6 ms·

20 Percent Of TechCrunch Readers Are Already Browsing With Chrome

28 points by ashishbharthi 17y ago

CoryMathews 17y ago
FF better watch out. It is are going to be losing market share as fast as IE pretty soon. Yet I still cannot believe the world has not discovered how great opera is yet...
- SamAtt 17y ago
  I think the caveat to "People will not pay for what they can get for free" is "People will always think something costs money if it once did". In my experience most still think of Opera as a browser you have to pay for.
  - ugh 17y ago
    The only lasting impression Opera left me with was not about price, but about bloat. I always perceived Opera as a jumble of too many disjointed features. A far cry from the much leaner (not faster but more focused) alternatives. That may no longer be the case, but that's why I don't even try to use Opera anymore. Opera was always very much unlike all the other alternatives to IE out there. Which might explain why some are very loyal users but also why Opera may never be able to attract the masses. The recipe for success was to make it simple and to make it fast.
    - CoryMathews 17y ago
      I would argue that opera is more simple then any other browser available. Heres just an example. Say you want mouse guestures. In FF and Chrome you have to search for an addon in opera you just use it. Want to subscribe to an rss feed? just click it and there is no need for an external rss reader because its built in. Accidentally close the tab and need it back habit says hit Ctrl+z so you do and its back. Want to go to your normal sites? open a new tab and you see them sitting right there in your speed dial. I could go on but I will stop. btw the 10.5 beta is the fastest browser available, even faster then chrome.
      - alexro 17y ago
        I use Opera for most of the browsing, it consumes less memory and generally more manageable than anything else I used before (IE 4+, FF 1+, Chrome 1+)
      - ugh 17y ago
        Your comment is a nice summary why exactly Opera will continue to win over nerds but not moms. Bravo! :-)
      - boundlessdreamz 17y ago
        Ha ha.. No offence meant, but you basically proved parent posters point. Opera is all powerful but is not simple. Look at the preferences tab of opera and firefox for example. With firefox the advantage is that if i want, I can pick and choose extensions. Also I can confidently recommend firefox and chrome to a non-techie and be sure that they will be able t pick it up but opera can be confusing
      - illumin8 17y ago
        Actually, I believe not supporting mouse gestures would be more "simple" than having every feature including the kitchen sink.
- fnid2 17y ago
  Opera used to be great, but with the latest release, I find web sessions terminate prematurely and the browser crashes a lot. I switched back to firefox.
  - CoryMathews 17y ago
    odd I had the opposite. The new FF 3.6 will not run for more then 10 mins without crashing. Even if its just idle.
    - fnid2 17y ago
      i'm on 3.5.7, so thanks for the tip. I'll pass on 3.6
- eli 17y ago
  Opera has some really great features built in the browser, but it also lacks the ability to add new features via plugins. And perhaps things have gotten better recently, but last I tried there were still sites (like my bank) that didn't work at all in Opera. And not many people are going to devote resources to Opera compatibility unless more people are using it (a real chicken-and-egg problem). That said, I should add that I've met a few of the people from the Opera team and they were really cool. Seems like a fun place to work.
reader5000 17y ago
I switched from ff after the latest ff update succeeded in slowing startup speeds even more. They seem to be more focused on ribbon/toolbar customizations than achieving <5 second start ups.
- scott_s 17y ago
  I startup my browser about once every two weeks. Perhaps it's a waste of developer time to focus on achieving a faster startup time.
  - Vindexus 17y ago
    One of the biggest complaints I hear about Firefox is the startup time. I startup Firefox twice a day normally - once at work and again at home - so it's definitely an issue for me.
- halo 17y ago
  One of Mozilla's focusing with Firefox 3.6 was improving the startup times (see: https://developer.mozilla.org/devnews/index.php/2010/01/21/firefox-3-6-is-now-available-for-download/ https://developer.mozilla.org/devnews/index.php/2010/01/21/f... http://autonome.wordpress.com/2010/01/21/firefox-3-6-performance-startup-and-snappiness-improvements/ http://autonome.wordpress.com/2010/01/21/firefox-3-6-perform...). I believe they're going to continue to focus on this in future too -- I remember reading that some patches improving startup times have been completed but didn't land in time for 3.6, but I don't have a citation to hand. This matches with my personal expererience - anecdotally, Firefox feels noticably quicker both in terms of startup and rendering since updating to 3.6.
drp 17y ago
I would be very interested to know the breakdown for HN users.
- webwright 17y ago
  It's about 24% Chrome for my blog, which I imagine is a pretty similar audience for HN. Chrome is outstanding. Blazing fast, instant boot, never crashes. Firefox was a slow hog for me. What I want to know is-- How many people who work at Mozilla believe that Firefox is a better browser? How many of 'em use Chrome at home?
  - fbu 17y ago
    For the few times I have Chrome crashing, it is due to Flash... But even then, Chrome handles the thing very nicely and either the plugin is stopped, or ony one tab is broken. The rest of it being still available. Amazing !
- jeff18 17y ago
  An article I wrote recently got on Hacker News. Here's the segmented referral traffic from HN to my blog: http://i.imgur.com/7gnH0.png http://i.imgur.com/7gnH0.png
  - lpolovets 17y ago
    Cool idea for indirectly measuring HN browser usage =) I expected IE to be pretty unpopular among the HN crowd, but less than 3%? Wow.
  - ryanelkins 17y ago
    Similar numbers for a recent post on my blog as well (that was pretty much only HN users). About 38% on Chrome, 2.6% on IE.
- abstractbill 17y ago
  For justin.tv, Internet Explorer: 50.36% Firefox: 33.01% Chrome: 8.91% Safari: 5.29% Opera: 1.45%
greyman 17y ago
I consider the Chrome to be the best browser (I use Windows XP) since version Beta 4, when extensions support was added. I switched from Firefox, mostly because it is considerably slower. As I see it, Chrome just out-innovated FF.
- nuclear_eclipse 17y ago
  There are still a few minor niggles I have with Chrome, mostly relating to bookmarks: - Chrome doesn't support bookmark shortcuts; I use SuperGenPass in FF as a bookmark with a shortcut of "p", so in any form, rather than needing to click the mouse, I can do Ctrl-L, p, enter - Chrome doesn't "support" unorganized and tagged bookmarks like FF3 does. I like being able to file/search bookmarks by tags, separately from a small hierarchy of most-used bookmarks on the toolbar. - Chrome doesn't support bookmark separators, which are a "nicety" for organizing bookmarks in folders on the toolbar. Something small like that really does help with visual recognition and hand-eye coordination.
  - pielud 17y ago
    It does actually support this, it's just not a bookmark, it's a "search engine". For example, if I want to type "yc" in the address bar to get to news.yc: 1. right click address bar, select "edit search engines" 2. click the add button 3. give it name like "news.yc", keyword is "yc" url is http://new.ycombinator.com http://new.ycombinator.com. The "%s" in the url isn't required. When I imported my bookmarks from firefox, it did this automatically. It took me forever to figure out how to add new ones. edit: formatting
    - nuclear_eclipse 17y ago
      And then that's no longer synchronized between my various machines and browsers via Xmarks?
- spicyj 17y ago
  Out of curiosity, what extensions do you use that you would have missed if you had switched to Chrome before beta 4?
vaksel 17y ago
I'll stick with firefox, it has all my extensions, and toolbars, and greasemonkey scripts that I use for work. And to be honest I like the user experience a lot more, it's much more intuitive. I still use chrome, since it's my tor proxied browser, but the user experience is just horrible compared to firefox.
- tdoggette 17y ago
  In what way?
  - jrockway 17y ago
    Not operable exclusively from the keyboard, and it ignores your window manager and draws its own window decorations.
    - tdoggette 17y ago
      I wouldn't trade tabs-on-top for anything. The single most common mouse action in a browser (or my browser, I should say) is to switch between tabs. In addition to the Fitts' Law benefit of having tabs on the edge, there's the ability to move the pointer smoothly from left to right on the tab bar without having to ever readjust up/down to hit the target tab.
    - Zak 17y ago
      There's an option to use the window manager's title bar and controls. At least, there is on Linux.
  - vaksel 17y ago
    firebug and webmaster tools for development, a few tools to help with SEO, a few tools to see site statistics at my fingertips etc. I mean sure Chrome starts up faster, but I never close firefox, so it's not that big of a deal for me as far as user experience, it's just that nothing is where I am used to things being. There is no file > edit > view navigation, in fact all the navigation is on the right side, when everywhere else it's on the left side. And it's all condensed to two 2 menus(images), which are stuck somewhere off to the side. + there is the lack of coherent tabs...if you have multiple tabs open, with firefox, you can read everything, since it allows scrolling, with Chrome you just have 40 unnamed tabs on top.
ROFISH 17y ago
Holy crap, look at that high number of Safari users too! Are they all Safari/Mac?
- CoryMathews 17y ago
  does anyone in their right mind use safari on windows? I hope not, hell IE runs faster.
  - eli 17y ago
    Certainly not, but lots of Mac users run Firefox. I think Apple won a lot of people back with Safari 4.0
  - ROFISH 17y ago
    Actually, the few times I'm in Windows I do use Safari. It's mostly because I prefer the Mac-style font aliasing and it's available as an option in the Window's browser.
psycandrew 17y ago
Cool article but it's ALL techcrunch users. These users are probably... do I dare say it? Tech savy & are most likely at the vanguard of technological change. Lets see some stats for bing, google, & yahoo :)
Kilimanjaro 17y ago
I love Chrome. Firefox has become FF: forever to load, forever to close.
BearOfNH 17y ago
Are these numbers based on page fetches or unique visitors? It's obviously easier to count page fetches but the article implies it's broken down by visitor, without being explicit about it.
blueag 17y ago
Are 20% of TC readers Google employees who read TC in hope of leaving Google to start their own companies?

28 points by ashishbharthi 17y ago

FF better watch out. It is are going to be losing market share as fast as IE pretty soon. Yet I still cannot believe the world has not discovered how great opera is yet...

SamAtt 17y ago
I think the caveat to "People will not pay for what they can get for free" is "People will always think something costs money if it once did". In my experience most still think of Opera as a browser you have to pay for.
- ugh 17y ago
  The only lasting impression Opera left me with was not about price, but about bloat. I always perceived Opera as a jumble of too many disjointed features. A far cry from the much leaner (not faster but more focused) alternatives. That may no longer be the case, but that's why I don't even try to use Opera anymore. Opera was always very much unlike all the other alternatives to IE out there. Which might explain why some are very loyal users but also why Opera may never be able to attract the masses. The recipe for success was to make it simple and to make it fast.
  - CoryMathews 17y ago
    I would argue that opera is more simple then any other browser available. Heres just an example. Say you want mouse guestures. In FF and Chrome you have to search for an addon in opera you just use it. Want to subscribe to an rss feed? just click it and there is no need for an external rss reader because its built in. Accidentally close the tab and need it back habit says hit Ctrl+z so you do and its back. Want to go to your normal sites? open a new tab and you see them sitting right there in your speed dial. I could go on but I will stop. btw the 10.5 beta is the fastest browser available, even faster then chrome.
    - alexro 17y ago
      I use Opera for most of the browsing, it consumes less memory and generally more manageable than anything else I used before (IE 4+, FF 1+, Chrome 1+)
    - ugh 17y ago
      Your comment is a nice summary why exactly Opera will continue to win over nerds but not moms. Bravo! :-)
    - boundlessdreamz 17y ago
      Ha ha.. No offence meant, but you basically proved parent posters point. Opera is all powerful but is not simple. Look at the preferences tab of opera and firefox for example. With firefox the advantage is that if i want, I can pick and choose extensions. Also I can confidently recommend firefox and chrome to a non-techie and be sure that they will be able t pick it up but opera can be confusing
    - illumin8 17y ago
      Actually, I believe not supporting mouse gestures would be more "simple" than having every feature including the kitchen sink.
fnid2 17y ago
Opera used to be great, but with the latest release, I find web sessions terminate prematurely and the browser crashes a lot. I switched back to firefox.
- CoryMathews 17y ago
  odd I had the opposite. The new FF 3.6 will not run for more then 10 mins without crashing. Even if its just idle.
  - fnid2 17y ago
    i'm on 3.5.7, so thanks for the tip. I'll pass on 3.6
eli 17y ago
Opera has some really great features built in the browser, but it also lacks the ability to add new features via plugins. And perhaps things have gotten better recently, but last I tried there were still sites (like my bank) that didn't work at all in Opera. And not many people are going to devote resources to Opera compatibility unless more people are using it (a real chicken-and-egg problem). That said, I should add that I've met a few of the people from the Opera team and they were really cool. Seems like a fun place to work.

reader5000 17y ago

I switched from ff after the latest ff update succeeded in slowing startup speeds even more. They seem to be more focused on ribbon/toolbar customizations than achieving <5 second start ups.

scott_s 17y ago
I startup my browser about once every two weeks. Perhaps it's a waste of developer time to focus on achieving a faster startup time.
- Vindexus 17y ago
  One of the biggest complaints I hear about Firefox is the startup time. I startup Firefox twice a day normally - once at work and again at home - so it's definitely an issue for me.
halo 17y ago
One of Mozilla's focusing with Firefox 3.6 was improving the startup times (see: https://developer.mozilla.org/devnews/index.php/2010/01/21/firefox-3-6-is-now-available-for-download/ https://developer.mozilla.org/devnews/index.php/2010/01/21/f... http://autonome.wordpress.com/2010/01/21/firefox-3-6-performance-startup-and-snappiness-improvements/ http://autonome.wordpress.com/2010/01/21/firefox-3-6-perform...). I believe they're going to continue to focus on this in future too -- I remember reading that some patches improving startup times have been completed but didn't land in time for 3.6, but I don't have a citation to hand. This matches with my personal expererience - anecdotally, Firefox feels noticably quicker both in terms of startup and rendering since updating to 3.6.

drp 17y ago

I would be very interested to know the breakdown for HN users.

webwright 17y ago
It's about 24% Chrome for my blog, which I imagine is a pretty similar audience for HN. Chrome is outstanding. Blazing fast, instant boot, never crashes. Firefox was a slow hog for me. What I want to know is-- How many people who work at Mozilla believe that Firefox is a better browser? How many of 'em use Chrome at home?
- fbu 17y ago
  For the few times I have Chrome crashing, it is due to Flash... But even then, Chrome handles the thing very nicely and either the plugin is stopped, or ony one tab is broken. The rest of it being still available. Amazing !
jeff18 17y ago
An article I wrote recently got on Hacker News. Here's the segmented referral traffic from HN to my blog: http://i.imgur.com/7gnH0.png http://i.imgur.com/7gnH0.png
- lpolovets 17y ago
  Cool idea for indirectly measuring HN browser usage =) I expected IE to be pretty unpopular among the HN crowd, but less than 3%? Wow.
- ryanelkins 17y ago
  Similar numbers for a recent post on my blog as well (that was pretty much only HN users). About 38% on Chrome, 2.6% on IE.
abstractbill 17y ago
For justin.tv, Internet Explorer: 50.36% Firefox: 33.01% Chrome: 8.91% Safari: 5.29% Opera: 1.45%

greyman 17y ago

I consider the Chrome to be the best browser (I use Windows XP) since version Beta 4, when extensions support was added. I switched from Firefox, mostly because it is considerably slower. As I see it, Chrome just out-innovated FF.

nuclear_eclipse 17y ago
There are still a few minor niggles I have with Chrome, mostly relating to bookmarks: - Chrome doesn't support bookmark shortcuts; I use SuperGenPass in FF as a bookmark with a shortcut of "p", so in any form, rather than needing to click the mouse, I can do Ctrl-L, p, enter - Chrome doesn't "support" unorganized and tagged bookmarks like FF3 does. I like being able to file/search bookmarks by tags, separately from a small hierarchy of most-used bookmarks on the toolbar. - Chrome doesn't support bookmark separators, which are a "nicety" for organizing bookmarks in folders on the toolbar. Something small like that really does help with visual recognition and hand-eye coordination.
- pielud 17y ago
  It does actually support this, it's just not a bookmark, it's a "search engine". For example, if I want to type "yc" in the address bar to get to news.yc: 1. right click address bar, select "edit search engines" 2. click the add button 3. give it name like "news.yc", keyword is "yc" url is http://new.ycombinator.com http://new.ycombinator.com. The "%s" in the url isn't required. When I imported my bookmarks from firefox, it did this automatically. It took me forever to figure out how to add new ones. edit: formatting
  - nuclear_eclipse 17y ago
    And then that's no longer synchronized between my various machines and browsers via Xmarks?
spicyj 17y ago
Out of curiosity, what extensions do you use that you would have missed if you had switched to Chrome before beta 4?

vaksel 17y ago

I'll stick with firefox, it has all my extensions, and toolbars, and greasemonkey scripts that I use for work. And to be honest I like the user experience a lot more, it's much more intuitive. I still use chrome, since it's my tor proxied browser, but the user experience is just horrible compared to firefox.

tdoggette 17y ago
In what way?
- jrockway 17y ago
  Not operable exclusively from the keyboard, and it ignores your window manager and draws its own window decorations.
  - tdoggette 17y ago
    I wouldn't trade tabs-on-top for anything. The single most common mouse action in a browser (or my browser, I should say) is to switch between tabs. In addition to the Fitts' Law benefit of having tabs on the edge, there's the ability to move the pointer smoothly from left to right on the tab bar without having to ever readjust up/down to hit the target tab.
  - Zak 17y ago
    There's an option to use the window manager's title bar and controls. At least, there is on Linux.
- vaksel 17y ago
  firebug and webmaster tools for development, a few tools to help with SEO, a few tools to see site statistics at my fingertips etc. I mean sure Chrome starts up faster, but I never close firefox, so it's not that big of a deal for me as far as user experience, it's just that nothing is where I am used to things being. There is no file > edit > view navigation, in fact all the navigation is on the right side, when everywhere else it's on the left side. And it's all condensed to two 2 menus(images), which are stuck somewhere off to the side. + there is the lack of coherent tabs...if you have multiple tabs open, with firefox, you can read everything, since it allows scrolling, with Chrome you just have 40 unnamed tabs on top.

ROFISH 17y ago

Holy crap, look at that high number of Safari users too! Are they all Safari/Mac?

CoryMathews 17y ago
does anyone in their right mind use safari on windows? I hope not, hell IE runs faster.
- eli 17y ago
  Certainly not, but lots of Mac users run Firefox. I think Apple won a lot of people back with Safari 4.0
- ROFISH 17y ago
  Actually, the few times I'm in Windows I do use Safari. It's mostly because I prefer the Mac-style font aliasing and it's available as an option in the Window's browser.

psycandrew 17y ago

Cool article but it's ALL techcrunch users. These users are probably... do I dare say it? Tech savy & are most likely at the vanguard of technological change. Lets see some stats for bing, google, & yahoo :)

Kilimanjaro 17y ago

I love Chrome. Firefox has become FF: forever to load, forever to close.

BearOfNH 17y ago

Are these numbers based on page fetches or unique visitors? It's obviously easier to count page fetches but the article implies it's broken down by visitor, without being explicit about it.

blueag 17y ago

Are 20% of TC readers Google employees who read TC in hope of leaving Google to start their own companies?