

Chrome beats IE market share for one day - r7000
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/22/chrome_number_one_for_a_day/

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avallark
Chrome beats IE market share. It showed that over the weekend Chrome is the
most used browser, while on a weekday, people go back to work and use IE. This
has two implications: 1) Companies are still locked into some solutions like
OWA and sharepoint because of which users still use IE at work. 2) Users have
started distinguishing between browsers and at home they prefer using Chrome.

For companies with most of their clients using their own personal computers
(like for us), we could expect a fair share of Chrome over IE and hence the
following: 1) Our QA should have a major focus on testing with these browsers.
2) Architecture needs to focus on this stat. as a guiding principle while
deciding future architecture.

Another interesting statistics is the second screenshot with the Mobile
Operating systems. 1) The highest share of internet browsers still run a Nokia
Symbian phone. Most likely these are traffic from developing countries, where
monetizing from these clients is extremely difficult. 2) iPhone and Android
are tied and very close.

So focusing only on iPhone could be a mistake. We need to open up to focusing
on Android just as much.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
> Companies are still locked into some solutions like OWA and sharepoint
> because of which users still use IE at work.

My hunch is that a lot of companies are locked into legacy internal web
applications that were optimized for IE6 and look like crap in a modern
browser.

~~~
freehunter
Even worse is a handful of web apps we use at work are coded specifically for
Firefox. Firefox 3.6. They don't work in IE, Chrome, or newer Firefox
versions.

Then we have some other ones that only support IE 6 and 7. My laptop only has
1GB of RAM. Yeah...

~~~
Produce
1GB of RAM on a work computer? I'd flat out refuse to do anything until they
fork out a whopping £30 to quadruple that.

~~~
freehunter
Sorry, I've edited this post. The original felt like an off topic rant.

Long story short, we're moving to BYOD soon, and until then I'm using a backup
laptop from years ago since I'm pretty low on the food chain here.

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cobychapple
It's great to see (from the peaks in usage of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera
on weekends) that people are choosing more progressive browsers over IE for
home use. It'd also be neat to see the breakdown of IE _versions_ in this data
too.

Microsoft sure do have their work cut out for them!

~~~
ootachi
No, people are choosing _Chrome_ over IE for home use. The trend is clear;
Chrome is likely to achieve a crushingly dominant market share in a couple of
years, or sooner.

~~~
blvr
__> The trend is clear; Chrome is likely to achieve a crushingly dominant
market share in a couple of years __

Assuming the trend will continue until Chrome becomes dominant. Firefox's
didn't.

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AznHisoka
As much as I like Chrome, the increase in Chrome's share also means more
people will be using Google by default.. and their search dominance scares me.
Consumer web startups can literally die overnight if Google penalizes
them(google "TeachStreet"), or if their Adwords account got banned for some
unknown reason.

~~~
jonknee
Perhaps, but that's mostly because people prefer Google. When you install
Chrome it pops up asking what search engine you would like to use. What should
Google do differently? Microsoft hides the default search provider in the
initial setup behind a "choose custom settings" button.

[http://nyacomputing.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/chrome-
se...](http://nyacomputing.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/chrome-setup-
page-1.jpg)

vs

<http://static.arstechnica.com/ie8_search.png>

~~~
vibrunazo
Also, I have the impression that a few microsoft products (MSN, live etc) will
automatically change other browser's search engine to Bing. My girlfriend told
me her "google changed" after installing MSN.

But maybe it was something else, as she's doesn't exactly knows what she's
doing. Can anyone confirm that?

~~~
freehunter
This happens with a lot of software, unfortunately. On the side, I do computer
repair (and charge for it). I'd say about 30% of my calls are "my Google
changed to Ask!" after installing FoxIt or Digsby etc.

I was hoping that charging people money would lead them to finding their own
solutions for trivial problems, but instead it has just padded my beer fund.
C'est la vie.

------
thought_alarm
12 years ago I suggested that IE would lose its crown to a web browser
developed by a web site using an open source cross platform rendering engine
developed by Apple.

And everyone said I was nuts.

~~~
mariusmg
If it's open source, it's not developed by apple......

~~~
program
WebKit is open source and is developed by Apple and other companies such as
KDE, Google, Nokia, Samsung and others.

~~~
cookiecaper
KDE is not a company and WebKit originated as a fork from KHTML, KDE's HTML
rendering engine used in Konqueror. Too much credit is often ascribed to Apple
for appropriating the engine on to a popular piece of software (OS X).

~~~
bad_user
They did applied polish to it though and also built a new Javascript engine. I
don't know who contributed what, but today's WebKit is a lot better than what
KHTML was before being forked. I was once a KDE user and the first thing I did
after a fresh install was to replace Konqueror.

But yes, truth be told, the KDE developers that worked on KHTML deserve a lot
of credit.

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peterhunt
In my opinion, successfully marketing a seamlessly up-to-date browser is the
3rd greatest thing Google has done for the world (behind search and gmail)

------
codesuela
Internet Explorer: the employees browser of duress

~~~
zitterbewegung
Do you want the overhead of testing your internal web application on two
browsers or one?

~~~
Nogwater
I'd rather test my web app in a browser with modern development tools (Chrome,
Safari, IE 9, Firefox with Firebug).

~~~
sirclueless
I'm not so sure. If half of the value of the app you are developing is that it
will still work 5 years after your consulting gig with no intervention, then
it's hard to fault someone for choosing IE.

~~~
ricardobeat
That doesn't make any sense. Forward compatibility is not an issue at all with
modern browsers, and you're not obliged to update either.

~~~
tjoff
_and you're not obliged to update either._

With chrome (and now firefox?) you kind of are obliged to update... Right? Due
to their update scheme I've at least gotten the impression that they won't fix
security issues in older versions, but I could be wrong.

~~~
Nogwater
Firefox has a little middle ground where you can use specific versions outside
of the fast release cycle and still get security updates. At least that's the
plan.
[https://wiki.mozilla.org/Enterprise/Firefox/ExtendedSupport:...](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Enterprise/Firefox/ExtendedSupport:Proposal)
You don't get the 10 years of support that MSFT might provide for (some)
versions of IE, but it's not like you have to upgrade every 6 weeks either.
Also, because Firefox is open source, they're hoping that someone else will
pick up the slack and continue to support older versions.

I haven't heard of any similar program from Chrome.

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Sunspot
How many people _choose_ Chrome? I bought a Lenovo laptop recently and Google
Chrome was pre-installed as the default browser. And although the desktop
shortcut icon was the familiar one, it was renamed "Internet Browser."

