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Google Chrome Leapfrogs Internet Explorer as the Web's Top Browser
- DigitalSea 14y agoHaving just switched from Firefox to Chrome myself, this makes me happy. Chrome is definitely one of the best browsers I have ever used/developed and debugged websites in. Best of all, no memory leaks either.
- eliben 14y agoI'm mostly happy about people switching from IE (particularly its older incarnations) to anywhere, than from Firefox to Chrome ;-)
- ajitk 14y agoConcur that a switch to either Chrome or Firefox is a win. Both have been competing with each other after Chrome raised the bar. In either case winner is the user. Personally, I have been using Chrome and Firefox both. Firefox being the primary browser for browsing the wild web and Chrome for development and for using Google's services.
- kijin 14y agoI'm a diehard Firefox user, but I'm very glad that Chrome is there to offer some real competition. Back in the Firefox 3.6 days, Mozilla was beginning to get a little lazy, somewhat like Microsoft in the IE6 days. Then Chrome came along and Mozilla realized that they had to compete. It took them a couple of years to catch up, but now Firefox is a worthy competitor to Chrome and vice versa.
- afsina 14y agoWho to trust? There is a 20% difference with StatCounter and NetApplications. And according to NetApplicaitons IE is gaining O_o. I wish Google can tell its own statistics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
- hahainternet 14y agoHere are my numbers Chrome - 63.1% Firefox - 21.1% IE - 7.1% These are heavily biased towards young (13-25) Windows users who play games. I've noticed the massive dominance of Chrome for some time, but the numbers are not clear enough to show a rise or fall in its use over time.
- idleloops 14y agoChrome certainly used to feel snappier with JS, which probably attracts the gamers.
- idleloops 14y agoNot sure why I got a down vote for this. Probably as it's anecdotal? What I should have said: from my experience Chrome feels snappier with Javascript performance at least while playing typeracer. And I read into that, that JS games perform better under Chrome.
- hahainternet 14y agoI wouldn't worry about random downvotes, no karma system works. 'snappiness' is a potential driving factor for Chrome use. I'll try and do some research on users at some point.
- vibrunazo 14y agoAccording to the page you linked, the difference is because NetApplication uses unique daily users instead of page hits. NetApplications also uses some different weighting per country. StatCounter also use a much larger sample, 3 million websites vs 40k. I would guess, this means there are still more people using IE, but those using Chrome use the internet more often? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Differences_in_measurement http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Dif...
- pimeys 14y agoI hope Firefox gains more momentum. I don't trust Google, I don't want them to control everything. FF 13 is fast and modern browser. Installing Ghostery, AdBlock and Firebug makes it perfect.
- gouranga 14y agoAgreed. Internet Explorer with TPL support is a better proposition than Chrome. Firefox as well. Both browsers are putting the user first and not the vendor. Chrome is simply not trustworthy. Why would you get a browser from an advertising company that uses people's data to make money?
- hahainternet 14y agoSo get Chromium. Problem solved.
- gouranga 14y agoChromium is not what people are using. Chrome is. Completely different build output.
- hahainternet 14y agoThat's their choice. If you want to use chrome but without Google, get Chromium.
- te_chris 14y agoo rly? Microsoft have suddenly stopped trying to take a slice of the internet advertising market and competing directly with Google?
- olalonde 14y agoAnd doesn't most of Firefox's revenues come from Google?
- duiker101 14y agoThat red line at the bottom always saddens me. Why doesn't opera get the recognition it deserves?
- dm8 14y agoOpera is amazingly fast too. Like Chrome/FF13. And smaller memory footprint. Its not marketed well unfortunately.
- nkuttler 14y agoAt first you had to pay for it, then it was annoying adware. Sure, it was a snappy browser and I even used it for a while, mouse gestures etc. But there were always good enough free browsers available. When they removed the ads in 2005 it was far too late, Firefox had changed the game.
- coffeeaddicted 14y agoAnd Opera is still not open source. Which makes at least a difference for some people.
- chrisacky 14y agoI have recently added thenextweb.com to my blacklist domain to make sure that I accidentally don't send them any page views. I'm indifferent about any downvotes that i'll receive as a result of this comment, but for those of you who have realised how "deserving" Zee thinks he is to plagiarise articles, here is an alternate you can read. http://memeburn.com/2012/05/its-official-chrome-is-the-webs-most-popular-browser/ http://memeburn.com/2012/05/its-official-chrome-is-the-webs-... (I'm referring to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3972651 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3972651 incase you missed out on how TNW's Zee just totally does not get it). (Edit: I'm sure this article here isn't plagiarised. That's not why I provided a link. It's hardly an imaginative story so I'm sure TNW pulled it together themselves. However, when you try and pass yourself off as a legitamate hard working publication, and fail to give credit to someone who essentially wrote and researched your article, there is something intrinsically wrong with your ethics. As a person, I'm not even particularly opinionated, lots can pass me by without me caring: but Zee's attitude disgusted me).
- toni 14y agoSo the question becomes, why people keep posting plagiarized stories (complete with link tracking query strings) by TNW on HN?
- obiterdictum 14y agoA lot of people are probably not aware of it, as it's hard to keep up with every drama on the Internet when you have things to do. I certainly wasn't until today. (Yes, I realize the irony of this comment, I should be doing things right now.)
- DeepDuh 14y agoSelf reflection can be such an exhaustive character trait. My Objective C programs can also sing that song ;).
- throwaway_87 14y agoThat's how nerds get controversial things accomplished without pushback. They do it while the rest of the world, which is busy with other things, isn't looking.
- kevinsd 14y agoOh well, Statcounter (and only Statcounter) again. Compared to other sources, Statcounter has a track record of valuing Chrome's market share higher. Also, the curve in the article is pretty steady/linear. Where comes "leapfrogging"?
- DaveChild 14y agoBeing a web dev, I tend to keep a collection of browsers open all the time - Chrome for email, twitter, calendar, bug tracker etc. Firefox for development (Firebug FTW). Midori for state-less browsing (it empties caches and data when restarted, so I use that when I need a clean session). And Opera for social, personal, fun, feeds and reading etc. They all have their strengths, but I'm still amazed Opera doesn't have a higher share.
- stuartmemo 14y agoI still don't really get what Firebug offers over Chrome's dev tools these days. What do you prefer about it?
- idleloops 14y agoI wonder if it's something as simple as the name 'Opera' (why?) Having said that Firefox and Chrome are pretty lousy names too, it doesn't seem to have done them any harm.
- DeepDuh 14y agoOpera seems to face the chicken and egg problem. Many websites that are specifically optimized for some browsers don't work on Opera. They don't consider opera for its low user numbers. And users are not not easily attracted to a feature rich browser where some sites don't work. I've used Opera for many years but when they had a bit of a buggy release (I think it was around Opera 10) I switched to Chrome, albeit with some sad feelings (I miss fast forward the most).
- throwaway_87 14y agoI don't think there's any question Chrome is going to win the Second Broswer War. The question is only when we all agree it's over. The monopoly issue seems even more troublesome this time, as compared with when Microsoft was trying to tie the browser to the desktop PC OS, because the web and search is actually Google's core business. If I were working on Chrome I would find myself wondering, "So what happens after we become the browser that 99% of the web uses and develops for? What if ChromeOS follows a similar path? Is that going to be good for the web in the long term? What if Google's business starts to slow down? We have created a virtual strangehold over the web. We might have to use it more aggressively." Or maybe not. All that free food. The big bonuses. The great things we achieved. In the near term, we have seriously made things better for everyone. Life's just too good to think business could ever falter. Maybe I might never have such thoughts. I'm just an engineer. I'm just doing my job. I can't worry about these things. The amount of control one company is developing over something so essential as the web is just obscene.
- DannoHung 14y agoThe difference this time is that the whole thing is open source. If it goes off the rails, we don't have to have someone start fromt the ground up fixing it. Just start building from the last good version.
- bzbarsky 14y agoExcept that large chunks of Chrome are not in fact open source....
- jiggy2011 14y agoGoogle has been the defacto gatekeeper of the web for some time now. The nice thing is that their business model doesn't seem to revolve around locking people into any particular system. In fact they want the opposite, as far as they are concerned everyone should be equal in terms of clicking on ads.
- bzbarsky 14y ago
- netcan 14y agoWhich-is-beter aside, this seems like a very healthy mix for competition & inovation: 75% split roughly even between 3 players. The big three are all very different (Community led Open Source, Bundled with the OS & Mega Company led Open Source). Developers can still feasibly test for major browsers. Everyone will be aware they have a choice. There is room in the remaining 25% for new players to emerge. Seems ideal.
- jballanc 14y agoReally, it's always struck me as odd that Microsoft hasn't thought about open sourcing IE. Presumably there's a tangled mess of proprietary code that they would have to sort out first, but it's already the case that the majority of users are browsing the web using open source browsers. There's no longer any hope of financial incentive for being closed source. In fact, it's more of a liability than anything these days...
- pygy_ 14y agoIn other news, the hemorrhage of Firefox users has been stabilized in January 2012, and it has been picking up market share for the last weeks (from 24.67% to 26.42%). http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-weekly-200827-201221 http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-weekly-200827-201221
- shangrila 14y agoMeanwhile, I saw a TV commercial for IE today. Amazing how things have changed from the days of 90+% market share dominance by IE.
- josefresco 14y agoIt's a good song too. Sadly I don't think anyone has ever chose a browser based on a TV commercial.
- ConstantineXVI 14y agoGoogle's running TV ads for Chrome as well; so at least 2 major browser vendors disagree.
- rizzy 14y agoI hate these type of articles. Out of all the sites I run and help with I have yet to see Chrome be the number 1 browser used. IE still accounts for the majority of all traffic. It has always been in my experience IE, Firefox then Chrome. With IE holding roughly 40-50% of the share.
- josefresco 14y agoAgreed. I monitor about 100 domains, mostly small business websites here in the US and none (I repeat NONE) have Chrome anywhere even close to Firefox, let alone IE which commands the first spot on almost every site. I don't know where or who these Chrome users are, but they certainly aren't visiting your bread and butter small biz websites.
- systematical 14y agoI use Chrome, but I really want(ed) FireFox to win this. I don't like helping Google gain another market, but FireFox ruined its browser with bad performance / memory leaks. FireFox left me no choice and I assume most web developers and technology peeps made a decision similar to mine.
- shmerl 14y agoWhen did you last test it? Firefox performance surpasses Chrome in memory management and optimizations IMO.
- systematical 14y agoYeah it got better, but I kinda made the switch already.
- shmerl 14y agoGive a try to both and compare. Since you were resolute enough to make a switch out of performance concerns, you can as well switch again ;) Personally I never found Firefox to be performing bad enough to switch, even though Chrome could be better some time ago.
- kjhughes 14y agoMany Windows users are still on XP, which is viewed as good-enough and not worth the upgrade troubles: http://www.neowin.net/news/windows-xp-market-share-goes-down-in-february-2012 http://www.neowin.net/news/windows-xp-market-share-goes-down... If Microsoft would have written IE versions beyond 8 to work with XP, IE might have been able to hang in at #1 longer since the later versions of IE aren't as bad. I know I'll be happy when I see IE 8 usage drop sufficiently low in my logs to allow me to stop attending to its limitations while developing.
- throwaway_87 14y agoEveryone commenting about open source in this thread, who is not a Chromium developer, has built Chromium from source? It's really easy, right? And it works just the same as Chrome, right? Mozilla is open source but the complexity and volume of the code means very few people can work with it. How many of you, who are not Mozilla developers, have modified the Firefox source and compiled a working version?