

Trend implies Chrome to overtake IE in browser share in one year. - jamieforrest
http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-monthly-200809-201107

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swombat
And within 2 years it will be used by more than 100% of people worldwide!

As my maths teacher used to say, "even in the privacy of your own home, you
should not extrapolate."

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Piskvor
Obligatory XKCD: <http://xkcd.com/605/> "As you can see, by late next month
you'll have over four dozen husbands. Better get bulk rate on that wedding
cake."

IMNSHO, the adoption of IE9 (on new computers with Win7 preinstalled,
perhaps?) might make a significant dent in that projection. I've seen a very
similar graph (starring Firefox) a few years back; and then IE came back from
the dead with version 8.

~~~
jamieforrest
Yeah, and there's always someone in April who's on pace to hit 80 home runs
for the season. That said, I think the trend toward Chrome, and webkit
browsers in general, is undeniable.

~~~
chalst
Linear extrapolation in general is unwise, but with market share it is
particularly foolish. I'd bet the opposite, that the gap between the two
browsers takes longer than a year to vanish.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
In South America, where these stats show Chrome in the lead, the growth seemed
to be accelerating up to and beyond the crossover point (the same in the few
individual countries where they're leading). What about marketshare
particularly should make this unusual or unexpected?

I'd assume some kind of tipping point effect as it becomes "normal" not to run
IE and/or to run Chrome that could lead to such acceleration since the
barriers to adoption are so low.

~~~
rhplus
Perhaps there's a distribution deal or popular website in South America that
requires Chrome to function best (Orkut?). Or perhaps, as you said, it's just
a network effect.

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tpatke
Who cares? Whatever browser is the market leader doesn't matter because you
will still need to support IE, Chrome, Firefox and Safari for the foreseeable
future. Nobody has ever made a (significant) profit from a browser. In fact,
Microsoft lost billions for their efforts (see U.S. vs. MSFT).

Can someone please explain to me why this matters?

~~~
k33n
If Chrome is the market leader, you have a viable argument for not supporting
IE at all. Or at least making it a low priority.

~~~
jlind
It really depends on the target market, regardless. Plenty of people will be
quick to tell you how many enterprise companies are still stuck with IE6. And
most of them are willing to write fat checks to maintain that status quo.

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mzarate06
The graph the title links to is a little dated, it only cites stats up to July
2011. Here's a more up to date graph citing stats up to October 2011:

<http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-monthly-200809-201110>

The curves are even more revealing.

~~~
zobzu
yeah that's too bad others already lost that war even if IE, FF, Opera, etc
became 2x better than Chrome overnight it wouldn't change a thing. The
machine' rolling and advertised on 99% of the most visited pages, bundled with
most software with default opt-in.

In 5 years from now we'll probably start saying how "maybe its not a good
thing for ANY company to have 90%+ market share in something as important as
the browser" and how "Yeah well Google didn't play fair, but that' ok cause we
hated MS, and no one cared much about brand-fanboism for Opera or Firefox"

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Hoff
Looks to be browser fragmentation.

"Other" (which is massively increased) and IE9 are the only increasing entries
in this plot:

[http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww-
monthly-200809...](http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww-
monthly-200809-201110)

While what's in that "other" plot isn't listed, the Chrome and Firefox version
schemes and their associated plethora of smaller and more frequent releases
have played havoc with the classic version-plot scheme.

~~~
ootachi
I don't think it's fragmentation. It's Chrome on track to achieve market
dominance.

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ZeroGravitas
Chrome 15 is right now in the process of claiming the most used _version_ from
IE 8.

But like the combined version share, what you can use is often more about the
people holding you back on IE 6,7,8 than the ones pushing you forward.

