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Even For Businesses, Chrome Is The Top Browser (computerworld.com)
An anonymous reader shares Computerworld's interview with David Michael Smith of Gartner.
"Most enterprises still have a 'standard' browser, and most of the time, that's something from Microsoft. These days it's IE11. But we've found that people actually use Chrome more than IE... It's the most-used browser in enterprise," he said... IE retains a sizable share -- Smith called it "a significant presence" -- largely because it's still required in most companies. "There are a lot of [enterprise] applications that only work in IE, because [those apps] use plug-ins," Smith said, ticking off examples like Adobe Flash, Java and Microsoft's own Silverlight. "Anything that requires an ActiveX control needs IE."
Many businesses have adopted the two-prong strategy that Gartner and others began recommending years ago: Keep a "legacy" browser to handle older sites, services and web apps, but offer another for everything else... Chrome, said Smith, is now the "overwhelming choice" as the modern enterprise browser... Smith wasn't optimistic that Edge would supplant Chrome, even when Windows 10 is widely deployed on corporate computers in the next few years. "Edge certainly will have opportunities" once Windows 10 is the enterprise-standard OS, "but I would say that Chrome has a lot of momentum, largely for the fact that it is so popular on the internet."
While a year ago Chrome and Microsoft's browsers both held 41% of the browser market share, now Chrome holds 59% to just 24% for both IE and Edge combined.
Many businesses have adopted the two-prong strategy that Gartner and others began recommending years ago: Keep a "legacy" browser to handle older sites, services and web apps, but offer another for everything else... Chrome, said Smith, is now the "overwhelming choice" as the modern enterprise browser... Smith wasn't optimistic that Edge would supplant Chrome, even when Windows 10 is widely deployed on corporate computers in the next few years. "Edge certainly will have opportunities" once Windows 10 is the enterprise-standard OS, "but I would say that Chrome has a lot of momentum, largely for the fact that it is so popular on the internet."
While a year ago Chrome and Microsoft's browsers both held 41% of the browser market share, now Chrome holds 59% to just 24% for both IE and Edge combined.
The people have spoken, and their preferences - despite bundling and presets - have been made known.
If variants of IE weren't mandatory or exclusive at many places (my company has some 400,000 computers with IE, and business critical Oracle modules that only work in IE), Microsoft would have even less than 24%.
Firefox losing market-share, Thunderbird increasingly abandoned, but, at least, Mozilla — after squeezing out that no-good hater — is socially just.
Replacing the inventor of JavaScript with someone from marketing made the world a better place. Rejoice!
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
chrome spys on you for google's profit. use it at your peril as google no longer believes in "don't do evil", the shareholders put a stop to that.
On top of that chrome is obnoxious in that it tends to be running processes even when you are not using. Try it on a raspberry pi 3 and you will see 14% of your precision 1GB are 3 Chromium background apps even when Chrome is not running. They use non-negligble CPU, so there not doing nothing.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
We initially adopted Chrome back when it was exciting, fast, and standards-obsessive. These days... Google seems to have ambitions to turn Chrome browser into more of a quasi-OS platform. More importantly, it is a platform that is somewhere between difficult and impossible to manage to the degree that we would like to. These days the web is integrating more and more active (executable) content into sites, as opposed to passive content that is displayed with limited interaction. More execution = more attack surface, more difficulty to sandbox properly, etc. I'm not saying we need to go back to active content being limited to 1990s-style tags, but Google seems to be rushing ahead with "what can we do?" versus considering "what should we do?" A happy medium would be to allow end-users and administrators to choose where on the spectrum of bleeding edge (pun intended) content we want to deal with, but that doesn't appear to be in the cards. Additionally, it's not like it's an even remotely acceptable option to not update your browser so what Google (or Microsoft or Mozilla or Apple) inflict on us sticks.
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
Chrome is terrible for me. It's to minimalistic plus spy ware for Google.
IE is just IE.
Edge is just IE with a new name.
Firefox is trying to act like Chrome which is turning me off to Firefox.
It's like new cars, everything is the template design with their own unique way of getting to what used to be menus and configuration screens. Hell before you know it Lynx will be the only decent browser left on the market.
IE is obsolete, with no releases since 2013
Edge is IEs little brother, with spyware built in.
Firefox wrecked its UI with Australis (and again with Photon) and wrecked its extension system.
Chrome is Google spyware and memory leak central.
Opera is a Chinese Chrome Clone.
Vivaldi is a clone of opera which is a chrome clone.
Brave is adware.
Fail Moon is an outdated fork of Firefox.
That leaves lynx, which can only browse web 1.0 sites.
and internal tools are written in html/javascript because it's quick n dirty. Chrome being faster means programmers spend less time optimizing. Also when Chrome breaks you uninstall/reinstall and you're back up. When IE breaks it's time to reimage the PC.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
IE11 is the standard web browser and locked down tighter than a virgin nerd's ass at my job. Some techs misuse their admin authority to install Firefox or Chrome. Those installations are automagically uninstalled via the prohibitive software script each month or manually uninstalled after management sends out spreadsheet of IT techs with prohibitive software installed on their systems.
"but I would say that Chrome has a lot of momentum, largely for the fact that it is so popular on the internet."
What the hell does this even mean?
Remember that Chrome will send every single URL you visit back, and index in their search engines. Do you have any URLs which are fine while inside the network, but shouldn't be known outside? Well, they will be known to the world by the time your employees run Chrome on the network.
How controllable is Chrome by group policy? It's good to be able to lock regular users out of the settings and developer tools but grant certain access to those that need it.
I decided that I will use tools provided by our IT team. Chrome updates whenever it likes. It may or might not share data with Google. If things break or Chrome does something stupid, I do not want to be liable.
Can you post some packet logs of this behavior? Everyone suddenly clams up when I ask for them.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Chrome's numbers are so high, I think many businesses now realize that since many of its employee's use Chrome in their personal time, it makes sense to implement it into their business systems. Most business probably do not cling to IE still, and Microsoft really hasn't offered a viable replacement with Edge. I don't mind using Edge, but I do not think its comparable to Chrome and not a good replacement for IE. I see Edge as a browser for someone who really just wants a basic browser and doesn't think too far beyond what they got with Windows 10. It's pretty obvious that Edge is not gaining many users and probably never will.
Chrome isn't #1 because it's a good browser. It's #1 because google.com and a thousand other websites nag you to install it. Avast Antivirus nags you to install it on every big update and the box is checked by default. Tons of software installers try to hoist a Chrome and/or Google Toolbar on you and the boxes are checked by default. Google has paid off millions of people to thrust Chrome in your face at every turn and try to install it and force it to be the default browser without you noticing that it's happened.
Chrome is big because you have to actively resist installing and keeping it at this point. Chrome does not deserve its market share; it is not organic, it is bought and paid for.
Keep a "legacy" browser to handle older sites, services and web apps, but offer another for everything else... Chrome
I do the opposite - Chrome is my "legacy" browser thanks to its built in Flash support. But I don't use it otherwise.
Ive been trying to minimize the amount of time I live in the Google-sphere for a few years now. My work uses Google Apps for education; but that's subject to public records requests anyway so Google could have access just like anyone else.
#DeleteChrome
Until Chrome supports Group Policy, it will not be suitable for use in the enterprise.
now IE suck to much and Firefox lacks focus.
I know at the very least that Chrome seems to work a lot better with NTLM and other single-sign-on functions than Firefox. This alone accounts for my use of Chrome at work despite liking Firefox better. If SSO doesn't work, the web browser is useless in big business. Web proxies, payroll, any cloud app (like it or not, everything is going to "cloud" services) depend on not having to type your creds in every time you visit a corp function.
Firefox fixes that, and they'd be my browser of choice at work.
Great companies are still married to Microsoft. I wish Chrome really would take over. I'm assuming the author is doing wishful thinking.
How about chromium? I've just been using that, how much of the Chrome spyware remains?
People voluntarily load Google spyware onto their computers? Wow.
As a home user, i pro-actively use all three of the 'big three' - Chrome, Firefox and Edge. Partly out of curiosity, partly because one might be slightly better at certain content than others (like hardware accelerated video content), partly to have separate sessions (closeable content vs content i need to keep 'hot' for multiple days) and partly to separate cookies. So running multiple browsers is just a simple life-hack i use for pragmatic purposes.
To be fair, i am pretty agnostic. All browsers do what they are supposed to do, i did not encounter compatibility issues recently (=last few years), so i guess people advocating one browser above the other have some reason for this preference. All of them support ad-blockers, which is the only real necessity added to 'factory settings' as far i'm concerned.
If any, i find edge the least stable. It had/has issues with the adblocker, and web-pages crash every so often, especially after the PC has been 'idle'. Apart the stability issue, it works just as well as the others.
Also, there is no noticeable difference between performance. Maybe because i upgraded my -by now- pretty old PC with an SSD disk and more RAM. Maybe because there is not much difference after all.
Conclusion: there is no winner. We are actually finally where we wanted to be a decade ago - browser-agnostic webcontent that works on any OS any browser. The only big issue i see is the new monoculture of webkit dominance.
Just 2 cents from a happy firefox&chrome user...
A glitch a day keeps the bugs away.
Lost count how many times I had to uninstall that piece of shit software called chrome that came free with other packages and I missed the option to not install if there even was one. People complain about MS forcing stuff down their throats but when it comes to Google oh its fine its the way it should be.
There are a lot of [enterprise] applications that only work in IE, because [those apps] use plug-ins
But IE is going the way of the dodo, and Edge does not supports plug-ins, right?
I've never liked Chrome. It's too limited for my liking. My main browser for the past couple years has been Opera.
Our org allowed Chrome because IE had too many bugs. Having an alternative reduced help-desk calls. Chrome has bugs also, but the chance of both Chrome and IE having the same bug is small. If an app or feature doesn't work on one, it will likely work on the other. It's a screwy state of affairs, but it's practical.
Table-ized A.I.
I even have Google nagging me to install it on my Surface 2 with Windows RT, even though they don't have a version of Chrome that works with this tablet.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
heh... not here... everybody installs chrome because ie can't render sites properly or firefox hungs their flash based facebook games
can't access intranet sites defined in hosts file? ok lets use chrome
Exactly. At this point it's known by almost everyone that uses a computer. In the beggining how do you think it got its marketshare? Did millions of geeks tell their non-geek friends and relatives how nice Chrome was? No, Google pushed it hard by every way they could think of.
Firefox got popular by being much better than IE was at the time (not that hard).
For some people Chrome may be better than anything else but publicity and bundling were very important to getting it where it's today.
Why this obsession with what browser someone else uses?
I'll stay with Firefox thanks.