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.

Comments

At least, Mozilla is socially just!

[mi]

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!

Re: At least, Mozilla is socially just!

[cyber-vandal]

The inventor of JavaScript isn't someone most web devs think highly of.

chrome is spyware

[goombah99]

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.

We're looking in the other direction already

[ErikTheRed]

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.

Re:We're looking in the other direction already

[Plus1Entropy]

Google seems to have ambitions to turn Chrome browser into more of a quasi-OS platform.

This was the original plan. When I was at University, Google came to give a recruitment speech to all the CS/EE/CE students. This was when Chrome was pretty much brand new.

Basically they wanted to undo the advent of distributed computing and return us to the mainframe-terminal architecture. Quite literally, the guy said something along the lines of "We want your computer to just be a monitor, keyboard, and mouse."

It was at that point I realized that you didn't have to be that smart to work at Google.

Re:Windows group policy

[R.Mo_Robert]

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.

Very. There are Administrative Templates available from Google and you can use them to create GPOs that either set computer/user policies (not changeable by user) or default user preferences (changeable). I've used the former to prevent installation of extensions and whatnot and the latter to configure homepages. Disabling developer mode is another thing you can do. I'm not sure if there's an item to disable user access to Settings (maybe you could blacklist chrome://settings?), but I think a better option for most cases would be to enable GPO items that will configure as policies specific settings you don't want the users to change.