Chrome Becoming World's Second Most Popular Web Browser 511
redletterdave writes with news that Google Chrome is in the process of surpassing Firefox to become the second most popular web browser. Pinpointing the exact time of the change is difficult, of course, since different analytics firms collect slightly different data. The current crop of media reports were triggered by data from StatCounter, which shows Chrome at 25.69% and Firefox at 25.23% for November. Data from Net Applications shows Firefox still holding a 4% lead, but the trends suggest it will evaporate within a few months.
Inevitable. (Score:5, Interesting)
Complete lack of surprise (Score:4, Interesting)
With the way things have been going for firefox, it was a matter of time, not competition. The community said they wanted a swing and the firefox team has consistently provided a tire. I get that firefox is open source and they don't have the resources of google or microsoft, but still for a long time they were extremely competitive. What happened? My guess is they either stopped caring about anybody actually using firefox for anything reliable and began toying with the source, or senior developers left the project and were replaced by monkeys.
I actually had a chat on slashdot with a developer of ff. The guy was so disillusioned towards why would people ever have expectations of an open source project and he can do wtf he wants cause he's not getting paid to do it. Well he's right, but what will he do when nobody is using firefox anymore?
No surprise due to bundling (Score:5, Interesting)
We are constantly removing Chrome from the software packages that are bundling it. Kind of a turnoff for me.
Just like getting a new PC with all the trialware crap.
Re:Firefox is to blame (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:And still... (Score:5, Interesting)
I use chrome on my windows machines... have for a long time. I was using either chrome or chromium on linux for some time too. But as it turns out, very basic functionality in the linux builds has been broken for as long as I can remember and your patience eventually runs out. For instance, bookmarks have never worked right in Chromium or Chrome. There are something like 20 related bug tracker entries for the same issues and they've never been fixed. And I just can't get by without working bookmarks anymore... they're kinda essential to a decent browser.
So I put firefox back on those machines, and I was impressed that everything just works, and it's plenty fast. I'm sure it's because I've only got two extensions installed but I'm happy with it. Now I'm considering moving the windows machines back.
Either way, you've gotta love having choices.
Re:And still... (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, it does work nicely, albeit a) more slowly than Chrome and b) it tends to crash for stupid reasons (most often while typing up a comment on Facebook; then again, maybe the universe is trying to tell me something).
I do wish Firefox would implement Chrome’s method of auto-updating in the background (thus eliminating the wait at startup) and finally stop one tab or extension from crashing the whole browser.
I haven't had it crash on me, I run it on Linux boxes.
I use all of the browsers for dev, for personal use I use two, Firefox and Chrome.
Firefox for personal browsing. I can't see that changing any time soon. Chrome for HTML5.
Firefox beats the rest at privacy and user control hands down. As far as I'm concerned that makes it the best browser. Maybe they should keep all that and switch to webkit as an engine?
I like that idea.
Re:just keep copying opera (Score:5, Interesting)
I use Opera as my primary browser and I absolutely love it, but I have to admit that it's not as idiot-friendly as Fx or Chrome so I rarely recommend it to other people. Opera is great for power users who appreciate the fact that you don't need to install plugins, extensions, add-ons or bells and whistles to make it a useable browser. However, I do highly recommend Opera Mini to users with mobile devices due to the fact it tends to be faster thanks to Oepra Turbo as well as more user friendly and intuitive than the native Android, etc browsers.
Re:And still... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:And still... (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the difference is that Chrome updates all of the time but it does it transparently (to the user) and so doesn't impact their browsing experience.
If Firefox updated in the background and it didn't break anything in the process then no one would care.
Well, except when major GUI changes happened and then everyone would have a fit because they didn't get a choice to not update and keep things like they were.
Chrome has avoided that so far by pretty much keeping the same GUI throughout its lifespan.
Alternatively, Chrome's design makes some add-ons not feasible (Adblock Plus doesn't really work well at blocking flash ads on Chrome last time I checked).
Does Chrome have an identity crisis? (Score:5, Interesting)
We see Mozilla, Chrome, and Safari all on the same line. And I see a lot of lines like that. In fact of 587 lines I saw in my log that accessed the favicon.ico page, they all mentioned Mozilla and only three did not mention Safari.
Re:And still... (Score:5, Interesting)
Here is one on Tom's Hardware: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/firefox-chrome-opera,2558-4.html [tomshardware.com]
When comparing ten tabs the article states. "The big surprise here is Opera's and Chrome's poor showing in the multi-tab tests. Overall, Firefox delivers the best memory usage results. It comes in first place for the five- and ten-tab usage tests, but fourth in the single-tab metric."