Chrome 15 Overtakes IE 8 For Top Browser Spot

An anonymous reader writes "If you're reading this on Chrome, you're part of a wave that has ditched Internet Explorer or Firefox and helped vault Google's browser to the top Web browser spot worldwide." Are you reading this on Chrome? (I'm using Chromium right now, but that's pretty close.)

No

[Anonymous Coward]

Google's decision to drop native h264 support in Chrome means I deleted it and won't be installing it again. Likewise, I steer all clients away from it and do not even bother to test our websites in it. I thought it was finally time for the browser wars to be over and for everything to really work in whichever browser was chosen easily. Then Google pulled that one. Idiots.

Re:First post from firefox

[rhyder128k]

An excellent point. It's also worth noting that Firefox is the most popular browser in Europe. Probably due to those EU regulations about Windows offering a default choice. Y'know the ones that people said would have no effect anyway.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2011/01/04/us-internet-europe-idUKTRE70324F20110104 [reuters.com]

Re:First post from firefox

[InsightIn140Bytes]

Same goes for Opera, which is extremely popular in Russia and CIS countries and actually beats any other browser. It has like 50% market share in some countries. http://my.opera.com/dstorey/blog/2009/03/16/a-look-at-desktop-market-share-cis-edition [opera.com]

For those of us with SSDs however...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've used Chrome a lot and like it even more. Unfortunately, a mere day's browsing generates 700,000 writes according to windows (almost an order of magnitude over any other browser). As an SSD user, this just isn't acceptable and all the fixes are a complicated way of 'shoving the cache onto a spinning disc drive'.

Re:Firefox still rules

[bhcompy]

without a proper NoScript solution, all other browsers fail. FF is a bloated beastly browser, but can't live without NoScript anymore.

Re:No

[hedwards]

The problem is that as long as MPEG LA expects to be paid for use of the standard you're going to have a two tiered net the way that it used to be with Flash. Granted most folks would have a license via MS, but it's a really shitty situation to have to either a licensing fee to use the web or violate somebody's patents.

Re:Firefox still rules

[furbyhater]

It's not only noscript, as the poster below indicates, once you've got used to tree-style-tabs there's no going back.
It seems to me that firefox's development model fosters the creation of cool, innovative add-ons more than chrome.
Even though their faster-than-light release cycle of late may put and end to this... :-(

Re:For those of us with SSDs however...

[sa666_666]

If you have some RAM to spare, consider moving the cache to a RAM disk instead. This will save the SSD, and is even a good thing to do if you're using a hard drive.

Re:First post from firefox

[Requiem18th]

I also want to add that all the popularity of Firefox is due to it's own quality.

Chrome is aggressively advertised in all Google services, specially Youtube.
It also has TV ads including Super Bowl ads, using celebrities like Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga and even Hatsune Miku!

It also tries to sneak installs by sponsoring freeware downloads with chrome bundled. Opt-out of course.

They even messed up with the opt out option to make it hard to opt-out. I am specially offended by that *because* it is such a petty thing to muck with. It was a simple, straight forward Windows form but the opt-out option was semi-disabled. Oh come on that's just childish!

So I'm not impressed by Chrome's market share. It mostly shows the efficacy of strong marketing. I'm not saying it is a bad browser, or that Firefox is perfect, just that Chrome's success isn't really due to some sense of superiority.

And another thing.

What is with Chrome fanboys? Google is a for-profit corporation vent on market domination. It is NOT a good thing if Chrome kills Firefox, the last thing we need is another browser monoculture.

Re:First post from firefox

[BrokenHalo]

I also want to add that all the popularity of Firefox is due to it's own quality.

True. Firefox is now a rock-solid, stable and mature browser. Having said that, I have actually been using Chromium as my default browser for a few months, for just two reasons:
1. Chromium loads webpages perceptibly faster, and
2. because Chromium by default takes up marginally less real-estate on my laptop screen with menubars, toolbars and whatnot that are not necessary.

However, if Chromium were not available, I would not be persuaded to use Chrome, as I am not happy about the possibility of anything I do being relayed to Google.

Re:First post from firefox

[cayenne8]

Interesting...........completely anecdotal, but I don't know anyone that uses chrome, much less even knows it exists for the most part of them.

Hell, most of them I had to explain what FF was....

Re:First post from firefox

[arglebargle_xiv]

I also want to add that all the popularity of Firefox is due to it's own quality.

By "quality" I assume you really mean "qualities", i.e. the combination of its appearance, UI, stability, compatibility, and so on. And that's the problem with FF today, the market is broken up into people sticking with 3.6.x because it's a significant improvement on all of its successors, people on a random spread of versions up to whatever we're on this week (I don't want to post a version number because by the time this post appears it'll have changed), and people who've abandoned it for Chrome, which FF seems to be trying to copy, but badly.

Re:First post from firefox

[edalytical]

Chrome's marketing is downright deceptive. After running a test on speedtest.net you'd be presented with a ad for Chrome that read something like: "Internet speed not what you expected? Try a faster browser." That's, in my opinion, a lie. Google isn't the saint we thought it was. It's a fucking advertising company. That's worse than any operating system or office suite company that was once the market leader.

Re:For those of us with SSDs however...

[Waccoon]

Firefox also lets me move the browser cache and profiles to my hard drive or any folder I want. Chrome only supports writing to the same folder to which its installed. There's not much point to an SSD if I have to install applications to a hard drive.

When I tried Chrome, it read 20GB+ and wrote between 2-4GB every time I did a cold start. I ditched the browser very quickly. Aside from wondering what the fuck this advertising company was doing reading and writing so much data on startup, I wasn't going to let Chrome thrash my SSD to death.

I've since discovered that Chromium and Iron don't torture drives. Not only have I banished Chrome from my system, but all other Google apps as well.

Re:First post from firefox

[kangsterizer]

Hopefully 1. will be fixed soon. Chrome and Firefox are roughly as fast. Some pages load faster on Firefox. Some faster on Chrome.
But ALL Google pages load faster on Chome (and Chromium of course). That's because they all use Google-only protocols (such as SPDY) which do make a difference.

That's how you segment the web by the way, even if it's using open source stuff. Thanksfully, for that very one (SPDY) it's going to be in Firefox soon, hence, 1 would be fixed soon. But I'm *sure* Google will find other ways.

They're probably going to include Chome-only tags (oh wait, they already do that! offline gmail anyone?) or NaCl components, or Dart only component.

And that's why Google's actually turning evil after all.

Re:First post from firefox

[Bing Tsher E]

So you have the source code for Chrome and have built it from source?

You have any of the really important Google software, i.e. the backend source code?

I read it on Firefox

[Daniel Phillips]

Truth be told, I read it on Firefox, though I also have Chrome running. In fact, I do my "throwaway" browsing on Chrome and "serious" browsing on Firefox. Chrome not being able to bookmark all tabs to a folder is a serious deficiency that prevents me from saving sets of links that are the result of possibly lengthy research. Another constant annoyance is Chrome saving all files to Downloads instead of giving me the option to open. This litters my Download directory with lots of junk, a problem I do not have with Firefox. And Chrome cannot be trusted to remember its open tabs after an unexpected shutdown (such as a reboot).

Re:First post from firefox

[f()rK()_Bomb]

I'm in Ireland, attending college as a mature student, every single teenager uses chrome, as do all my friends. When someone complains about Firefox on Facebook everyone points them to chrome. Exact opposite experience, anecdotes are useless.

Not suprising

[belgianguy]

While the comparison might be somewhat apples-oranges, I do think Chrome deserves credit for upgrading the majority of its clients to the latest version, independent of OS version and without hassling its users about it. In contrast to this, Internet Explorer has artificial ceilings installed, older versions of Windows cannot upgrade past a certain version and I believe Apple has similar policies towards the use of Safari. Chrome imposes no such 'sanctions' on its users, which I think is a great way to adapt the way we use the Internet to its ever faster evolution.

Although I don't understand the resurfacing argument that IE6 is mainly kept alive by corporations. Would that not contradict some sort of evolutionary process? Those unwilling to change should be left behind, just because advances in web technology could provide advantages to internal applications of competitors, so if they decide not to upgrade, the competition should decide it for them. But this seems not to be the case. So my bet is that the majority of IE6 users probably come from bootlegged vanilla XP installations with (surprise-surprise) automatic upgrades turned off in regions like China.

And then there once was Firefox, in its heyday the only alternative to The Microsoft Way. Now, it tries to maintain a release schedule that is only rivaled in speed by some out-of-whack neutrinos. Somehow its upper management got deluded into thinking they needed to mimic their new-found rival to stay relevant. While that sentiment has some truth to it, the way it was executed hurt their core user base more than they could siphon off users from either IE or Chrome. Because people who like Chrome, will use Chrome. And not something that desperately chases Chrome, but fails to address other critical issues in the process.

Re:First post from firefox

[berberine]

I work at a junior high where the science teacher has a Master's in Computer Science. She tells everyone not to use anything but IE because those other browsers aren't supported by Microsoft and you don't know what virus you're going to get with them. She's extremely vocal about it and nothing I've said makes a difference. She just keeps telling me I'll be sorry when I get a virus from "that Firefox you use." She has the teachers in the junior high convinced not to use anything else.

Meanwhile, you go to the high school where my husband works and they use a mix of Firefox, Opera, Chrome, and IE, depending on their own preference.