Chrome Crosses Midway Point To Capture Firefox | Hacker News Reader

Chrome Crosses Midway Point To Capture Firefox

conceivablytech.com

10 pointspeternorton6 comments

Articles that compare the market share of free products are always a bit weird. If you are selling something, you naturally want it to sell best. But for a free product (free as in free speech) the main concern is giving users choice. There mere existence of choice changes the game. Debates about the most installs miss the point.

What I don't understand, is why the author says the Firefox is loosing share? It looks like they have remained at about 20% for some time now.

What an odd headline. I guess "Chrome Finally Gets 50% Of What Firefox Has" doesn't make Chrome look good enough. The stats show that Firefox still has about 20% share, while Chrome only has about 10%. While there is a downward trend for Firefox right now, that's also attributable to Firefox 4 not being available yet.

This headline seems like the author's conclusion getting pushed on the reader. There's no telling whether or not Chrome will capture Firefox at all, because anything can happen in the future. Perhaps Firefox 4 will be great; perhaps Chrome marketshare will flatten out; perhaps IE9 will be a huge success that draws users from all the other browsers.

I think it is a good conclusion. I certainly will be pushing all friends, family, and otherwise towards Chrome. There's no sign their model will go awry -- they are already ahead, in my eyes.

There are just too many great features, for grandma AND developers, that I can't pass up the simplicity of a single platform. There's absolutely no reason my non-technical consults should have to bother with upgrading their browser, hacking their extensions, and dealing with performance issues.

Chrome's ecosystem is headed in the right direction, and it is owning up to a lot of its faults and addressing said faults in droves. There's a lot to be said for Chrome's _rate_ of success, when predicting the future.

Firefox 3.5 and 3.6, both fairly significant releases, barely touch the charts, with respect to Chrome. FF 4.0 is going to be great, so I don't expect many to leave the platform, and I think it's fair to expect Chrome to be its equal.

IE9 is also shaping up to be a good platform -- better than 7 or 8 hoped to be. It too will probably capture a lion's share of its zealots and the Windows platform, but there is no reasonable justification for the tech savvy to continue pushing others onto more stable and paced browsers. IE team still need a bigger fire under their seats, and we'll hopefully see a worthy opponent for a three-pronged, browser shootout.

On a newer computer (ie MBP 2010), Chrome and Firefox are pretty evenly matched in terms of usable speed in my experience.

However, on older machines (ie, my parent's 7 yo laptop), Chrome makes an otherwise unusable machine into a halfway decent browsing experience.

I'm not sure how this impacts future marketshare, but it probably explains why me and my wife both equally use Safari/FF, but my parents use Chrome (and only on the older machines).

Chrome way past 33% landmark in victory over Firefox metric

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