
Google Chrome Leapfrogs Internet Explorer as the Web's Top Browser - jarederondu
http://thenextweb.com/google/2012/05/21/google-chrome-overtakes-internet-explorer-as-the-webs-most-used-browser/?awesm=tnw.to_1EUZJ&utm_campaign=social%20media&utm_medium=Spreadus&utm_source=Twitter&utm_content=Google%20Chrome%20overtakes%20Internet%20Explorer%20as%20the%20Webs%20most%20used%20browser
======
chrisacky
I 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-...](http://memeburn.com/2012/05/its-official-chrome-is-the-webs-most-
popular-browser/)

(I'm referring to <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).

~~~
throwaway_87
So what we have to do is always find the original sources of thenextweb
articles and post those instead.

There is certainly no loss in skipping over thenextweb.

This is just my opinion.

But in my experience they have proven themselves to be all but worthless time
and again. It's not just plagiarism. They do not research their stories. They
appear to lack any measurable insight into the subject matter. As such, they
make a lousy source of news.

~~~
DanBC
> _So what we have to do is always find the original sources_

That's what the guidelines recommend.

------
pimeys
I 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.

~~~
antninja
Firefox used to be my browser of choice, but now it's the worst of all for me.

There are two main problems:

1\. Sometimes I start FF and it tells me that its process is still running. It
happens too often that I close FF and it fails to properly terminate its
process. The result is that I can't open FF until I kill it in the task
manager.

2\. Firefox is the only browser in which Flash crashes. Almost every day I had
to search for the "Plugin container for Firefox" in the task manager and
manually kill it.

Today the browsers that "just work" are IE9 and Chrome. I can't use Chrome all
the time because it doesn't open images in Twitter, probably because images
use http and Twitter uses https. Every browser has its own little problems.
Those of Firefox are too much for me.

~~~
robin_reala
Sounds like a corrupt profile. If you’re interested in trying to fix it then
you could delete your profile and start again (or if you’re running a beta or
newer Firefox go to about:support and click on ‘Reset Firefox’).

~~~
shibboleth
I don't know about that. I get the same issues even with Aurora (as do many of
my colleagues).

------
DaveChild
Being 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.

~~~
polshaw
Opera has been ahead of the curve for features virtually forever (currently:
tab stacking, right click anywhere to add search, and 'g searchterm' syntax).
It is also _much_ more memory-efficient than chrome/FF with many tabs.

I think it has just never been seen as 'sexy' by the tech geeks, and therefore
never evangelised.

Surprisingly Opera's strong showing in mobile/wii didn't impact the desktop.
Does HN think it might do better if it was open-sourced?

~~~
gillianseed
Yes I agree that Opera has had lots of great ideas, many which have later been
introduced into the 'mainstream' browsers and yet they (Opera) fail to
generate any marketshare.

Perhaps it is because it's closed sourced, I don't know.

Personally I went with Firefox rather than Opera back in the day mainly due to
Firefox extensions (nowadays Opera supports extensions aswell) and have stuck
with it since I know it so well and it works fine.

------
pygy_
In 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>

------
afsina
Who 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>

~~~
hahainternet
Here 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
Chrome certainly used to feel snappier with JS, which probably attracts the
gamers.

~~~
idleloops
Not 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
I 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.

------
netcan
Which-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
Really, 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...

------
throwaway_87
I 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.

~~~
jiggy2011
Google 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
Google's business model does in fact involve around locking people into
Google's services. To the extent that lockin into a particular system makes
that easier, they are quite happy with such lockin.

~~~
Raphael
Google offers a stable of compelling free services. If that's lock-in, then
throw away the key.

~~~
bzbarsky
Google's goal is to make sure you see their ads. To the extent that having
compelling free services helps, they're doing compelling free services.

But the goal is user eyeballs, not having compelling free services. So Google
is perfectly happy to do other things that help ensure users will use said
services.

Nothing wrong with that, by the way.

------
rizzy
I 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
Agreed. 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.

------
duiker101
That red line at the bottom always saddens me. Why doesn't opera get the
recognition it deserves?

~~~
nkuttler
At 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
And Opera is still not open source. Which makes at least a difference for some
people.

------
kevinsd
Oh 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"?

------
shangrila
Meanwhile, I saw a TV commercial for IE today. Amazing how things have changed
from the days of 90+% market share dominance by IE.

~~~
josefresco
It's a good song too. Sadly I don't think anyone has ever chose a browser
based on a TV commercial.

~~~
ConstantineXVI
Google's running TV ads for Chrome as well; so at least 2 major browser
vendors disagree.

------
DigitalSea
Having 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
I'm mostly happy about people switching from IE (particularly its older
incarnations) to anywhere, than from Firefox to Chrome ;-)

~~~
ajitk
Concur 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
I'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.

------
kjhughes
Many 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...](http://www.neowin.net/news/windows-xp-market-share-goes-down-in-
february-2012)

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
Everyone 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?

------
systematical
I 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
When did you last test it? Firefox performance surpasses Chrome in memory
management and optimizations IMO.

~~~
systematical
Yeah it got better, but I kinda made the switch already.

~~~
shmerl
Give 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.

