Google Chrome’s amazing growth spurt. The top web browser by June 2012? | Hacker News Reader

Google Chrome’s amazing growth spurt. The top web browser by June 2012?

royal.pingdom.com

86 pointsDanielRibeiro62 comments

I use Safari. Strangely, it's like the better tempered half-brother of Chrome and doesn't come with a Flash plugin I can't uninstall. Oh and it doesn't claim to have adoption statistics that are as dubious as the Enron financial statements.

you could use chromium for the same effect. also, you can disable the built-in flash plugin.

Ah extrapolation by mean difference. My favourite part is the assumption that growth will continue to accelerate as market share increases, when firstly, that doesn't make any sense, and secondly, we have data from Firefox's growth showing that the opposite happens.

Yes I must admit as soon as I saw their graphs this sprung to mind. http://xkcd.com/605/

Of course that kind of extrapolation is mostly just wishful thinking, but Google's success in this market is impressive. IMO they've raised the quality bar for all the other browsers in a very short time.

Indeed. Even the comic book that they released to explain the innovations of Chrome was a great idea to make people understand and care more about this important piece of software.

For those who haven't seen it: http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html

They also do a whole lot of marketing. Some month ago there was a campaign all around the city advertising Chrome on billboards and in the subway. Software ads are kinda rare here, I think the last time I've seen some was at the launch of Windows7. Seeing Chrome posters in public at a time, where only developers where using it, was kinda surprising.

statistical trolling. EVERYONE knows the IE browser share takes 5 years to budge. Great projections, but it just means Chrome might be eating Firefox's lunch for a minute.

I'm as big of a Chrome fanboy as anyone else, but that chart is wrong in so many ways.

Just to give an example: the end points of the chart show the browsers at roughly 22%, 34% and 54% -- around 110% market share..

ok, maybe they're actually predicting the total growth of internet users to grow 110% in a couple of years, but you can still do a percentage calculation...

Also, like te_chris mentioned, IE is getting better and I doubt we see such fast changes. But hopefully IE goes below 40% even 35% sooner than later

This article seems to forget that 1. IE is getting better, as much as we all hate to admit it, 2. IE is still the default browser of the world's most popular operating system, 3. People are lazy and, as IE keeps getting better/faster, are going to be even more happy to just settle and get on with browsing the web - not argue over which browser is better.

"1. IE is getting better, as much as we all hate to admit it,"

I think we'd all admit it's getting better, but it's still years behind firefox and chrome where it matters. The IE release cycle is also so slow that it makes it even more outdated. IE still can in no way be considered a 'modern browser'.

Stats from a fairly popular webapp: Firefox=47.4%, Chrome=30.9%, IE=12.6%, Safari=3.3%, Opera=1.8%

So for me the question is when IE will drop below safari and opera...

IE 9 was released in March and IE 10 already in preview release scheduled for Sept. I designed a site around Chrome-dev (13, now 14) and it looked better in IE 10 than in FF4/5. The IE release cycle is definitely not ideal but a 6 month release cycle is a god send.

IE9 is acceptable and IE10 is surprisingly good. I have a feeling the IE team is targeting WebKit as their competition and not FF.

I haven't liked IE best since IE5, long time Firefox user from Phoenix 0.4, but I'd really suggest trying out IE10, it's pretty much on par with FF4 stock from everything I've seen. I still really don't like that it doesnt handle tab closing properly (IE10), but I see that FF5 finally handles tab closing half way decently. Tab handling and the 'awesome bar' or whatever the Chrome team calls it were the biggest drivers of me switching to Chrome. Also, IE10 now has a single URL/search bar which is a vast improvement and puts it on par.

It's the stable version that matters, not preview one, since preview versions don't get pushed to users, and it's only a very tiny amount of people using them. Microsoft thinks in 1 year cycles, Google and now Mozilla, too, think in 6-8 weeks cycles of releasing stable browsers with new features. IE will give new features only once per year to most users.

> IE is still the default browser of the world's most popular operating system

While true if you look at current hardware numbers, I think your statement is misleading and incorrect. More people today purchased a computer running a Google OS than a Microsoft OS. I know that Windows is "the world's most popular operating system" by total installation numbers, but it is not the most purchased today.

I'm not sure what is, but I'd bet Android is "the world's most popular operating system" if you measure it by today's sales.

sources ? i highly doubt that.

In its first 18 months windows 7 sold about 650.000 licenses a day. According to Andy Rubin there are currently around 500.000 android activations a day. Since not all windows licenses that are sold are actually used, and the number of licenses sold is probably declining, while the number of android activations is increasing, I'd say it's fair to say that they're roughly as popular, and android will probably overtake windows some time this year.

Sources: http://windowsteamblog.com/windows/b/bloggingwindows/archive... https://twitter.com/#!/Arubin/status/85660213478309888

I think you're kinda right but the force of your statement:

More people today purchased a computer running a Google OS than a Microsoft OS.

Isn't backed up by your source, there's a lot of hand waving going on there.

Also remember that phones have a much shorter life cycle than computers.

Edit: And remember that safari isn't on those graphs, you're talking about computers and smart phones, the article doesn't seem to be.

pretty flawed to compare Desktop OS sales with Android Smartphone sales imo. One could argue that there are more smartphones sold than PCs nowadays but in the traditional computer market IE is still the leading browser. Every 500 USD Laptop comes with Win7, every Company is running Windows and all of China is still on XP and IE6 :) Worldwide IE is still in a huge lead http://netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=0&...

It was pretty obvious the article was referring to the desktop so I ignored iOS/Droid..

A world in which Internet Explorer is indistinguishable from Google Chrome doesn't seem like a bad world, even if it means that Microsoft gets to keep 50, 40, 30 or however many percent of the market.

Google is strong, Apple is strong, Mozilla is (sorta) strong. I don't think we have to fear a world in which Internet Explorer is a great browser, not as much as in the nineties, anyway.

A world in which Internet Explorer kinda makes progress but not as fast as other browsers (which is in my opinion the world we are living in) is quite different, I think. Internet Explorer can't win in such a world but it can slow down progress (compared to it not existing at all or compared to an Internet Explorer that is on par with, say, Webkit). I still think that such a world is preferable to being stuck on IE6 forever.

And I'm hearing good things about IE10, so maybe we get to live in a world in which Internet Explorer is indistinguishable from Chrome.

If IE 10 is "as good as Chrome" then Google will have achieved their claimed objective for developing Chrome.

There's problems with all three of your statements:

1. IE on XP isn't getting any better, it's stuck at IE8. I'm sure people in Redmond are as desperate for people to upgrade from XP as we all were for people to upgrade from IE6, but as we've experienced, wishing and hoping aren't enough. Last I heard XP was 60% of Firefox base, and if you assume they are older machines, it makes sense that they also have an incentive to use the fastest browsers to wring the most out of their machines. If all they do is browse then it makes much better financial sense, and the alternative browser probably clears up a bunch of security problems too.

2. IE isn't the default browser in Europe, which is a market that's bigger that the U.S. New users get prompted to choose from a short list, which includes Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera. In many other countries IE isn't as dominant due to language or cultural issues. In the UK and US which are traditionally strong for IE, Safari on Mac is also strong which makes up for weaker showings by Firefox and Chrome and that's a growing and influential market that Microsoft has conceded entirely. Only China and South Korea are really IE strongholds and South Korea now has something like 15% Android thanks to an explosion of mobile browsing and being the home country of Samsung and LG (mobile being another growing and influential market that Microsoft seems totally out of the running for).

3. If people really are that lazy then a) it prevents them upgrading XP, b) it prevents them switching back to IE if previously switched to (the auto-updating) Chrome and Firefox, and similarly switching from Android and iPhone in mobile..

It would be silly to not expect Firefox, Safari and Chrome to continue improving as well. IE is finally coming out it a pathetic slumber, but so what? If it's ever good enough that I could picture using it, I'll check back here.

I'm fairly sure that the percentages in the second chart add up to about 110...

It seems coach was right, then ... you can give 110% percent

One of the many reasons this sort of simple extrapolation of current trends makes no sense in the long run.

Actually, their prediction for Chrome in particular looks kind of polynomial. To be fair it does look a little polynomial on the left side of the prediction line, too, but as you point out, using this kind of extrapolation on percentages is ridiculous in any case.

For as popular as chrome is, I feel like the browser market is going to become bifurcated between "normal users" and developers. Chrome is speedy, stable, and I recommend it to everyone since I'm the computer guy in my circle. But Firefox is still my development browser, and I don't see that changing any time soon.

What makes Firefox superior as a development browser? The Chrome Developer tools are, IMO far better then firebug...

I don't think they're necessarily superior, but I use chrome for everything anyway because it's my main browser. I don't do too much front end stuff, but for JS debugging and the odd css/html hack, it's more than enough to keep me from having to have two browsers open.

Firebug with

Firecookie http://www.softwareishard.com/blog/firecookie/

Firequery http://firequery.binaryage.com/

Firepicker http://thedarkone.github.com/firepicker/

Jsonview http://jsonview.com/

Colorzilla http://www.colorzilla.com/firefox/

> Firecookie http://www.softwareishard.com/blog/firecookie/

Built into the Webkit Developer Tools

> Firequery http://firequery.binaryage.com/

jQuery objects visualisation (in console and inspector) are in the Developer Tools, rest is not (though the injection is a bookmarklet/browser extension away)

> Firepicker http://thedarkone.github.com/firepicker/

Missing indeed, Opera's Dragonfly has a color picker but the webkit devtools don't.

> Jsonview http://jsonview.com/

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chklaanhfefbnpoihc...

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ddngkjbldiejbheifc...

https://github.com/rfletcher/safari-json-formatter

> Colorzilla http://www.colorzilla.com/firefox/

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hmdcmlfkchdmnmnmhe... ?

Well for cookies chrome only shows the value, gives less control than firecookie. Other extensions seems 'hacky' solutions, doesn't feel integrated, some time slow. Also for css editing like add style, increasing/decreasing css rule value firebug is still better than chrome inspector (chrome still does not support increasing/decreasing in metrics tab). But javascript debugging experience is better in chrome. Chrome has good profiler, can add XHR breakpoint, listen for various event listener.

On an unrelated note I can't live without tree style tabs(On average I have 30+ open tabs, which is unmanageable in chrome, hangs some time) and vimperator. All in all I still prefer firefox.

I don't use Chrome at all, and don't even have it installed on most of my OS installs. I have Firefox everywhere though, and I'm pretty happy with IE and Safari respectively as backup browsers.

I felt the same way as you. But a few weeks ago I moved to trialing Chrome as both my development and everyday browser. After close to 4 weeks now of trialing Chrome, I'm 99% certain that I won't be going back to FF for development and certainly not for everyday web browsing. I've now installed a total of 10 extensions into Chrome that well enough duplicate everything I had in FF (supporting my web dev and typical browsing activities). And bear in mind this is from a guy who has used FF for many years and was really looking for any excuse not to make the switch. But I gave it a chance and am actually quite surprised that Chrome has won me over.

The clincher for me was looking at Chrome extension development. The extension system for Chrome seems really accessible and well thought out and I feel like I could make some Chrome extensions for myself without really any hassle at all. In contrast, I have been told by acquaintances who have made FF add-ons that FF add-on development can be quite an unpleasant experience.

As a long-time FF user (and Firebird before that, and Pheonix before that) it would take a bit to sway me. Having said that, you're right that add-on development is unnecessarily tedious (seriously, it should start as easy as that cool link I saw on here that allows you to setup jQuery scripts ala easy-Greasemonkey) , I have to say that FF is surprisingly slow these days, and why does it update on launch (surely it could do a pre-update behind the scenes, and do a switch over of .exe on launch or something).

My experience so far has shown that if you're looking for an exact one-to-one duplication of the FF experience, then yeah, Chrome's not there yet and possibly never will be.

Coming from FF I had this funny moment when I opened up the Chrome preferences menu and it opened in a tab, just like a web page (I assume because it is just a web page) and I thought "huh, that feels a little strange..." then I opened up some extension's options page and it was just a web page too and I thought "Actually, preferences and options as just plain web pages is really cool and intuitive after getting over the subtle shock of them not being in those little pop-up dialogs." It unifies things nicely and this approach is one of the reasons why extension development in Chrome can be made so intuitive for people already experienced with web technologies.

Regarding the slow performance of FF lately: I remember some months ago I had this situation where I was trying to debug a JS powered upload progress bar I was working on which relied on AJAX calls to update the length of the bar and it just wasn't updating or it would update once, then nothing until the very end when it would shoot to 100%. Watching in Firebug, AJAX calls were being made but seemingly nothing was coming back. I was stumped, I tried everything I could think of, until by chance I tried turning Firebug off and bam! My upload progress bar started working perfectly. JS in Firefox with Firebug on top of it was slow enough that the multiple AJAX calls needed by the upload progress bar weren't working properly anymore. Looking back, I think that day the seed was planted for my move to Chrome.

Use the Add-on SDK, formerly known as the Jetpack SDK. It's much easier to use than the old extension system.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/developers/builder

I think it will level out eventually IMHO mostly because the other two probably will have users that really don't want to switch.

Not to mention market share can't exceed 100%...

I think it will level out because:

(1) the quality of Firefox and IE have shot up over the last year in response to Chrome.

(2) Chrome's users are the most fickle and thus the most susceptible to new (or old) competition.

I can relate to number one, but what's your evidence for number two?

Early adopters are generally the least loyal of any customer. They are much more likely to take a risk on new technology and give it a shot.

Just an anecdote, but I have been using chrome for the last six months because everything else was slow as a dog on my Mum's MacBook Pro, and chrome was super-fast. But the lack of decent keyboard link navigation is driving me crazy, and may drive me back to firefox soon.

Interesting, I've found Chrome to be slightly faster than Safari on my MacBook, but also much more prone to stalls and complete catatonia than Safari.

I am looking at Google Analytics of a site popular with US teens that has >12M monthly uniques:

1. Firefox 32.40% 2. Chrome 31.63% 3. IE 30.20% (last 30 days)

Argh. Same crap as with all the population predictions. Everybody always assumes the graph is exponential. It is not. It always levels off. The real trick is predicting where/when that will happen.

http://royal.pingdom.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/110701-c...

Is that the predicted market share "growth" as the chart claims, or the predicted market share? I think they were trying to get at the latter, but if that's the case, by Dec 2012 (according to their projections), Chrome will have 55% share, IE 35%, and Firefox 22% or so. That adds up to be more than 100%...

So it can't be projected market share, right?

Depends how effective they are at converting people that don't really care. Pretty much everyone that really spends any time at all thinking about browsers and their differences would have already tried chrome.

I think they will continue to make inroads into IE with word of mouth recommendations and user frustration, a lot of the Firefox crowd though would be pretty happy with it and unlikely to change.

I've installed Chrome on at least 4 people's computers and they are still using it. If you win over the geeks, you get a lot of other 'dependent' people.

Business usage will be harder, though... Maybe if Chromebooks really take off.

For the people who don't care what browser they use, Google is converting them by bundling Chrome with other products like Skype, which automatically installs Chrome and makes it the default browser on IE users' computers. I posted some more details about this in the previous discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2719358

One thing to note is that when you think mobile, WebKit (Chrome, Safari, Android, iPhone) is already a dominant force. We don't know what our primary web browsing device might be 10 years from now and IE is trapped in PCs (yes I'm ignoring Win Mobile phones). Kind of interesting that IE and Firefox actually share Mosaic heritage.

> One thing to note is that when you think mobile, WebKit (Chrome, Safari, Android, iPhone) is already a dominant force.

Warning: there is no webkit[0] especially not on mobile[1].

While not completely true, it's important to remember three things about webkit:

1. The core engine progresses fast, and actual browser implementations fork the core, two webkit browsers may have very different capabilities and bugs due to the precise trunk revision they were forked from

2. Webkit relies on a number of abstract interfaces which are implemented differently on each port, depending on the quality of the port and the underlying platform's capabilities two webkits on two different platforms (or toolkits) may behave very differently

3. Webkit is an HTML/CSS rendering engine, javascript engines are built separately, which means (again) two webkit browsers may have very different behaviors and capabilities as far as JS and DOM go, and provide completely different sets of APIs.

[0] http://ariya.blogspot.com/2011/06/your-webkit-port-is-specia...

[1] http://www.quirksmode.org/webkit_mobile.html

I, as mostly everyone else, was not paying attention to Opera. I rely on shortcuts, so pentadactyl and FF seemed the only way to go. Well, I have to say Opera with vimperopera is better. The shift-arrow navigation is a killer feature.

M2, the mail client, actually makes me open gmail much less...

Especially with the newer web apps coming out, Chrome 'just works'. Even though I personally use Firefox most of the time, I am telling others to use Chrome more over time. I know they'll always be able to see the web the way (I think) they should.

Firefox is automatically updated these days just like Chrome is, so there isn't much of a difference between the two in this regard anymore.

automatic update is only for security updates. major updates still do popups for users to install

Installing Chrome as default browser on my mother's computer felt a lot like when I set Google.com as her home page in 1998. And I did it for very similar reasons. Chrome is the fast/lightweight/awesome version of what already existed.

So, by the end of 2012, Chrome (56%), IE (35%) and Firefox (22%) together will have over 110% of the market? ;-)

So by 2013 it should have captured 100% of the market and by 2013 130%?

...and yet I still can't ctrl-tab to my last active tab.

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