4 ms·

>I think about Chrome’s usurping of Internet Explorer (IE), and I wonder (antitrust and all aside) would Chrome have usurped IE if it wasn’t for IE stagnating?

• jeremyjh 8y ago
  That graph begins with IE at 60% share and ends with it at 20% share. It indicates pretty clearly that most of Chrome's growth came from IE, I'm not sure how you can interpret it another way.
  • dTal 8y ago
    Look at the slope in the beginning. People would have switched away from IE anyway. The release of Chrome didn't change the number of people switching away from IE, but it stopped Firefox's growth dead in its tracks.
  • zhte415 8y ago
    IE6 stagnation was hated by developers and users alike. Growth of any browser came from something-must-be-better-than-this. FF had the upper hand against Opera, who were still quite the serious contender. I'm sure someone has done a PhD thesis on this, and if not well worth doing on multi-factor influences on market share for web browsers. Very multi-disciplinary too, covering tech, consumer understanding, embedded incumbents, marketing (a big part in Chrome's boom in my opinion). Chrome's growth came from IE, yet. But at the time, anyone's growth could have come from IE. Chrome did it better and faster. * I was still using IE6 in a corporate enviornment in 2013. I have friends that still require IE6 on XP in a company because funding for the system upgrade can't be made. The system's not internet facing, not explicitly. IE6 tried to define the internet, thankfully the internet moved on, and would have moved on. FF was at their tails, Chrome sped that.
• toyg 8y ago
  I agree, and Chrome did that in one simple way: marketing and monopoly power. They leveraged their position in search and webmail to push people to switch, and hammered the message in mainstream advertising (on buses and newspapers, even in Europe). If they had pushed FF instead of building their own browser, now FF would be in that position - regardless of technical merits (which were minor, and basically boiled down to a single one: process-per-tab, which meant the browser never crashed if a single website misbehaved). FF was not without responsibilities (they got bogged down in backend work on gecko that never really delivered, then got distracted by side bets like FFOS and friends), but without Google's other properties and market share, this would never have happened.
  • kiriakasis 8y ago
    > which meant the browser never crashed if a single website misbehaved I might have faulty memory, but this is not some minor detail. It is world changing. For young teenager me, Chrome had a vastly better UX than both IE and Firefox when it debuted. (now I prefer Firefox though)
    • josteink 8y ago
      > I might have faulty memory, but this is not some minor detail. It is world changing. I never had Firefox crash on me, so I never saw it as a selling point. I however saw tabs crash all the fucking time in Chrome, so to me it just seemed like a workaround for bad engineering. If anything was world changing to me, it was that now we were being told that tabs crashing all the time was normal.
  • jcbrand 8y ago
    > I agree, and Chrome did that in one simple way: marketing and monopoly power. When Chrome came out, it was much faster than Firefox. IIRC, it was also an evergreen browser from the start and you could install plugins without restarting. It was in many ways a superior product.
    • webwanderings 8y ago