge to deal with hundreds of millions of users daily and tens or hindreds of millions concurrent user requests a second. They are doing it really well too. I can only imagine the massive problems that need to be solved. It is jarring. Good stuff.
You can't handle the truth.
Trying to get firefox to work with all the flash stuff on linux is just too painful. Chrome, while slow and buggy lately is the best option available. It appears that google goes to great lengths to make sure that firefox will not play youtube videos. So yes, I run chrome.
Look folks, I have avoided Google Maps on Android for one major reason: The app shuts off the screen, while in use! Imagine that for a second. This has been an ongoing thing since the very beginning.
Consequently, for Maps, I use Waze which exhibits no such annoyance.
And going with Google means you lose that one when Google goes out of business. Which, I promise you, it will eventually.
If you're worried about changing ISPs a lot, then pay a few bucks a year and get one with a dedicated email hosting company, of which there are many. The price is negligible, roughly the price of a cup or two of coffee per year.
My android phone has a gmail account by default. I use it and my Yahoo account to send messages/pics from the phone. It's easy and free, so what's the worst that can go wrong? ;^)
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Might not be universally true anymore. Check the terms :)
Hotmail used to delete all your mailbox if you didn't check it for six monthes (just the content, you could then start using it again). I think they stopped doing that. But back then I lost all my email (not much used or for unimportant registrations etc.) and stopped using them. With 100x bigger hard drives etc. they don't play these games anymore I think.
Modern issue is getting "helpfully" locked out of your account, microsoft or google. I have a friend who cannot access his account at all. He registered using an old friend's cell phone number at the time.
The location based lock out is very creepy as he once could access mail in another place in the same city, but at a newer place in the same city he was locked out.
So.. if you have an ISP email that says you still can use it after leaving the ISP it may be a lot safer! (the @ispname.com gives them a bit of advertising). Microsoft and Google blackmail you into giving them your personal data else your account may get locked and thus you may lose contacts and important messages.
I considered using Chrome some time, but Firefox still beats it regarding plug-ins and their configurations: Adblock+, Noscript, Lightbeam, ... and the possibilities to block anything that you do not want on your computer/browser.
Going with the free email from your ISP means that you lose your email address if/when you switch to another ISP.
That wasn't my experience. Once they started putting ads in the web client, they were more than happy to keep hosting an email address for you.
If you're worried about changing ISPs a lot, then pay a few bucks a year and get one with a dedicated email hosting company, of which there are many. The price is negligible, roughly the price of a cup or two of coffee per year.
I've been wanting to move away from gmail, and have an .com domain, but I can't figure out what to put in from the of the @, Ie. what goes here: @.com.
So for now I'm stuck on gmail... and that email address is getting used so many places I'll never be able to stop using it.
Android needs a Google account and given a Google account is a Gmail account..... How come there are 1 billion+ Android but only 900 million Gmail?
I have a Google account for each Android device (x3) and Gmail from when it was email for people who wanted email (x3) [and not massive spyware that records your every move]. So I'm 6 or so Gmail accounts. I have difficulty believing that there are people with lots of Android devices sharing their one Google account across those devices.
I mean, one or two, sure, but more than 2 devices attached to one address??
This is not a good thing; I have been using Chrome more and more, but it's not because I want to.
It's like we're back in the bad old days where you had to use Internet Explorer for some sites and Netscape for others, only now it's IE and Chrome.
We went through a nice phase with the AnyBrowser campaign, and I was able to use Opera or even Lynx - Sure not all sites rendered 100% correctly, but they *worked*.
But while Opera 11.64 (The last good version of Opera) is still my primary browser, I find I'm being forced more and more to use Chrome for some sites because of pointlessly excessive javascript and webkit extension usage.
Even my beloved GoG.com has fallen to this annoyance - Where the site was perfectly usable in my old Opera before their more recent changes, it is now broken completely to the point of being unusable unless I use Chrome :(
Imagine! What the user base is going to be once they are out of beta and do the first release.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I use Chrome, but only for gmail. That way, I figure that Google just gets to read my gmail (mostly used for public email lists) twice.
1 billion users of android and 1 billion users of chrome, and you still can't build chrome-public as part of an aosp build.
you can, however, rebuild and replace android's webview from the chromium source.
That one billion figure doesn't sound as impressive after one considers that it's fairly likely that it's mostly obtained by counting every Android install that comes bundled with Chrome. I'd be shocked, just shocked, if Google does NOT count someone who used Chrome a few times, before installing Firefox mobile. Like me, for example. I hardly ever use Chrome on my Googlephone. But, I'm sure I'm counted in that billion-plus figure.
This is EXACTLY where Microsoft wanted to be with the phone strategy and this is EXACTLY where Microsoft does not want a competitor doing.
How is the Windows desktop to survive in corporate america if all the new and intelligent developers are targeting Android / Linux?
Time to play dirty and send the hit men out, put the scare that if you dev for Android / Linux you might get put 6' under. Maybe they will start by just roughing them up a little with a night stick or have them bump their head when getting into the patrol car, taxi or limo....
And going with Google means you lose that one when Google goes out of business. Which, I promise you, it will eventually.
If you're worried about changing ISPs a lot, then pay a few bucks a year and get one with a dedicated email hosting company, of which there are many. The price is negligible, roughly the price of a cup or two of coffee per year.
Dedicated email hosting companies, including those you pay actual money for, would go out of business much easier than Google would. Google's size and reach is vast. Google would have to be sitting on a net operating loss of several million per year for a few decades before they'd ever go out of business.
Meanwhile, a single recession could potentially kill a dedicated email company.
Until they're bought by BiggerCableCo who then converts it to an @biggercableco domain, and you lose all of your contacts.
What alternative to GMail, preferably self-hosting, does close to as good as Google for searching through email? That's a serious question, that's what's keeping me on GMail. It's just a little too handy at being an organizational tool.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Some point to the iOS vs Android as being walled garden vs. freedom, while it is actually more like closed garden vs. being a prostitute. Some point to Firefox vs. Chrome as okay vs better, while it is actually more like freedom vs. being a prostitute.
I keep hoping that Android and Chrome will successfully fork from Google at some point so we can enjoy great open source software AND freedom. What, exactly, makes that unreasonable?
I download all my email using thunderbird and then make a backup of it. I get to keep all of my email and don't have to worry about google going out of business. I've counting this since 2002 and haven't reach 5 gb of data yet. I don't trust anyone with my data and don't store it in the cloud. Call me old fashion but I feel safer than trusting others with my personal documents.
More like around a billion dollars per year for several decades. Google currently has over $60 billion in cash.
Google's business is doing quite well, and this will probably continue as long as its leadership is pretty decent at business. That's not to say Google can't fail, but it would take a long period of really bad management decisions for that to happen.
Which users do they count?
Desktop only?
4wdloop
it is still a pile of steaming elephant dung.
Not news, Film at 11.
Only 995,000,000 (more or less) to go
Either I should stop buying Google ads because they are severely overstating their exposure or people within the United States of America are not Google's primary customer base.
Going with the free email from your ISP means that you lose your email address if/when you switch to another ISP.
Thats why you own your own domain. Hosting company goes out of business,you switch to another. You can even forward it to someone else if you prefer their mail interface.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
In truth, these numbers of users are really quite small. The current upper bound seems to be about 108 billion, so there's still a ways to go.
Going with the free email from your ISP means that you lose your email address if/when you switch to another ISP.
In the meantime, if you have some trouble with your ISP email account (lost password or whatever), there's actually some level of support and a mechanism to get back into your account. Good luck getting any support for Gmail.
So? Chrome crashes constantly and sucks now -- despite Google removing features every new version. Android is fragmented as hell and slow, with Google trying to remove as much open-source as it can.
Meanwhile, the big news for developers at Google I/O was the awesome news about how Google can help developers serve even more shitty adverts to app users.
Fuck Google, I'm going Microsoft, at least Microsoft plays well with others now that Ballmer is gone and Nadella in charge.
A Google service can be killed without Google going out of business. History has shown this many times.
I have no doubt Google will be the next hated technology company. There is something about becoming too big that makes things go south. But as much success Google has had, its core money maker is still in ad revenue. This is really a problem for the future. Chromebook's which is hardly mentioned is mostly popular in education and nowhere else. 75% of Chromebooks are sold to educational organizations and of that Chrome OS only makes up less then 1.5% or so of total PC sales. So while people seem to love Google Chrome browser and Android OS phones. They don't care for Google's Chrome OS ecosystem. Its really very hard to convert people from a widely used OS like Windows. Even if you hate Microsoft, you eventually realize that most every program ever developed has basically defaulted to doing a Windows version. What Google needs to do is find a way to actually make money with their products, not giving away products in hopes that those products sell ad revenue. I do not think Google has a good business model in general.
The downside of this is that they can afford to be totally unresponsive to users. Google has recently replaced their classic Google maps with a piece of junk. Don't take my word for it, go to the Google maps forum, this link for example: https://productforums.google.c.... While every single one of the close to 1000 posts on that thread (except for the Google representative's initial post) is negative, Google can afford to ignore them (and in fact, not even respond to them), because the complainers constitute a tiny fraction of the number of users. (And it's not clear how many they represent, i.e. how many other users hate the new version but haven't taken the time to post their displeasure--or may not know how to do so.)
Or should i say Farcebook?
There are ~7 billion people in the world...
If the domain is yourname.com then hello@yourname.com or firstname@yourname.com works; the latter is probably less confusing if you have to verbally dictate it to someone (unless you just spam business cards everywhere). So saying "john at john smith dot com" is clearer than "hello at john smith dot com", because verbally saying hello mid sentence is unusual.
You can forward gmail emails to another address pretty easily, and even reply to those emails from that email address or from your primary one. It's easy to set up in Google Apps with your own domain, and probably just as simple on other hosting services (which you'll presumably use).
Whilst not a particular fan of being an advertising firm's b*tch, I'd also caution against using free ISP email. Doing so makes it trickier to switch ISP.
(Sadly I'm speaking from experience here.)
Hello is a good one... I might that... because the domain is [firstname][last name initials].com