

Who cares about Chrome. IE6 Has 25% Market Share - bdfh42
http://whydoeseverythingsuck.com/2008/09/who-cares-about-chrome-ie6-has-25.html

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bdfh42
A good point that we all have to take on board but (for some of us) perhaps a
little too pessimistic.

If you are targeting the public at large with your new web site/start up then
the IE6 issue looms large. However if you market is the "movers and shakers"
then you are going to care a lot more about FireFox, Safari and IE8 right now
- and will be looking to Google's Chrome to join in and take a share.

~~~
chrisbroadfoot
Of course the point stands that developers _probably_ still need to look out
for IE6 users.

However, what the hell is Hank trying to say here? Is there a point to this
blog post?

Is he suggesting that innovation should be halted simply because a large
minority is still using outdated technology?

~~~
marijn
Exactly. All I could find in the article was vague naysaying. (Which,
actually, seems to be the general tone of most of his posts.) Having a new
decent browser that does a few innovative things is good. It won't solve the
Internet's problems overnight, but it is clearly going to be beneficial on the
long term.

~~~
wmeredith
His blog is called whydoeseverythingsuck seems like you should go in expecting
whine over substance.

Oh, and according to W3C IE only has about 50% of market share, which is a lot
different than the 75% he claims. is there a more accurate source he's going
off of, or is it hyperbole?

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mechanical_fish
All it takes is one killer app that only runs well in Chrome, and it'll have
an installed base faster than you can believe.

Chrome itself will be the first attempt at that killer app.

~~~
streety
Doesn't the very nature of Google Chrome prevent such an app from emerging?
They seem to be sticking to the standards as far as possible. If you add
google gears to any other (decent) browser the added benefits of Chrome will
be lost for any single app.

~~~
mechanical_fish
I haven't used it so I have no idea. And all I've read is one comic about the
architecture -- and while that comic is amazing, it still doesn't have _every_
detail.

But I wouldn't be surprised if the multi-process architecture and the new JS
engine turn out to make a surprising qualitiative difference in the
performance of certain classes of JS apps.

Maybe so, maybe not. But even though I'm not writing anything particularly
complex -- like, say, Gmail -- I've already had the thrill of working around
situations where my one-lung JS interpreter is holding up the whole browser.

Heck, perhaps Gmail itself will be significantly smoother. Given the market
penetration of Gmail, that would be a pretty good marketing hook for Chrome,
all by itself.

~~~
albertcardona
An efficient javascript engine would enable, finally, awesome javascript
graphics (via canvas).

------
biohacker42
All this hand wringing over old browser compatibility puzzles me. Aren't
marketers always trying to segment the market? Don't we go through great
lengths to track and id, who's young, who's rich, who's what ever?

So isn't IE6 a dead give away with who you're dealing with? And how could
advanced features and functionality also be targeted at the same demographic?

If you detect IE6 bring out the flashing "click here to win a prize" shit.

If you see Firefox 3.0 go nuts with web 2.0 "Learn Erlang now!!!!"

~~~
silencio
Absolutely not. I expect only a tiny segment of IE6 users are doing it because
they don't want to upgrade, the rest are because they cannot upgrade (i.e. in
a corporate environment).

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cosmo7
So we should stop developing browsers because

"Stop using IE6! Use this browser, which is marginally better."

is more convincing.

------
briansmith
This is definitely an interesting time in the browser market. Currently,
everybody is in love with Firefox. But, Firefox will quickly take a back seat
to IE8 (which is "good enough" and will have huge market share) and Google
Chrome (which will be technologically superior). This time next year, I
wouldn't be surprised to see IE6/IE7/IE8 market share at 10/5/60%, leaving 25%
of the market to be split approximately evenly between Firefox, Google Chrome,
and Safari.

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sutro
Chrome is a "thing." A "thing" is a subset of "everything." According to this
blogger, "Everything sucks." Ergo, according to this blogger, Chrome sucks.

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mpk
You're all missing the point. IE6 only has 25% _left_. Yes, it's horrid and we
waste a massive amount of time supporting it, but the market share is
dropping. It was 90% of the market 2 years ago. Once it drops below 15% we can
stop supporting it and move into .. 2006 (which is when IE7 was released)!

------
puns
Chrome has all the potential to be huge. Google is a brand — everyone knows
Google, even all those people still using IE6. They may not have heard of
Firefox or Safari, but they sure will hear about Chrome (I hope Google really
pushes it out there).

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jeroen
IE6 users will only be motivated to upgrade when a significant part of the web
no longer supports IE6. Unfortunately, most of the web will only consider
dropping support for IE6 when its market share is considerably lower.

~~~
druswick
I work in an environment where most enterprises still cling to IE6. These
enterprises do so, because they've built up an internal expertise in keeping
IE6 secure (kinda) and stable (kinda). At some point in the future, it seems
like that internal expertise will be too expensive or will fail to maintain
that secure and stable (kinda) environment. At that point, it seems, there
will be a fairly quick migration to newer technologies. I don't think it'll be
the killer app that draws the enterprise market... it'll be the bottom line.

~~~
jedc
Completely agree here. I think that a good portion of IE6 use is tied to
corporate environments that prevents users from running anything other than
IE6.

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stcredzero
Since Chrome is open source, its improvements will be immediately available to
Firefox. A part of the point is to get some better technology out there.
CHrome is worth the effort on this alone.

Why, in this age of great VMs and Generational Garbage collection is a User
app like Firefox plagued by memory leaks and fragmentation? Couldn't we
retarget the compilation of Firefox onto a VM and have all memory be allocated
through a table of pointers? Is Firefox so bloated at this point that it
couldn't take a 4X hit to its performance? (Maybe it is?)

~~~
briansmith
Firefox will be able to share approximately 0% of the code of Google Chrome.
WebKit is designed totally differently than Gecko, and the overall
architecture of Google Chrome (multi-process) is totally different than that
of Firefox (single process, single threaded).

~~~
stcredzero
You can usually use code from a multi-threaded code base in a single threaded
program. I'm sure that all of Chrome won't be reusable. But to say that it
will be 0% is a bit of a stretch.

Are you implying that _none_ of the code in Firefox or Chrome is going to be
orthogonal to rendering web pages? Is this how you architect your programs?

~~~
Zev
As was pointed out earlier, for _rendering_ , Chrome uses WebKit (of Safari,
Android, and S60 fame). Firefox uses Gecko. It's not as simple as picking
random functions out of one codebase and dropping them into the other one. It
just doesn't work that way.

However if you meant the spread of ideas can flow from Chrome to Firefox (or
even Safari; WebKit is open source as well), then yes, you're right about
that. But its highly likely that the underlying code for said feature will be
the exact same in all three browsers.

~~~
stcredzero
Memory management is largely orthogonal to a whole lot of stuff. That's a big
area where Firefox can improve.

~~~
Zev
All I said was that the _code_ can't be copied and pasted between browsers.
(probably.) Doing so A. wont work (most likely), and B. lead to poor memory
management on the application if it somehow does manage to work.

Instead, the _ideas_ will be taken and copied (and hopefully made better). But
idea's aren't code. So unless you're talking about human memory (which seems
highly unlikely given you said "…where Firefox can improve") I'm not quite
sure what benefits in terms of memory usage Firefox (or Safari or even Opera)
gets from this.

~~~
stcredzero
Entire subsystems like Google Gears can probably be put in place, with a lot
of code used without modification.

Also, if someone implemented my original proposal in this thread, this would
be entirely orthogonal to any code currently in Firefox.

~~~
DougBTX
Gears and WebKit were designed to be reusable, other features such as the
process model would be much harder to integrate into Firefox.

I'd be interested to see Firefox embedded in a "wrapper" VM, but I think
you'll find it harder to implement than you expect. Please post to HN if you
give it a shot.

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malkia
Ironically Apple's me.com would probably run better in Chrome, than in
Safari...

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sabat
The idea isn't pure market share -- it's the spur on a floundering browser
market. Enough feature-twiddling, more innovation.

