28 ms·

Chrome 15 Is Now World’s Most Popular Browser (Version)

113 points by twapi 15y ago

toddmorey 15y ago
Since Chrome quietly updates, how do you think they'll handle updates that have significant UI changes? I guess you can have new versions have some features opt-in? That's what they've done with the GMail transition.
- masklinn 15y ago
  > Since Chrome quietly updates, how do you think they'll handle updates that have significant UI changes? They'll do it, and if people disagree, well, too bad. > That's what they've done with the GMail transition. On the other hand, that's not what they did with the Reader transition, or when they broke the "+" operator in search.
- OriginalSyn 15y ago
  The main idea around Chrome is no significant changes from version to version. If you look at Chrome 9 and Chrome 15 you'll see there are significant changes but they were made in small iterations with each release. The benefit of this is if they make a small change that causes a large pushback, they can easily stop that path of development and try another.
deathwarmedover 15y ago
A bold title, followed by the caveat at the end "These stats are based on the calculation of StatCounter.com, and the actual browser market share may differ from these."
- markokocic 15y ago
  Since Chrome doesn't have real AdBlocker, it is logical that stat counter will show its number accurate, while Firefox share will be underestimated due to a large amount of users blocking StatCounter and similar tracking services.
  - deathwarmedover 15y ago
    I'd love to see statistics on how many people use AdBlockers and/or Ghostery vs the wider audience that would be picked up by StatCounter and friends. I would be surprised if they made a large dent in the statistics though.
    - markokocic 15y ago
      We can only speculate on that number. But point is whatever percent that is, they are likely Firefox users, since Chrome doesn't do real blocking of those sites. If the number of privacy concerned people is only 5% (a guess as good as any other guess), add that number to Firefox percentage, and the picture looks quire different.
asmosoinio 15y ago
Something that this highlights: I really like it how I usually have no idea of what version of Chrome I am running.
- melling 15y ago
  I run both Firefox and Chrome and know which version I'm running. That would be today's builds. Grab the FF Nightly and Chrome Canary builds and help beta test. Close to half the Internet is getting upgraded every 6 weeks. More testers needed.
  - untog 15y ago
    Can you run multiple versions side by side? Because I need to know if my site is compatible with the current version of Chrome, not the nightly. Would still like to be able to check out new stuff, though.
- g3orge 15y ago
  Chrome updates itself automatically, so you probably running the latest version.
  - jrockway 15y ago
    And what number is that?
    - Achshar 15y ago
      omahaproxy.appspot.com this lists latest versions on every platform for every channel.
  - asmosoinio 15y ago
    Yes, that was my point exactly.
jjude 15y ago
and it still doesn't support rss like other browsers
- Flenser 15y ago
  https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nlbjncdgjeocebhnmkbbbdekmmmcbfjd https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nlbjncdgjeocebhnmk...
  - Tomis 15y ago
    So what you're saying is that a new Chrome user, in order to get functionality that other browsers have out of the box (I'm thinking of Opera, I'm biased like that), have to start digging after extensions. That's fine and dandy for experienced PC users like you and me but what about regular people? Housewives, pensioners, working people who want to use a browser but don't have much time to invest in learning its intricacies. History has shown that people can live with screwed up technology for a long time without looking for improvements because they think it's normal or they're used to it (floppy disks for file transfer in the 21st century, for instance) and sometimes new technology or features have to be forced upon the user for them to take it up. In the case of Chrome, regular people get a truncated version of what a browser can do (no significant difference in features from Internet Explorer except speed). This creates a large entry barrier for regular people. Do you think your average grandpa using Chrome (or Firefox, for that matter) will have a revelation at some point, thinking "gee, I'd really like to have mouse gestures, they would make my life so much easier for my poor hands"? Or "wow, I'd sure like a speed dial whenever I open my browser so that I can go with one click to the pages I most often use" (no, I don't want "most visited" as chosen by Chrome, I want speed dial). No, of course it's not going to happen; grandpa has never heard of RSS, mouse gestures, speed dial, and so on; someone (or something) has to explicitly tell/show him these features so that he becomes aware that they are possible. I also have a personal beef with the people who thought that on startup Chrome should have "open the home page" as default option instead of "reopen the pages that were open last". This is the most retarded default option I could think of in our day and age - if someone wants to get rid of their tabs then they will CLOSE THEM. It's that simple. Just because I have to close the browser does not mean that I finished what I was doing and that I want my tabs closed. Opera got this right more than 10 years ago but some people still have the Internet Explorer 6 mindset. It's as if all your Gmail messages were marked unread when you logged in to your inbox because hey, it's a new session. TL/DR - extensions are a poor substitute for built-in functionality in a world where the majority of users still are regular users (non-tech savvy). Grandpa Joe will not go digging for extensions.
z92 15y ago
The real news is IE share, worldwide, is now only 40%!
- guelo 15y ago
  So we're trading a browser from a company with a desktop monopoly for one with a web search monopoly. I'm trying to get excited here. It's a shame Firefox couldn't win, but it's tough going up against a determined multibillion dollar behemoth, especially when they get to leverage their monopoly (sound familiar?) by advertising on one of the world's most popular webpages, google.com, for free.
  - mzarate06 15y ago
    So we're trading a browser from a company with a desktop monopoly for one with a web search monopoly. I'm trying to get excited here. Despite your sentiment, this is still moving the web forward. We all benefit from browsers built by vendors that have a genuine passion for the web. I'd argue that most believe Chrome is built from such passion more so than IE. Since you brought up Firefox - I've always been on their side, up until I started living w/pain due to their decision to drop support for WebSQLDatabase. I'm now rooting for Chrome!
    - ootachi 15y ago
      Firefox never supported Web SQL. There was no support to drop.
      - mzarate06 15y ago
        You're right, my mistake. I should have said "to not support" instead of "to drop support for".
  - chrislomax 15y ago
    I too would have liked Firefox to win but I think it's nothing to do with advertising the reason for Firefox declining and it's simply that Firefox has lost it's mojo. From version 4 they killed their browser. They may have redeemed themselves recently but I wouldn't care to look, Chrome picked up where Mozilla left off. Chrome is a fantastic browser and I never have issue with it. Firefox 4 and 5 used to crash at least once per day. If it wasn't crashing then the ram usage was spiralling out of control. I would rather put my trust in Google than Microsoft, I believe that Google have the interest of a faster more up to date web than Microsoft do and I go with their values.
rob08 15y ago
No Safari?
- CraigRood 15y ago
  Plenty of browsers missing of that chart. I assume they have just selected the top 3 to keep it simple.
- dmooney1 15y ago
  You can see Browser-share as opposed to Browser-version share if you go to the statcounter page linked above. Webkit is around 6% and Chrome is 27% making WebKit ~33% and rising. All versions of IE are ~38.5 and falling. Firefox is ~25% and falling really slowly. Opera is <2% and rising really, really slowly.
herrherr 15y ago
For comparison have a look at the getclicky stats: http://getclicky.com/marketshare/global/web-browsers/ http://getclicky.com/marketshare/global/web-browsers/ They seem to be pretty close.
Maro 15y ago
"If we consider all versions collectively, Internet Explorer continues to rule the world with around 40% usage share. Chrome and Firefox have 24.75% and 26.15% usage share respectively."
- DanielRibeiro 15y ago
  Another way to see this: Firefox and Chrome together rule over IE. Made me smile.
davidjohnstone 15y ago
Chrome has had the most popular unique user agent string for a while. The latest version of Chrome with Windows XP is always first, followed by Chrome on Windows 7.
tzury 15y ago
Should be 15+ as this morning, my Ubuntu's update manager got chrome 16 for me (and many others, Linux, Mac and Win users).
Splines 15y ago
Here's the actual graph, the image in the linked article is terrible to look at. http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww-weekly-201132-201149 http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww-weekly-201132-...
maxklein 15y ago
Google is making a huge shift from dominating search to dominating the browser and the mobile OS, which have basically become the platforms on which most modern technology is going to be built.
thenotself 15y ago
All that these stats really show is that version distribution is the least fragmented on Chrome, which was the first to implement silent updates and supported it since the beginning.
wwweston 15y ago
As someone who's uneasy about how much influence Google's gaining, I switched back to Firefox for about a week recently. FF8 seems better than previous versions as far as performance goes, but Chrome still seems to be the king, and as a dev I spend so much time on the web it really matters.
- dreamdu5t 15y ago
  Couldn't FireFox adopt WebKit?
- magicalist 15y ago
  I prefer Chrome's dev tools, but there have been really nice speed improvements in Firefox 9 and 10 you should try out if you're thinking about giving up on it.
Pedrom 15y ago
It's interesting the different trends among browser versions. For Chrome when a new version comes out the previous one die almost immediately but IE users tend to keep their version for a long time. As a web developer I hate that :(
rplnt 15y ago
These stats are absolutely inaccurate. According to their FAQ: "We do not manipulate the data in any way. We do not collate it with any other information sources. No artificial weightings are used. We simply publish the data as we record it." Yet, 25% of their hits are recorded in the United States. Their recordings are not distributed in a same way users are. Data should be weighed up/down according to how much data they got from a region, how many people live there and what is the Internet penetration. I think that the graph (and not just this one) would look VERY different. Conclusion: Title is misleading. You can't say something is world's whatever when you have data from four countries. edit: Inaccurate in the context of how they are interpreted.
- aodhan 15y ago
  Hello, Thanks for your comment. I'm from StatCounter and would like to address your concerns. Weighting stats means that the stats are only as good as the weighting methodology used. If the weighting data is inaccurate or out of date, then it renders the data completely incorrect. For these reasons, we choose not to weight our data in any way and instead we report is as we record - other commentators can, however, weight the data as they wish. I'm not sure why you think we only have data from 4 countries. We have a very large global sample size of over 15 billion hits a month. You can view the country break-down here: http://gs.statcounter.com/faq#sample-size http://gs.statcounter.com/faq#sample-size
  - rplnt 15y ago
    I understand that it is not really possible to make it perfect. And I also understand why you share raw data and it's probably the best way to do it. I just wouldn't make such strong conclusions from it.
ck2 15y ago
These stats are based on the calculation of StatCounter.com In other words more people on Firefox use ghostery and adblock so they never load statcounter in the first place.
derekdahmer 15y ago
What's just as amazing is in just two weeks, about 95% of Chrome 14 users 'switched' to Chrome 15. That same transition from IEX -> IEX+1 probably takes two years. That's the power of transparent, automatic updates.
mhartl 15y ago
I use the Firefox AwesomeBar to navigate the web. Is there an equivalent for Chrome? Chrome always seems to find searches I don't care about ahead of bookmarks or history.

113 points by twapi 15y ago

Since Chrome quietly updates, how do you think they'll handle updates that have significant UI changes? I guess you can have new versions have some features opt-in? That's what they've done with the GMail transition.

masklinn 15y ago
> Since Chrome quietly updates, how do you think they'll handle updates that have significant UI changes? They'll do it, and if people disagree, well, too bad. > That's what they've done with the GMail transition. On the other hand, that's not what they did with the Reader transition, or when they broke the "+" operator in search.
OriginalSyn 15y ago
The main idea around Chrome is no significant changes from version to version. If you look at Chrome 9 and Chrome 15 you'll see there are significant changes but they were made in small iterations with each release. The benefit of this is if they make a small change that causes a large pushback, they can easily stop that path of development and try another.

deathwarmedover 15y ago

A bold title, followed by the caveat at the end "These stats are based on the calculation of StatCounter.com, and the actual browser market share may differ from these."

markokocic 15y ago
Since Chrome doesn't have real AdBlocker, it is logical that stat counter will show its number accurate, while Firefox share will be underestimated due to a large amount of users blocking StatCounter and similar tracking services.
- deathwarmedover 15y ago
  I'd love to see statistics on how many people use AdBlockers and/or Ghostery vs the wider audience that would be picked up by StatCounter and friends. I would be surprised if they made a large dent in the statistics though.
  - markokocic 15y ago
    We can only speculate on that number. But point is whatever percent that is, they are likely Firefox users, since Chrome doesn't do real blocking of those sites. If the number of privacy concerned people is only 5% (a guess as good as any other guess), add that number to Firefox percentage, and the picture looks quire different.

asmosoinio 15y ago

Something that this highlights: I really like it how I usually have no idea of what version of Chrome I am running.

melling 15y ago
I run both Firefox and Chrome and know which version I'm running. That would be today's builds. Grab the FF Nightly and Chrome Canary builds and help beta test. Close to half the Internet is getting upgraded every 6 weeks. More testers needed.
- untog 15y ago
  Can you run multiple versions side by side? Because I need to know if my site is compatible with the current version of Chrome, not the nightly. Would still like to be able to check out new stuff, though.
g3orge 15y ago
Chrome updates itself automatically, so you probably running the latest version.
- jrockway 15y ago
  And what number is that?
  - Achshar 15y ago
    omahaproxy.appspot.com this lists latest versions on every platform for every channel.
- asmosoinio 15y ago
  Yes, that was my point exactly.

jjude 15y ago

and it still doesn't support rss like other browsers

Flenser 15y ago
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nlbjncdgjeocebhnmkbbbdekmmmcbfjd https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nlbjncdgjeocebhnmk...
- Tomis 15y ago
  So what you're saying is that a new Chrome user, in order to get functionality that other browsers have out of the box (I'm thinking of Opera, I'm biased like that), have to start digging after extensions. That's fine and dandy for experienced PC users like you and me but what about regular people? Housewives, pensioners, working people who want to use a browser but don't have much time to invest in learning its intricacies. History has shown that people can live with screwed up technology for a long time without looking for improvements because they think it's normal or they're used to it (floppy disks for file transfer in the 21st century, for instance) and sometimes new technology or features have to be forced upon the user for them to take it up. In the case of Chrome, regular people get a truncated version of what a browser can do (no significant difference in features from Internet Explorer except speed). This creates a large entry barrier for regular people. Do you think your average grandpa using Chrome (or Firefox, for that matter) will have a revelation at some point, thinking "gee, I'd really like to have mouse gestures, they would make my life so much easier for my poor hands"? Or "wow, I'd sure like a speed dial whenever I open my browser so that I can go with one click to the pages I most often use" (no, I don't want "most visited" as chosen by Chrome, I want speed dial). No, of course it's not going to happen; grandpa has never heard of RSS, mouse gestures, speed dial, and so on; someone (or something) has to explicitly tell/show him these features so that he becomes aware that they are possible. I also have a personal beef with the people who thought that on startup Chrome should have "open the home page" as default option instead of "reopen the pages that were open last". This is the most retarded default option I could think of in our day and age - if someone wants to get rid of their tabs then they will CLOSE THEM. It's that simple. Just because I have to close the browser does not mean that I finished what I was doing and that I want my tabs closed. Opera got this right more than 10 years ago but some people still have the Internet Explorer 6 mindset. It's as if all your Gmail messages were marked unread when you logged in to your inbox because hey, it's a new session. TL/DR - extensions are a poor substitute for built-in functionality in a world where the majority of users still are regular users (non-tech savvy). Grandpa Joe will not go digging for extensions.

z92 15y ago

The real news is IE share, worldwide, is now only 40%!

guelo 15y ago
So we're trading a browser from a company with a desktop monopoly for one with a web search monopoly. I'm trying to get excited here. It's a shame Firefox couldn't win, but it's tough going up against a determined multibillion dollar behemoth, especially when they get to leverage their monopoly (sound familiar?) by advertising on one of the world's most popular webpages, google.com, for free.
- mzarate06 15y ago
  So we're trading a browser from a company with a desktop monopoly for one with a web search monopoly. I'm trying to get excited here. Despite your sentiment, this is still moving the web forward. We all benefit from browsers built by vendors that have a genuine passion for the web. I'd argue that most believe Chrome is built from such passion more so than IE. Since you brought up Firefox - I've always been on their side, up until I started living w/pain due to their decision to drop support for WebSQLDatabase. I'm now rooting for Chrome!
  - ootachi 15y ago
    Firefox never supported Web SQL. There was no support to drop.
    - mzarate06 15y ago
      You're right, my mistake. I should have said "to not support" instead of "to drop support for".
- chrislomax 15y ago
  I too would have liked Firefox to win but I think it's nothing to do with advertising the reason for Firefox declining and it's simply that Firefox has lost it's mojo. From version 4 they killed their browser. They may have redeemed themselves recently but I wouldn't care to look, Chrome picked up where Mozilla left off. Chrome is a fantastic browser and I never have issue with it. Firefox 4 and 5 used to crash at least once per day. If it wasn't crashing then the ram usage was spiralling out of control. I would rather put my trust in Google than Microsoft, I believe that Google have the interest of a faster more up to date web than Microsoft do and I go with their values.

rob08 15y ago

No Safari?

CraigRood 15y ago
Plenty of browsers missing of that chart. I assume they have just selected the top 3 to keep it simple.
dmooney1 15y ago
You can see Browser-share as opposed to Browser-version share if you go to the statcounter page linked above. Webkit is around 6% and Chrome is 27% making WebKit ~33% and rising. All versions of IE are ~38.5 and falling. Firefox is ~25% and falling really slowly. Opera is <2% and rising really, really slowly.

herrherr 15y ago

For comparison have a look at the getclicky stats: http://getclicky.com/marketshare/global/web-browsers/ http://getclicky.com/marketshare/global/web-browsers/ They seem to be pretty close.

Maro 15y ago

"If we consider all versions collectively, Internet Explorer continues to rule the world with around 40% usage share. Chrome and Firefox have 24.75% and 26.15% usage share respectively."

DanielRibeiro 15y ago
Another way to see this: Firefox and Chrome together rule over IE. Made me smile.

davidjohnstone 15y ago

Chrome has had the most popular unique user agent string for a while. The latest version of Chrome with Windows XP is always first, followed by Chrome on Windows 7.

tzury 15y ago

Should be 15+ as this morning, my Ubuntu's update manager got chrome 16 for me (and many others, Linux, Mac and Win users).

Splines 15y ago

Here's the actual graph, the image in the linked article is terrible to look at. http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww-weekly-201132-201149 http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww-weekly-201132-...

maxklein 15y ago

Google is making a huge shift from dominating search to dominating the browser and the mobile OS, which have basically become the platforms on which most modern technology is going to be built.

thenotself 15y ago

All that these stats really show is that version distribution is the least fragmented on Chrome, which was the first to implement silent updates and supported it since the beginning.

wwweston 15y ago

As someone who's uneasy about how much influence Google's gaining, I switched back to Firefox for about a week recently. FF8 seems better than previous versions as far as performance goes, but Chrome still seems to be the king, and as a dev I spend so much time on the web it really matters.

dreamdu5t 15y ago
Couldn't FireFox adopt WebKit?
magicalist 15y ago
I prefer Chrome's dev tools, but there have been really nice speed improvements in Firefox 9 and 10 you should try out if you're thinking about giving up on it.

Pedrom 15y ago

It's interesting the different trends among browser versions. For Chrome when a new version comes out the previous one die almost immediately but IE users tend to keep their version for a long time. As a web developer I hate that :(

rplnt 15y ago

These stats are absolutely inaccurate. According to their FAQ: "We do not manipulate the data in any way. We do not collate it with any other information sources. No artificial weightings are used. We simply publish the data as we record it." Yet, 25% of their hits are recorded in the United States. Their recordings are not distributed in a same way users are. Data should be weighed up/down according to how much data they got from a region, how many people live there and what is the Internet penetration. I think that the graph (and not just this one) would look VERY different. Conclusion: Title is misleading. You can't say something is world's whatever when you have data from four countries. edit: Inaccurate in the context of how they are interpreted.

aodhan 15y ago
Hello, Thanks for your comment. I'm from StatCounter and would like to address your concerns. Weighting stats means that the stats are only as good as the weighting methodology used. If the weighting data is inaccurate or out of date, then it renders the data completely incorrect. For these reasons, we choose not to weight our data in any way and instead we report is as we record - other commentators can, however, weight the data as they wish. I'm not sure why you think we only have data from 4 countries. We have a very large global sample size of over 15 billion hits a month. You can view the country break-down here: http://gs.statcounter.com/faq#sample-size http://gs.statcounter.com/faq#sample-size
- rplnt 15y ago
  I understand that it is not really possible to make it perfect. And I also understand why you share raw data and it's probably the best way to do it. I just wouldn't make such strong conclusions from it.

ck2 15y ago

These stats are based on the calculation of StatCounter.com In other words more people on Firefox use ghostery and adblock so they never load statcounter in the first place.

derekdahmer 15y ago

What's just as amazing is in just two weeks, about 95% of Chrome 14 users 'switched' to Chrome 15. That same transition from IEX -> IEX+1 probably takes two years. That's the power of transparent, automatic updates.

mhartl 15y ago

I use the Firefox AwesomeBar to navigate the web. Is there an equivalent for Chrome? Chrome always seems to find searches I don't care about ahead of bookmarks or history.