Chrome 15 Is Now World’s Most Popular Browser (Version)

this lists latest versions on every platform for every channel.

As someone who is deeply concerned with Google's dominance of the Web (and increasingly mobile), I would dearly love for you to list out your reasons for trusting them, so that I can change my mind. In the meantime I'll stick to Firefox, loss of mojo or otherwise.

"They may have redeemed themselves recently but I wouldn't care to look"

These two sentences feel contradictory to me. If you want Firefox to win, at least give it a try once every few versions.

In the past month, Google has advertised on the new tab page for their chrome book using a mechanism for emergency updates (in some cases people can't close the ad), and started a fight in the chromium community about supporting Dart directly. Neither one is a major offence but both exhibit they have their own interests at heart.

Spdy is another good example. (I like Spdy, and I think its a good idea, but...) SPDY™ is trademarked to Google. It currently has no rfc. (Just a mostly empty draft. http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-agl-tls-nextprotoneg-00.htm... ) It was developed internally and not opened to comments. They control the largest implementations both server and client side. And while they're selling it as a way for everyone to make the web faster, they still have full control. (Apache support is here, nginx doesn't support it, Amazon uses it heavily for the kindle fire.)

While they do move faster than MS, they also seem to have an habit of working on something internally, then one day they announce the feature in Chrome, dump a library to the other browsers and expect them to just integrate it. And since they control the biggest websites, there's immediately an unfair pressure; "Oh, you don't want to use SPDY? Well, then your browser will be slower on Google sites than Chrome" (they don't say - or probably even think - that, of course, but it's true)

Mozilla talks a lot about their development and seems to be more interested in a better web, and not just a better browser.

Being Free Software really isn't a concern to most people. Try being a small company that tries to block aggression from Google or Microsoft. Will it matter that Chrome is free? It's not like you can go in and say, "Here I changed Chrome. All users now use this version." For 99.999% of users free software is meaningless.

What would make Chrome much more interesting is if they gave maintanance of it over to a standards body or even a university. At this point "free software" is just nice window dressing.

It's almost ridiculous how lucky we are to in fact have three major market-share holders with largely compatible platforms competing for our attention.

If the number of privacy concerned people is only 5% (a guess as good as any other guess), add that number to Firefox percentage, and the picture looks quire different.

I think you are vastly over-stating the cross-section of the population that both has no idea what a browser extension is, yet knows about RSS and cares about using it.

Then again, a good number of the people I do know don't even understand the concept of a web address or even how to use bookmarks -- nevermind speed dial. Usually when I watch someone try to find a site, they just search for it in Google, and if Google isn't the default search provider, they search for Google in whatever search engine is the default. They also rarely use any browser "feature" except the back button, and they're afraid to try out new features. Even tabs and multiple windows are often underutilized or avoided by simply using one window at a time and closing it if they want to start over or visit a new site.

In fact, whenever they accidentally activate a feature they don't use (history, right-click context menu, rss feed view, gestures, etc.), it often just leads to confusion because they weren't paying attention to what they did to set off the unfamiliar feature's action. As a result, they just close the window and start over, and if it happens again they get frustrated and do something else.

Also, learning new features isn't free. There's a cognitive cost involved and it takes a certain amount of training and repetition to solidify the ability to use new features. For some people, it's higher than for others, and eventually it gets to a point where people like my Dad have to basically relearn the same features over and over again every time they use a computer. Listening to older relatives talk about their computer experiences, it also sounds like most of the time they're too deeply afraid of accidentally breaking their computer by clicking or doing the wrong thing to learn features by experimenting, further reducing the ability for them to solidify their learning through repetition and practice.

By comparison, those individuals I see who are willing to learn new features or who can notice what they did to set off a feature are usually pretty tech-savvy (or soon will be) and would be able to figure out how to use and install extensions anyway.

So personally, I think it's a good idea to aim for a default, minimalist interface and avoid gestures and interactive UI elements that users can accidentally click or activate. But that's just based on my casual observations of people using computers, which is why I'd love to hear yours, since apparently you disagree.