
Chrome at 20% market share, IE9 less than IE7 - nextparadigms
http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/06/17/report-the-most-common-web-browsers-and-browser-versions-today/
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mbrubeck
Google appears to be spending quite a bit to increase Chrome's market share -
not just through advertising, but also through aggressive bundling deals. For
example, Skype's installer also installs Chrome and selects its as the default
browser— _if the current default browser is IE_. There's a choice to opt out,
but the installer's standard action is to install and select Chrome.

I assume the Skype installer deal will change once Microsoft finishes
acquiring Skype, but Chrome is also bundled in the installers for other
popular software like Avast Antivirus and (I think) Adobe Shockwave.

Some details:

[http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=67785482-1A64-67EA-E4A686A8...](http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=67785482-1A64-67EA-E4A686A82023E4DA)

<https://blog.avast.com/2009/12/03/avast-and-google-chrome/>

[Disclosure: I work for Mozilla. My comments are based on my opinions, not my
employer's.]

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Daniel14
I can see two benefits of increasing Chrome market share for Google, that
justify these expenses:

1) It speeds up the web. Since every second internet user makes Google money,
making the web a great place for both consumers (speed, security) and
developers (standards, up-to-date browsers) is very much in Google's interest.
2) It makes Google the default search engine. Instead of being at the mercy of
browser developers and having to pay them huge sums of money, they can
directly make lots of people use their search engine (and look at their ads).

I personally believe the second point is what actually finances the Chrome
team. Like android, Chrome is but "moat" for Google, protecting their main
source of revenue: Search. Shaking up the industry for the better is just a
nice side effect.

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magicalist
just to be chrome-defender guy again: whenever I've installed chrome it's
always asked on first start what search engine I want to be the default.

I haven't installed from a bundle before, so that might different.

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sjwright
I've always thought it was a clever move by Google.

1\. You can't accuse Chrome of being a trojan horse for their search engine.
2\. It makes Microsoft look bad when they default to Bing. 3\. When asked,
people almost always pick Google anyway. 4\. Google now have (another) way of
quantifying #3.

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georgefox
Re: #4, I would imagine the percentage of Google Chrome users who would pick
Google over an alternative would be a bit higher than the percentage for
internet users overall.

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sjwright
Agreed, but I'm sure the trend data would be useful for quantifying how their
brand is tracking (not to mention how their competitors are tracking).

Plus I'm sure they can separate statistics based on whether they installed it
directly, or whether it was installed as part of Skype, or whatever. The
skype-installed user base would be somewhat closer to typical users.

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InclinedPlane
It's actually somewhat ironic, since chrome wasn't ever specifically intended
to take over the browser market. It was intended to shake up browser
development and get everyone building better, faster browsers that supported
the lattest standards. I think it's fair to say they've succeeded
tremendously. When chrome was launched web devs were looking at a landscape
where maybe if they were lucky they could start thinking about html5 and css3
in another decade or so. Now things couldn't be more different, people are
deprecating ie6 support left and right and lauching a business that uses
bleeding edge web standards is far from a death sentence.

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huckfinnaafb
If that's true, then their attitude of "we don't want to be the biggest
player, we just want to change the game" seems to be a habit for them, as
they've said the same thing with regards to their ISP service.

I think Chrome and Firefox, together, have really pulled the web out of the
dredges and put it on a path of more frequent updates and a more diverse
market. Kudos to the Chrome dev team and all the people who contribute to
Chromium.

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sjwright
I'd save my biggest thanks to the guys who turned the cute little KHTML
library into a seriously modern and scalable engine. Not only do their
combined efforts power a full quarter of the desktop market, but probably
something like 95% of the modern smartphone market.

Anyone who's ever had to develop for the shitty custom browsers written by LG,
Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Nokia, Siemens (etc etc etc) knows what I mean.

So yeah, thanks Apple.

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mda
Webkit team: <http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/WebKit%20Team>

Webkit is a joint effort for very long time. Biggest contributors are Google,
Apple, Nokia and RIM.

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sjwright
Nokia is often cited as a big contributor because they bought TrollTech. Much
of Nokia's own work on WebKit for the S60 never got merged back into the
mainline.

Similarly, RIM's contributions were actually Torch Mobile, who they acquired
less than two years ago. Torch employed several long-time KHTML and WebKit
contributors.

Google are (I believe) the biggest single contributor _today_ , but their
contributions aren't yet substantial overall.

Apple's contributions included extensive work on standards compliance, web
compatibility, performance, security, robustness, testing infrastructure and
butt loads of major features. You know, the important bits.

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mda
You call finding-fixing most of the security vulnerabilities in Webkit "not
substantial"?

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MatthewPhillips
This is a good sign for us Chrome developers. I've been seeing increased
purchases of my app recent even to be quite frank, it's pretty rough around
the edges. When the Web Store was released to the stable branch I saw a huge
spike in page views and then it quickly trailed off. My page views haven't
gone up but purchases have; I'm guessing it's new users.

I'm hopefully that the Chromebooks will be successful because my particular
app is designed for Chrome OS (it uses the "panel" mode which launches the app
in a little window in the bottom of the screen. In desktop Chrome it launches
as a new window which isn't as good of an experience). This news is still
good; shows that even if Chromebooks are not successful Chrome proper is.

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jahmed
I have a CR-48 and would be interested in checking it out.

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jackfoxy
Remember: results vary greatly for individual websites. So if your livelihood
depends on web presence, monitor your own statistics and make sure there is a
good user experience on all the browsers that matter to you.

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tc7
I upgraded to IE9 to test a web app I'm working on, with the usual "1st IE
test" dread. Surprised and super pleased by how well it worked. Way less awful
than previous IE versions, in my limited testing. Even looks better - less
cluttered ui. If chrome, ff and ie9 had a 3 way tie, I'd be perfectly fine
with that..

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m3koval
After briefly using IE9 after using Firefox and Chrome for ages, I felt
exactly the same way. Not only was IE9 substantially better than IE7 and IE8,
but some of the UI decisions seem better than Firefox. If its support for
HTML5 and CSS3 have improved by a similar amount (I honestly have no idea),
then we finally have three relatively comparable browsers.

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dave1010uk
I great site to compare what different browsers support is
<http://caniuse.com> . For example, you can see that IE9 and Firefox 3.5 are
quite closely matched here:
[http://caniuse.com/#compare=y&b1=ie+9&b2=firefox+3.5](http://caniuse.com/#compare=y&b1=ie+9&b2=firefox+3.5)

As a web developer (and Firefox user), I believe that IE9 is miles better that
any previous version of IE but I still think Microsoft have a lot of catching
up to do. Hopefully IE10 will lessen the gap even more.

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melling
The numbers are already out of date. Google just upgraded 160 million people
to Chrome 12. Firefox will hopefully upgrade 200 million people to Firefox 5
this week. I've watch the numbers for the past couple of weeks and IE9 has
caught IE7.

The web could really get a bump if we just nudge the remaining legacy browser
users to upgrade. Why anyone would run IE6 or IE7 is beyond me.

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DougWebb
People still use Windows XP, and people still use old ActiveX software that
was developed when IE6 ruled and Microsoft was still pursuing dominance
through lock-in.

The real question is why Microsoft hasn't developed a way to install newer
versions of IE on the older OS'. There must be a way to isolate the browser
from the rest of the system, even if they have to wrap a VM around it.

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abraham
MS wants to sell newer versions of Windows.

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HaloZero
An equally likely situation is that users are migrating from IE to both Chrome
and Firefox. Now there are also users migrating from Firefox to Chrome. Thus
Firefox has remained stable, while Chrome has had immense growth.

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experimental
It's also true that users have moved to Firefox from Chrome, being that for
example depending on the metric Firefox is faster, but mostly the same speed.
QEMU in javascript is a good example of a real world example where Firefox's
javascript engine doubled Chrome's speed or thereabouts.

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the_gws
I would bet that most of that ie6 and ie7 share is business computers. It's
the IT department that decides when to upgrade those browsers and not the
users. In home computers ie might not be the dominant browser anymore!

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nkassis
I wonder if chrome was counted twice? The fact that some are still running 11
and other were running 12 makes me think that maybe users were in the middle
of that switch? I'd put their numbers around 12% then.

Whatever it is, I think it good. My app is biased to chrome because that's
what I use. I keep seeing more and more people on chrome at my browser
research lab (snooping on people's laptop at starbucks ;p)

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rorrr
I just looked at analytics of one of my relatively popular non-tech site, and
here's the breakdown:

FF: 36%

IE: 22%

    
    
        IE8: 61%
    
        IE9: 21%
    
        IE7: 13%
    
        IE6: 5%
    

Chrome: 21%

Safari: 12.6%

Opera: 6.6%

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mestudent
My non-tech site (small, ~10,000 uniques per month):

    
    
        IE            45%
           IE8            72%
           IE7            19%
           IE9             7%
           IE6             2%
        FF            23%
        Safari        19%
        Chrome        10%

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brudgers
Safari 5.0 has passed IE6.

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Zakuzaa
20% is really huge in such a short timespan. Chrome must be becoming
increasingly one of the prominent sources of user data for Google.

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azakai
> 20% is really huge in such a short timespan.

I don't think so. I am surprised it isn't higher.

First of all, Chrome's advertising campaign is immense. Chrome ads are
plastered all over the web, including crucial places like google.com. Chrome
is spending more on advertising than other browsers have available altogether.

Second, Chrome is a good product. Google has invested enormous resources into
it, the kind that only an industry giant like Google, Apple and Microsoft can
do, and the results are exactly as you would expect - good.

Third, we are also starting to see some special integration between Google web
properties and Chrome, optimizations that appear only in that combination of
browser+website. (Even if these are not proprietary protocols and so forth,
Google still has an incredible advantage in the direct connection between the
teams.) Leveraging Google's websites like that is a special advantage of
Google that other browser makers do not have.

In summary, for these three reasons, I don't think Chrome's market share is
surprising at all. In fact I am surprised it isn't higher.

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saturdaysaint
Those are good reasons, but the subtext of the parent post is how absolutely
intractable IE's share has been for years, despite (once) poor performance and
being appallingly behind the curve on new features (tabs, extensions, etc.).
Google's own research showed that users didn't even understand the abstraction
of a browser application - they were simply "ummm, on the internet".

Clearly, Google made headway on these issues, but I think you underestimate
how profound consumers needed (and still need) to be educated that they even
have a choice of web browsers and that choice impacts their daily web
experience.

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xuki
Thanks to Firefox, many users are now aware of and looking for "a better
browsing experience", which IMO helps a lot in Chrome's adoption rate.

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majmun
It seems like Chrome has eaten up Firefoxes market share. if im not mistaken.

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kenjackson
No, I think it is generally from IE. If you look at Firefox, it is basically
flat, over the past two years. All the growth is Chrome.

See <http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-monthly-200911-201105>

But it does raise a question, since they count browser usage, and not unique
users -- I fully expect that ppl who use Chrome/FF to spend a LOT more time on
the web browsing more sites. If we count unique users do we see a sharp uptick
in IE percentage?

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nextparadigms
I think browser usage is a _better_ metric anyway. Why should I count as an IE
user if I only open it once per month, or even once per week? How does that
help them? Browser usage is much more important.

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kenjackson
I think they're both very valid metrics -- but of different things. For
example, I spend about 50x more time online than my parents do, and I think we
need a metric to capture that. But we also need a metric that points out that
people who open up their computer once a day for 20 minutes to check email,
pay bills, and read the news -- may have very different browser
characteristics.

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jamesgagan
hard to believe that in this day and age, browsers aren't standardized to the
extent say cars or televisions are...then we would not have these problems.

