Trend implies Chrome to overtake IE in browser share in one year. | Hacker News Reader

Trend implies Chrome to overtake IE in browser share in one year.

gs.statcounter.com

32 pointsjamieforrest22 comments

And within 2 years it will be used by more than 100% of people worldwide!

As my maths teacher used to say, "even in the privacy of your own home, you should not extrapolate."

Obligatory XKCD: http://xkcd.com/605/ "As you can see, by late next month you'll have over four dozen husbands. Better get bulk rate on that wedding cake."

IMNSHO, the adoption of IE9 (on new computers with Win7 preinstalled, perhaps?) might make a significant dent in that projection. I've seen a very similar graph (starring Firefox) a few years back; and then IE came back from the dead with version 8.

Yeah, and there's always someone in April who's on pace to hit 80 home runs for the season. That said, I think the trend toward Chrome, and webkit browsers in general, is undeniable.

Linear extrapolation in general is unwise, but with market share it is particularly foolish. I'd bet the opposite, that the gap between the two browsers takes longer than a year to vanish.

In South America, where these stats show Chrome in the lead, the growth seemed to be accelerating up to and beyond the crossover point (the same in the few individual countries where they're leading). What about marketshare particularly should make this unusual or unexpected?

I'd assume some kind of tipping point effect as it becomes "normal" not to run IE and/or to run Chrome that could lead to such acceleration since the barriers to adoption are so low.

Perhaps there's a distribution deal or popular website in South America that requires Chrome to function best (Orkut?). Or perhaps, as you said, it's just a network effect.

No extrapolation here[0]. Fx is dogfighting with IE, all the while Cr is coming increasingly closer.

[0] http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-eu-monthly-200809-201107

Interesting. Firefox is about equal to IE in Europe. While in Germany, Firefox usage is way ahead of IE:

http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-DE-monthly-200809-201107

In antarctica everyone is using safari.

Ordinarily I downvote XKCD links on Hacker News, but in this particular case, it really does a perfect job of explaining what's wrong with the article.

Who cares? Whatever browser is the market leader doesn't matter because you will still need to support IE, Chrome, Firefox and Safari for the foreseeable future. Nobody has ever made a (significant) profit from a browser. In fact, Microsoft lost billions for their efforts (see U.S. vs. MSFT).

Can someone please explain to me why this matters?

If Chrome is the market leader, you have a viable argument for not supporting IE at all. Or at least making it a low priority.

It really depends on the target market, regardless. Plenty of people will be quick to tell you how many enterprise companies are still stuck with IE6. And most of them are willing to write fat checks to maintain that status quo.

In terms of affecting what devs need to do, it doesn't matter. However, if it happens (and it's a big if), it would certainly be noteworthy, because it will cement html standards-compliance.

As you say, you need to support IE, Chrome, FF and Safari - but (at least for IE < 8) this has always meant supporting the standard and then tweaking it to make it work in IE. I've never had significant differences in webpage functionality between chrome, FF and safari (YMMV). IE 9 is MUCH better at standards compliance - but this is purely because of MS's losses in marketshare.

If you don't see this as a significant thing, then I'm guessing you're too young to have been coding web pages when IE had a 90%+ market share. You kids have it easy. :-)

A large enough market share for Chrome means that developers can target more of the features in modern browsers. For example, companies can write WebGL games knowing that the majority of installed browsers support it. Google can add new features to Chrome and since everyone gets the automatic update, and Firefox will soon follow, the feature becomes mainstream.

If you focus on mobile you can safely ignore Microsoft's browser. Why do think web developers love mobile devices.

Microsoft made billions from their browser by derailing competition from the web that threatened their stranglehold on the desktop.

Google are doing the same in reverse, making billions by pushing the web platform on the desktop and mobile.

It matters because Microsoft's browsers have held back browser progress for more than 10 years.

I'm assuming you must be very young...

The graph the title links to is a little dated, it only cites stats up to July 2011. Here's a more up to date graph citing stats up to October 2011:

http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-monthly-200809-201110

The curves are even more revealing.

yeah that's too bad others already lost that war even if IE, FF, Opera, etc became 2x better than Chrome overnight it wouldn't change a thing. The machine' rolling and advertised on 99% of the most visited pages, bundled with most software with default opt-in.

In 5 years from now we'll probably start saying how "maybe its not a good thing for ANY company to have 90%+ market share in something as important as the browser" and how "Yeah well Google didn't play fair, but that' ok cause we hated MS, and no one cared much about brand-fanboism for Opera or Firefox"

Looks to be browser fragmentation.

"Other" (which is massively increased) and IE9 are the only increasing entries in this plot:

http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww-monthly-200809...

While what's in that "other" plot isn't listed, the Chrome and Firefox version schemes and their associated plethora of smaller and more frequent releases have played havoc with the classic version-plot scheme.

I don't think it's fragmentation. It's Chrome on track to achieve market dominance.

Chrome 15 is right now in the process of claiming the most used version from IE 8.

But like the combined version share, what you can use is often more about the people holding you back on IE 6,7,8 than the ones pushing you forward.

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