Google's Chrome climbs its way to 10% of the browser market
tech.fortune.cnn.com
tech.fortune.cnn.com
Given that the last data was in December, part of me has to wonder if college students home from college "fixed" their parent's computers.
Would CSS3/HTML5, canvas, etc. have the momentum they have today without Chrome having shaken things up? Would Firefox, Opera, and IE javascript performance have improved to the degree they have without Chrome? Would the IE team have finally knuckled under to pressure to improve standards compliance in IE without Chrome?
The fact that the Chrome team has been able to put out a top-notch browser that continues to gain market share hand over fist is just a side benefit.
We're not there yet. The underlying promise of the browser as application client is still largely unfulfilled. And mainstream adoption of emerging web standards is still hampered by 'patchy browser support' (read: IE8/7).
> CSS3/HTML5, canvas, etc.
Compared to the state-of-the-art, these emerging standards are fairly unambitious, as they need to be given the history of browser development. For Microsoft to support these things is a no-brainer because as exciting as they seem to web devs, the open web as software platform is a weak competitor.
> Would the IE team have finally knuckled under to pressure to improve standards compliance in IE without Chrome?
Very hard to say. But it's clear that the vanguard in the market share war against IE dominance is held by Mozilla, not Google, and they deserve a lot of credit for how far we've come (lower than 50% share for IE now in most Western countries).
> The fact that the Chrome team has been able to put out a top-notch browser that continues to gain market share hand over fist is just a side benefit.
While I agree that Google often successfully pursues a strategy of leveraging a small but critical market share in order to change markets rather than dominate them, it was the focused and determined cooperation of all the members of the WHAT WG that rescued web standards. Nothing less would have worked. Now that those members are increasingly at odds with each other, Google may start to find it needs to compete head to head with Mozilla in market share in order to get its ideas adopted.
Anyway, I love using Chrome even more than I loved using Opera before it. Congrats to the Chromium team on the milestone.
Despite very different picture in general (Safari is nearly non-existent, Opera is rivaling Firefox for the top), Chrome is steadily climbing in popularity and should reach 10% mark soon.
Googling the issue provided no authoritative answer. Several descriptions of similar behavior, spanning several months, with private individuals coming up with their own solutions -- which varied. This included posts to the Google help forum(s); private solutions -- I didn't see one response from a Googler.
Some solutions were involved enough, in an annoying way, that I didn't want to try them if there was something simpler. Reading between the lines of the solutions I happened upon, and remembering some of my past experiences with Chrome -- albeit some time ago -- when resource/memory utilization/exhaustion seemed to be an issue, I started closing tabs, trusting that since I could see the bookmarks within the bookmark bar's "Other Bookmarks" folder, the bookmarks were actually saved and I would have a reasonable chance of retaining them. (This is what I originally wanted to confirm in the bookmark manager before closing the tabs.)
Sure enough, after I'd whacked 10 or 15 tabs open to O'Reilly Safari pages, the bookmark manager started opening completely and responding properly, again.
Apparently, Chrome was reaching some limit and failing silently -- in this case, failing to successfully initialize/open the bookmark manager.
Big meh. Chrome may be fast and innovative in terms of execution and rendering, but it -- and Google more generally -- still leave a lot to be desired in terms of usability and well considered feedback especially for the general user.