
Chrome Overtakes Firefox Globally for First Time - themichael
http://gs.statcounter.com/press/chrome-overtakes-firefox-globally-for-first-time
======
soapdog
I use firefox because I believe in the work of Mozilla foundation. Chrome, IE,
Safari are all company products and those companies objective are tuned to
increasing their stock value. Yes, they make very good products but Mozilla
makes a good philosophy and I trust them to value privacy, quality and open
source. Firefox might be slower than chrome and not that beautiful but it is
made with a mindset that is similar to mine.

This may sound too political for a software choice decision but hey, I LIKE
MOZILLA FOUNDATION and their products.

~~~
canes123456
I assume you never buy anything from a company. It pointless to try to prop up
products despite it being worse. Open source project will not success in the
long run unless it is better. Firefox being better at protecting privacy is a
reason to use it, but thinking Mozilla values privacy because it is a non
profit is not a great reason.

~~~
timwiseman
_I assume you never buy anything from a company_

You can certainly do business with companies, while showing preference for an
organization that shares your values whenever such an organization exists.

 _but thinking Mozilla values privacy because it is a non profit is not a
great reason._

I think it is more that some people (including me) think Mozilla values
privacy because they flat out say they do and then they have a consistent
track record of supporting privacy. The fact they are non-profit does make it
slightly easier to take their statements at face value, but it is their track
record that really demonstrates it.

~~~
canes123456
Firefox's track record in regard to privacy is a great reason to use. What I
don't like is the support of products based on vague values that can't be
tested. What does it really mean that Mozilla only cares about the web and not
profits? This is a silly as using Android because it is "open". The way google
uss open is kind of meaningless.

------
w1ntermute
Putting aside the layman for the moment, has anyone else found Chrome
particularly annoying to use as a power user? There are so many issues, such
as the uncustomizable download bar (can't even have it autohide!), the
inability to fine-tune history/cache/etc. deletion, inabilility to set
filetype-specific download settings, and so on.

And Firefox isn't _that_ slow in its latest incarnations.

~~~
JohnTHaller
Of course. Chrome isn't really good for power users due to the less-powerful
extension setups (can't even do true ad blocking). And it's of much less
interest to companies due to the per-user installation setup and not being
self-contained (it relies on the host OS for encryption, proxy handling, etc).

~~~
justinschuh
Chrome has had a system installer for years:
[http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?answer=11...](http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?answer=118663)

I'm also not sure what you mean by "not being self-contained." Chrome relies
on OS subsystems where appropriate because it simplifies management and
provides a consistent user experience--that's why we use the OS certificate
store and proxy configuration settings. We've also seen quite a bit of
enterprise uptake because Chrome is the only browser that provides full
centralized management on all supported platforms (via Windows group policy,
Puppet, etc.).

~~~
andylei
> OS certificate store and proxy configuration settings

these things are awesome! firefox just doesn't work with most sites on my
company's intranet (particularly with authentication), but when i use chrome,
everything just works.

~~~
zobzu
that sounds odd. details?

~~~
justinschuh
Just guessing here, but it's pretty common for enterprises to set up a lot of
configuration via some sort of centralized policy mechanism. So, you'll have
custom certs and a proxy PAC pushed at the system level via GPO or Puppet. If
a browser (or any application) re-implements these features entirely, it won't
pick up any of that context.

------
AndrewDucker
Despite loving Firefox I see this as a good thing. Firefox has always been the
hobbyist/technical person's browser. Chrome is a slick experience aimed at the
end-user.

Personally, I'll be using Firefox with its fantastic tweakability and addons,
but anything which causes there to be multiple major browsers is good, because
it means people have more incentive to create standards and stick to them.

~~~
gcp
_Firefox has always been the hobbyist/technical person's browser. Chrome is a
slick experience aimed at the end-user._

I'm not sure. I think it's the opposite. Most end-users won't really know or
care what browser they are using, but they do care what their
hobbyist/technical friends/colleagues/kids use, because those are "the
experts" so they know what's best.

Chrome had very significant uptake among those, and one of the reasons for the
very steep growth in its market-share is that this "trickles down" to lesser
experienced users. It's also the biggest problem for Firefox, because it
gained its market-share in exactly the same manner.

And for the users that were impervious to this, bundling deals like with Skype
and Flash are also obvious big wins over IE and Firefox.

I'd be curious what features of Chrome make you believe its a more slick
experience for the end user as compared to Firefox.

~~~
AndrewDucker
Mostly the lack of options, and the way the updates don't get in your way.

Firefox gives you a lot more power, but everything you can do in it beyond the
basics gives you the possibility of things going wrong.

So you can install Tabmix Plus, but that gives you a wall of tab options that
can leave you wondering how to find things. You can install NoScript, and be
left wondering why half of your web pages don't work any more.

When it comes to "plain Firefox with nothing installed" and "plain Chrome,
with nothing installed" I suspect they're about as easy to use.

------
sanderson1
I too am a Chrome convert and loved FireFox in its day (mainly because of its
development tools), but its rampant memory leaks drove me away. While Chrome's
dev tools aren't quite as robust as FireFox's, they're getting there very very
quickly.

On a side note, I'm tired of having to design and develop around IE. All
versions have the promise of adhering to modern web standards, but with each
release, they tend to fall short of those promises.

~~~
tbassetto
May I suggest you to delete your Firefox profile folder
(<http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder_-_Firefox>) and give it another
try? They have corrected tons of problems, really.

IE10 is pretty solid, but you're right, we'll have to develop and design for
older versions for a long time.

------
joebadmo
I work at a federal agency and our browsers just got updated a couple of weeks
ago from IE6 to IE8. While I'd kill for either Chrome or FF, I have to say: I
never thought I'd be so happy about IE8.

~~~
salmanapk
Install Chrome Frame ;)

------
JohnTHaller
No, it doesn't. Net application's stats, which are much more realistic, are
here: [http://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-
share.aspx?qpri...](http://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-
share.aspx?qprid=0&qpcustomd=0)

IE 53% Firefox 22% Chrome 18% Safari 5% Opera 2%

~~~
Gustomaximus
I looked into Net Apps vs Statcounter a couple of years back and found the
opposite to be true. From my notes (so may be a little out of date on
figures):

\--------- Stats Counter: Stats are based on aggregate data collected by
StatCounter on a sample exceeding 4 billion pageviews per month collected from
across the StatCounter network of more than 3 million websites. Stats are
updated and made available every 4 hours, however are subject to quality
assurance testing and revision for 7 days from publication.

Net Applications: Accumulates data from 160 million monthly visitors to its
network of hosted websites that collect statistics. The average traffic for a
HitsLink customer is just over 1000 page views per day \------

On sample size Net Apps are not nearly as good nor do they have many foreign
market users to give a true global picture. It was not until 2010 that Net
apps weighted by country population figures which skewed their results heavily
to the US market share. And it has been alleged their stats are for sale.

------
miles_matthias
Does anyone else find Firefox hideous from an aesthetic perspective? I believe
in the work Mozilla does, but I can't use Firefox without being distracted by
it. Chrome is gorgeous and gets out of my way, allowing me to focus on what
I'm doing. I did see some Firefox beta sketches a while back on HN, and they
looked similar to Chrome, so hopefully they go that way.

~~~
jakeonthemove
Are you using XP or Mac OS? Cause Firefox looks pretty nice with Aero on Vista
and 7 - a lot like Chrome, actually...

~~~
miles_matthias
Mac OS X. Interesting.

------
DanielRibeiro
And I remember back then when firefox was not even 1.0, and was replacing the
horrible browsing experience on Linux on Konqueror, with a delightful one
(with tabs!).

I am glad to see how far we've come.

~~~
MikeCapone
I actually liked Konqueror, but it might have been a later version than what
you had.

~~~
guard-of-terra
Konqueror did a lot of things right which still aren't by any other browser.

E.g. it had okayish system integration while other browsers have it awful. It
displayed site favicons in task panel, instead of boasting its own. It was a
birthplace of webkit.

~~~
onedognight
> Konqueror did a lot of things right which still aren't by any other browser.

More importantly they did something right which _is_ in most other browsers,
their renderer!

------
tbassetto
Sadly, Microsoft's Internet Explorer still maintains a strong lead. IE10 seems
to be quite solid, but it will be available only for Windows 7 and 8 (and not
before mid-2012).

~~~
melling
IE8 will be around for years because XP can't get an IE9/10 upgrade. It looks
like combined IE6 & IE7 are around 6.5% in North America. IE6 is around 1%.
Being able to stop supporting IE6/IE7 is still huge. Yesterday I noticed that
this map app no longer supports IE7.

<http://map.itoworld.com/road-casualties-usa>

"Sorry, you are running an old version of Internet Explorer which is not
supported. For more information please visit here "

Link: <http://map.itoworld.com/ie-error.html>

~~~
thisisblurry
Google has also dropped support for IE7 as of August this year (for apps at
least): [http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/our-plans-to-
support-m...](http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/our-plans-to-support-
modern-browsers.html)

------
jakeonthemove
Mozilla needs to do more marketing - I seem more ads/posts for Chrome these
days, compared to a few years ago when almost every site (that I visited) had
a banner saying "Switch to Firefox for a better Web" or smth like that.

Both browsers are good, however I use Firefox since I have all the add-ons I
need, and the awesome Awesome Bar, which lets me access my favorite sites or
sites I visited recently with a few keystrokes or keywords (I remember a word
or two in the URL/title and I can always go back).

I had no luck finding something like that for Chrome, and that's my biggest
annoyance - every time I have to bookmark a site (which I always forget), or I
have to search for it again through Google. I type a damn keyword and it
searches instead of showing me the URL... I have a suspicion that is on
purpose, since it leads me to Google.com :-)...

~~~
starwed
Unsurprisingly, google has a _slightly_ higher marketing budget than
mozilla... :P

------
webwanderings
For my use, I measured my memory usage on both Firefox and Chrome (with
whatever little number of tabs I keep open daily), and I found that the memory
usage on both Firefox and Chrome is exactly the same. So I don't bother with
Google and rely on Mozilla.

------
jaequery
there is one big factor why i use chrome over firefox. and that is the auto-
complete as i type in things in the address bar. once i got used to that on
chrome, i can never get back to firefox, no matter how much they have improved
elsewhere. hope this serves as some good feedback to mozilla devs.

~~~
webwanderings
auto-complete is there in Firefox, it is just not there by default.

~~~
jaequery
good, then question is, will they ever make it by default?

~~~
webwanderings
I'd rather they make it as a simple enough choice (a check box or something).
There are privacy implications of auto-complete and I personally believe
Firefox is accurate in not enabling it by default.

------
amurmann
"Microsoft's Internet Explorer still maintains a strong lead globally with
40.63%."

"In the US Internet Explorer continues to perform strongly and is maintaining
market share at 50.66%"

I am very surprised to see that IE is so much stronger in the US. I always
thought IE was strong in Asia and that that lead to its high market share.
Does anyone have a theory as to why IE is stronger in the US than in the rest
of the world?

------
linuxhansl
Why?

Every time I read news like this I go back and actually measure rendering
times for the pages I frequent together with overall memory consumption.

Every time Firefox comes out on top, but yet somebody everybody thinks it is
faster and consumes less memory.

(And I am still using Firefox 3.6.*, and Chromium 14)

Maybe I'm different in my browsing habits, but I find that hard to believe.

~~~
hsivonen
Firefox has improved a lot since Firefox 3.6. Firefox 3.6 was released on
2010-01-21. Firefox 8.0 was released on 2011-11-08. (Chrome 14 was released on
2011-09-16.)

I suggest comparing the latest Firefox (8) with the latest Chrome (15).

(Disclosure: I get paid for working on the engine of Firefox.)

~~~
linuxhansl
Oops, rereading my post... it was highly ambiguous.

What I meant to say is that in all tests on web sites that I frequent Firefox
3.6 is better (both in terms of speed and memory) than Chromium 14 (which is
why I do not understand that everybody says it's faster).

------
NanoWar
When Chrome introduced plug-ins like Adblock, I started to consider switching.
Now I'm on Chromium. And it's good.

------
VikingCoder
It's interesting, if you look at the Worldwide numbers, Chrome seems to be on
a steady progression. But if you look at North America or USA, you see that
both Firefox and Chrome had a fairly significant dip in the last set of
numbers, while IE had a fairly significant uptick.

~~~
bzbarsky
Yeah, market share numbers are completely different by country. Compare
Germany and South Korea, say.

------
ccanassa
Chrome has already overtake even IE in South America:
<http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-sa-monthly-201011-201111>

------
shmerl
I like Firefox for extreme customizability. Nothing matches that and Chrome is
nowhere close to it.

------
senthilnayagam
Netscape was pioneer but lost steam later with version wars. Firefox came much
later to Mozilla which gave hopes, but performance and memory leaks caused it
to never be dominant browser, and it too got into version number war and is
loosing.

Webkit has won on smartphone browser war(arm), same is being repeated on
Desktop

------
mhartl
The Awesomebar keeps me using Firefox. Is there an equivalent for Chrome?

------
jpdelatorre
I love Chrome since I don't have to install external flash player plugin which
is kinda annoying. Chrome has a built-in flash player. You don't have to
update flash and restart all your browser.

------
xxiao
firefox/mozilla was essentially 'funded' by google search(the search bar
built-in)? wish it the best, as firebug is my favorite.

~~~
gcp
Firebug is gradually being phased out in favor of built-in developer tools
(which is nice, because Firebug is one of the things making Firefox slow).
There's been lots of blogging about those lately, just check out a
Nightly/Aurora Firefox build.

------
drivebyacct2
All of the talk about giving Firefox a try again... please, someone set up a
sane package (PPA?) for Firefox that includes the proper Ubuntu font packages,
that will allow me to test the dev releases on my machine. I love Chrome
because I get dev builds every other day from their PPA and it _just works_.
I've never had a similar experience when trying to use anything except the
distro provided copies of Firefox.

~~~
hsivonen
The Firefox PPA that corresponds to the Chrome dev channel is
[https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-mozilla-
daily/+archive/firefox...](https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-mozilla-
daily/+archive/firefox-aurora)

------
rewiter2011
free paid pr spam, i don't believe or trust this site.

~~~
lazugod
Why not? Statcounter would have the right information to make this finding.

