Google Chrome Becomes World's No. 1 Browser 449
redletterdave writes "Just six months after Google Chrome eclipsed Mozilla's Firefox to become the world's second most popular Web browser, Chrome finally surpassed Microsoft's Internet Explorer on Sunday to become the most-used Web browser in the world, according to Statcounter. Since May 2011, Internet Explorer's global market share has been steadily decreasing from 43.9 percent to 31.4 percent of all worldwide users. In that time, Chrome has climbed from below 20 percent to nearly 32 percent of the market share. Yet, while Chrome is now the No. 1 browser in the world, it still lags behind Internet Explorer here in the U.S., but that will soon change. Chrome currently has 27.1 percent of the U.S. market share, compared to Internet Explorer's 30.9 percent, but IE is seeing significant drop-offs in usage while Chrome continues to rise."
But what are the weekday numbers like? (Score:5, Interesting)
The "Chrome effect" is the spike of internet trends that only happens on the weekends because geeks and other home-enthusiasts are using alternative browsers since there is no real restriction. What is the percentage of use during 9a-5p monday through friday? Looking at intra-week stats shows this heavily favors IE, or at least it has in the past. What is the trend for business adoption of alternative browsers?
Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users (Score:5, Interesting)
Can you please list some Chrome only tags? Are these tags Google created? Or are these HTML 5 tags that other browsers don't exactly support yet?
False, according to Statcounter (Score:5, Interesting)
BROWSERS: Do you adjust your browser stats for prerendering/pre-loading? [statcounter.com]
Two browsers are affected by preview-type requests - Chrome and Safari.
Chrome
Further to a significant number of user requests, we are now adjusting our browser stats to remove the effect of prerendering in Google Chrome. From 1 May 2012, prerendered pages (which are not actually viewed) are not included in our stats.
Some points to note:
Prerendering was announced by Chrome in June 2011. This change did not have any significant impact on our stats.
Chrome is currently allowing the detection of prerendering behavior via its Page Visibility API.
Google specifically states:
"Important: This is an experimental API and may change-or even be removed-in the future, especially as the Page Visibility API standard, which is an early draft, evolves."
This means that in the future it may not be possible to track/remove the effect of prerendering on Chrome.
If other browsers adopt prerendering then it may not be possible to track/remove the effect of prerendering on those browsers. In that case, the fairest solution would be to include all page views (prerendered or not) for all browsers rather than only excluding prerendering in Chrome. That scenario would require us to revisit this methodology change in the future.
Safari
The Top Sites feature in Safari shows preview thumbnails of frequently visited sites. These preview thumbnails are refreshed by Safari periodically. Unfortunately, it is not possible to exclude these previews from being tracked. To get a bit technical, this is because the "X-Purpose: preview" header is only sent with the request for the base page. The header is not sent as part of requests for images, CSS or JavaScript that have to be downloaded and executed as part of the Top Sites preview. With online web analytics (as provided by StatCounter) the relevant header information is not passed so these preview requests can't be detected and therefore can't be removed. Ideally Safari will change this to ensure to send the "X-Purpose: preview" header with all Top Sites HTTP requests, however this is not the case at present.
Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users (Score:5, Interesting)
they pay makers of Angry Birds to have Chrome-only HTML5 version of their game
make websites that purposely only work with Chrome
There is no such thing as "Chrome-only HTML5" - those sites are just HTML5, that will work with Chrome. The sites will also run on other browsers if they support HTML5; it's hardly Google's fault if other browsers do not support HTML5, is it?
They game and spam other search engines [zdnet.com] like Bing too.
Interesting article! Did you bother to read it? In fact, it's the complete opposite of trying to game and spam search engines:
Google has demoted its Chrome home page in results for a search using the keyword "browser" following an effort to have bloggers promote the Google browser that backfired. Now, there is no Chrome ad at the top of the results or link to the Chrome page anywhere on the first page of results on Google. It's ranked in position 50, according to Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand, which first reported this news.
Google's statement, according to SearchEngineLand, is:
"We've investigated and are taking manual action to demote www.google.com/chrome and lower the site's PageRank for a period of at least 60 days.We strive to enforce Google's webmaster guidelines consistently in order to provide better search results for users. While Google did not authorize this campaign, and we can find no remaining violations of our webmaster guidelines, we believe Google should be held to a higher standard, so we have taken stricter action than we would against a typical site."
Re:Well deserved (Score:4, Interesting)
The extensions are shite.
Real garbage - and the updating of extensions is primitive, at best.
With all the assets they own or control - Google Code, anyone? - you think that this would improve. No luck. From the Google POV, users should NOT have control over their browsing experience, any more than users of televisions do.
The fact is, Firefox is a browsing TOOLKIT. Chrome is a HTML TV.
Android? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:But what are the weekday numbers like? (Score:4, Interesting)
If you're working in IT for a company that still mandates IE6 -- leave. There is high demand for IT workers from good companies that are not on the IE6 FAIL wagon. Failure to upgrade past XP/IE6 is just a symptom. You might as well leave on your own terms. Your job is not going to be around long anyway.
That's what a lot of people said about COBOL... Thirty years ago...
Installbase is all that matters. Safety in numbers, and all that. If there are XP and IE6 deployments, there will be demand for apps, which will sustain deployment.
Including or excluding Chromium? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Well deserved (Score:5, Interesting)
Where is the Chrome extension of any significant value that is equal to its Firefox counterpart?
Adblock and Ghostery are better on Safari, than Chrome - and Safari's versions BLOW.
What about the Chrome equivalent of Firebug, or RESTclient, or even Greasemonkey? What about DownloadHelper or DownLoadThemAll? What about FireFTP?
How about Zotero? Nothing this sophisticated, powerful and simple exists in the Chromiverse. The ports to Chrome and Safari can be best described as experimental.
In fact, it is the breadth of Firefox extensibility that best argues its case. The Chrome portal by contrast, is littered with simple CSS shifters for Facebook and YouTube.
Re:False (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Chromium, (Score:3, Interesting)
That's correct. I don't care that they build a profile to more effectively target ads that I ignore toward me.
Re:No wonder Chrome is gaining users (Score:5, Interesting)
Why tags? How about Chrome Native Client the equivallent to ActiveX?
Native Client is equivalent to ActiveX in the same way that Google's evil is equivalent to Microsoft's; only occasionally and mostly by accident.
I think Native Client is a bit of a misguided experiment. I worry that a sandbox implemented directly on so many different physical processors will have great difficulty being secure. However, it's not that they aren't aware of these worries and aren't trying to take them into account.
Every time that someone tries to say that "Microsoft is not as evil as they used to be" remember that they keep trying to add features from the above ActiveX list into their new ARM based Windows. Neither Apple nor Google will ever be as sneakily anti-customer, anti-consumer and anti-humanity as Microsoft is. Not even if their management specifically sets out to be.