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Google Says There Are Now 2 Billion Active Chrome Installs (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Google is hosting its Chrome Dev Summit today. There hasn't been a lot of news out of the event, but one number that stood out in today's keynote by Chrome Engineering VP Darin Fisher was that there are now 2 billion Chrome installs in active use across desktop and mobile. This is the first time Google has shared this number. Sadly, Google didn't announce any new user numbers for Chrome today. The latest stat for active Chrome users remains at 1 billion -- a number Google shared in April. While this number is surely higher today than it was six months ago, the company decided to focus on the number of active browser install today. "I wanted to make this point that there are a lot of Chrome browsers out there," Fisher said. "What's exciting about this to you all is that when you think about building for the web, there' a lot of browsers out there that implement the latest web standards -- that implement the latest and greatest web features." The report also notes that Google has a total of seven products with more than a billion users: Gmail, Android, Chrome, Maps, Search, YouTube and Google Play Store.
that's a lot of browsers that that have rendering problems with google's own Open Sans Font in 300, 600, 800 weight....
Funny how people seem to forget how it all started.
They say two "billion", but they only mean 10^9, as they are american "billions".
Of course there are. Chrome is the new above-board "virus" being shoved on everyone as unwanted bundle-ware along with anything they download, then making itself the default browser (worked so great for IE, right?). Then once it's on there, it arrogantly thinks that "OH I HEAR YOU WANT TO RUN CHROME, OK I'M GOING TO TAKE OVER YOUR COMPUTER ALL TO MYSELF", spawns a dozen processes or so and proceeds to suck up all available RAM and CPU. This is not platform specific (we're seeing it on Macs and Windows) and as a result people are switching back to Firefox because they're tired of the horrible performance and Chrome taking over the whole computer (hey Google, computers are meant to multitask).
I personally have never had a good taste about Chrome but I'm seeing tons of previous Chrome fanboys coming to the Firefox side now. *shrug*
How many of these are used only to stream Netflix?
I for one am worried about Google tracking users and providing their browsing data/location to governmental agencies for their parsing with the purpose of watching/graphing what everyone is doing. While I may not do anything illegal or immoral online, I still prefer to remain anonymous as I see fit. I do currently use Chrome on work computers, but I am transitioning to Firefox/Tor on all of my home machines. I already do not install Google's web browser on new machines, whereas I had been inclined to before. Hopefully, this will become a trend and keep Google innovative and promote privacy internationally. If anyone is interested in privacy-related tools:
Check out DuckDuckGo, StartPage (ixquick), epicsearch for privacy-oriented search engines and Pale Moon, Firefox/Tor, and Epic Browser for privacy-oriented web browsers.
Also, go to https://privacytools.io for more information on privacy/security.
Stay safe out there!
The real question is, how does that make Trump look bad?
Why would it need to do that? Trump makes Trump look bad.
I wonder how many unique users of Chrome though? Google can likely have a fairy good idea of that by the nagging you get to log into it when installing it.
I'm personally responsible for about 16 instances of Chrome across various devices, virtual machines, etc. in my house. Others may not have quite so many instances, but I'd guess that most users have at least two instances of it (computer, phone).
The numbers can't be accurate unless these "active installs" are calling home...
Thanks, Obama!
How do they know that Chrome has 2 billion active installs? Is it because Chrome always phones home?
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
YUP! I have it installed on every machine I work on, yet use it on none except for extreme situations. Same goes for IE and Firefox. None are default. None get daily usage, only there for testing purposes and debugging things. My daily driver? Opera, AKA Chromium Stable.
Quick quiz: which one of the following billion user apps has an incredibly stupid name?
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
The one and only reason that Google can claim this is because every Android device comes with Chrome installed and you can't remove it. Sure, you can install Firefox or some other browser instead, but even if you never ever use Chrome, it will still be there, wasting bandwidth on updates that will never get used. And, even if you select another browser as your default, you'll still get asked which browser to use every time you click on a link in an email, with Chrome selected instead of whatever you've picked as your default. (And, the checkbox to make it the default will also be checked.)
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Chrome should not be proud of their "standards support". They not only failed to remove non-standard failures from WebKit, waiting for too long for the web to become reliant on them, and then leaving it up to others to clean up the mess, but they also implement support for standards that are never quite right, and feel really rushed out the door.
This includes them wagging the dog to get others to implement things like WebRTC and IoT stuff before it's really been properly vetted, but also them just dumping their own proprietary tech out into Chrome before it's even a pseudo-standard (WebP, QUIC, PPAPI, etc), then let scads of their drones haunt other's bug listings trying to get these half-baked features into other browsers. Then others have to do the heavy-lifting to make proper standards out of them, fixing the problems they can which aren't already "too far gone", and making others look like they're behind.
This isn't even counting how they essentially worsened support for Flash by making the PPAPI version the only relatively stable one, instead of putting their muscle behind making a version that didn't need the plugin API. On top of that, they've shown how willing they are to just ignore other's standards when it's convenient, even if it screws things up for everyone. Just look at how they gave up on Pointer Events, made a competing, inferior Touch Events spec that didn't co-exist with it, and then backpedaled too late, only driving the state of touch event support back by many, many months while others sorted out the problems they had introduced.
Frankly, Google hasn't been any better at driving the modern web than Microsoft was back when they were #1. The only difference is that their supporters still love them enough to give them a pass for their steering, and that their most visible opposition (Apple) are a laughing stock when it comes to web standards support after touting it so loudly when it helped sell their early iPhones.
Although this is really a SFW* factoid they gave, it is refreshing to see that they are apparently only counting installs that actually get used. I know some companies claim any system that may have had their product installed on it (even if that product got removed and replaced with something else right away) as part of their numbers.
* SFW = So Freakin' What (or So Fuckin' What, if you are not afraid of the fuck word)
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Spasibo, Vladimir!
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
If you like Chrome use Chromium instead. At least you can turn off the spyware misfeatures.
It is not feasible to stop Chrome from calling home. It intentionally sends data to Google's main website URL to prevent anyone from trying.
We *nearly* got there - We were *almost* at the point when you could browse the web with *any* browser you liked and it would work!
Now we're back where in the dark days where you have to use a specific browser to be guaranteed full site functionality. And it friggin' sucks.
Yess !! I am totally agreed with it.