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Comment by majmun | Hacker News Reader

It seems like Chrome has eaten up Firefoxes market share. if im not mistaken.

Yes, and no. Firefox is actually bigger than it used to be when Chrome launched. It was at around 20-24% back then. But yes, Chrome did steal market share from Firefox. I think by now it got most of the early adopters and devs from Firefox.

But in the same time they both kept eroding IE's market share, so overall Firefox grew by getting some IE users, and losing a few to Chrome, while Chrome grew from both IE and Firefox.

I think it's a pretty win-win situation for both, at least for now. Together they are big enough to standardize some features, even without Microsoft's support (like say WebM, WebGL, or Native Client). So, I think that's good.

On a side note, I think something like 40-50% of Techcrunch readers are using Chrome, and that's a pretty good indication to where Chrome is going, just like it used to be for Firefox, when it had only 10-15% overall marketshare, but around 25-30% on tech sites. And now has caught up to that.

TechCrunch isn't really a good indication of browser market share, the type of user is more likely to use Chrome (usually sticks with the defaults even if they use extensions).

Also I'm not sure early adopters is a good description, Firefox users are more likely to care about usability, security, privacy, extensions that aren't possible with Chrome or that Google considers not important or don't want it (something like NoScript or RefControl) and open source (which Chrome is not, sure Chromium is but the distinction is important because of real world implications and other reasons). These things do tend to be more important for some early adopters, I'm not sure I'd grant "technical proficiency" to mere "tech enthusiast".

No, I think it is generally from IE. If you look at Firefox, it is basically flat, over the past two years. All the growth is Chrome.

See http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-monthly-200911-201105

But it does raise a question, since they count browser usage, and not unique users -- I fully expect that ppl who use Chrome/FF to spend a LOT more time on the web browsing more sites. If we count unique users do we see a sharp uptick in IE percentage?

Yeah -- the actual user count probably favors IE. Especially if you define "user" as having used the browser in the past week or something (I know I have, but not because I like IE). Also, it seems that Firefox would've grown a lot more over the past couple years if not for Chrome (I feel like Firefox got a lot of new users over the past couple years, but also lost a decent amount of existing users).

I think browser usage is a better metric anyway. Why should I count as an IE user if I only open it once per month, or even once per week? How does that help them? Browser usage is much more important.

I think they're both very valid metrics -- but of different things. For example, I spend about 50x more time online than my parents do, and I think we need a metric to capture that. But we also need a metric that points out that people who open up their computer once a day for 20 minutes to check email, pay bills, and read the news -- may have very different browser characteristics.

Actually, that doesn't appear to be the case. You can see some long term trends from StatsCounter[1]. From May 2009 to May 2011, Firefox's marketshare has been fairly stable, while IE's dropped ~18% and Chrome's rose ~17%.

[1] http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-monthly-200905-201105

Not really, but you can say that Chrome has eaten up Firefox's growth.

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