Google Chrome more popular than Safari
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
Chrome became the default on my PC at work as soon as I could get it installed a year ago.
The beauty of Chrome is its speed and elegance. Omnibox for searches, the behaviour of tabs (remembering which tab spawned the subsequent one), and the ability to use icons only for the bookmarks bar are three things that Safari doesn't do.
The addition of extensions for the PC have cemented its position there, and when those services are added to the Mac version life gets better.
Firefox does most of this, of course, but it looks and feels bloated and old on both platforms.
I will forever love Firefox for freeing us from Microsoft's IE tyranny, but Chrome is truly firing on all 8 cylinders these days, pun intended.
It has no bookmark manager, so when you have more bookmarks than space on the toolbar, there is literally no way to move them around short of deleting enough so that they all fit on the toolbar then moving them around. I ran into this when I wanted to add a new one to my toolbar and it was not possible. There is no way to rearrange them in the menu.
The scrolling in Chrome annoys me by being all herky jerky.
Lack of bookmark synching in Chrome is annoying. I have a desktop at work and a laptop for home use and it's so nice having my bookmarks sync up with Safari without any intervention.
Chrome on Mac is the first browser I've used where if I scroll down a page, go to a link on that page, then hit my back button it doesn't go back to where I was before. I have to scroll down the page again manually.
I'm a 1Password user and they do not have a version of their plugin that works for Chrome.
Chrome also does not make use of the standard OS X Keychain. So I have to put all of my passwords in again manually. Huge pain.
Some of these things can supposedly be remedied by using the latest version of Chromium which has extensions enabled and installing random extensions, but that is a workaround for a browser that's not ready yet.
Until it is possible to rearrange my bookmarks, sync them, use 1Password, scroll smoothly, and not have to scroll every time I hit the back button, I'll stick with Safari. Chrome has great potential, but is still not to the point where it can serve as a valid replacement for me. When I'm using Windows, it's my default for sure, but on Mac Chrome isn't ready yet.
Call me shallow, but that's the biggest blocker for me.
And as such, I'd highly doubt, at least until Chrome actively courts hardware manufacturers, that Chrome Ad click rates compare to IE. IE is the default web browser for many computers and ad clickers are more likely just to use the default web browser that comes installed on their system (the whole addon toolbar business is based on the fact that users won't (or don't know how to) switch their default search engine back once it's installed).
Is there any factual basis for this type of claim?
I would imagine there are a large segment of IE users who are also on the internet for hours every day and are locked into using IE by their corporate IT departmnet.
Personally, thus far, I've yet to see anything in Chrome that would make me jump ship (and I've been trying it for a while). I can do serious development with Firefox and I can have minimalist browsing with Safari.
With Chrome, I have 23 extensions installed at the moment, it performs as good as having no extension installed. I can't even imagine having 23 extensions on Firefox. All the extensions updates are done on the back ground, install it and forget about it. I had some browser crashes on the early chrome builds but since the last 8 months I didnt have a single browser crash and I am using dev channel.
IMO chrome is head over heels better than Firefox (this coming from a former Firefox fan boy) and you need to use it more than 5 minutes to really appreciate it.
If they did, Safari on Windows would look and feel more like a Windows application. As it stands, it's a very opinionated application, with foreign-looking scrollbars, text antialiasing that works differently from ClearType (they may have changed this by now, I haven't looked), etc. Comparing market shares between these browsers with the assumption that they have the same goals might be a bit off.
[edit]: I've also noticed a lot of people I know living over in the Windows world seem to harbor an uncontrolled hate-on for iTunes and Quicktime. Since these are often associated with the installation of Safari, that probably doesn't help Apple's position. Does Chrome come with any "unwanted" extras?
It's because Apple's software runs like garbage on Windows boxes. They eat up resources, install unnecessary stuff, run useless background apps that east up memory, take over bindings between file types and better applications (really, quicktime? I really don't want you to become the embedded player for .mpg files in all of my browsers, so I'm stuck with a 1"x1" postage stamp on my 26" monitor and no full-screen option).
On Macs, the software is sublime. On PCs they simply suck.
Those specific pieces of software alone kept me away from Macs for years because the PC ports were so terrible.
Really, there isn't any meaningful debate that V8 is the current king of the hill in Javascript performance, by a pretty large margin. Your statement that Safari's engine runs faster than Chrome's isn't supported by any evidence of which I am aware.
source: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9142004/Safari_edges_...
Now of course on Windows there is no contest, Chrome is faster, but on Mac Safari is slightly faster.
I scroll all the time. So it should better work perfectly. With Chrome, it doesn't. Switching between my feedreader and Chrome made my fingers hurt.
(This is, by the way, something many OS X apps get wrong. All of MS Office, iTunes and so on.)
Plus Safari is very close to Chrome's performance on a Mac, at least insomuch that anyone wouldn't notice.
That being said, although Chrome performs the core browser functions better than safari, it's still rough around the edges.
Let's be real.
The five buttons you have to click, each saying 'I acknowledge that this software may set my computer on fire' before you can even run an installer on windows has really cut down on program installation by the unwashed masses- in short, I think you are wrong.
If the security warnings are discouraging people from installing new software, they would equally discourage Chrome and Safari installation. So this is not an issue.
When it comes to web users, I lean towards them being "naive". You are free to hold a positive impression of the world as benchmarking enthusiasts :-)
You don't have to shop around for browsers to find Chrome a pleasing experience compared to Safari, and especially not Firefox on Mac.
One potential problem for Chrome, at least for the type of users we see here, is any potential issue with adblockers. Wasn't there some news items about Google possibly being less than thrilled with such extensions (understandably)? I know quite a few people for whom a good adblocking solution is essential, and they stick with Firefox exclusively.
defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool true
Chrome has attained in its first year the same average market growth of Firefox (roughly 4.5%) that it attained in 5 years with paid referral programs and advertisements everywhere. I wonder what growth Chrome will attain when it hits the rapid phase of its growth.
Also to consider is Microsoft is shipping Windows 7 in Europe with IE, Firefox, Chrome and another IIRC.
Additionally, Firefox grew its users base by 40% in the last year--adding nearly 100 million users.
One of the biggest issues I have is finding my tabs, and Tab Hunter is ideal for that purpose.
Chrome's a great browser and with the extensions has become the best browser on Windows IMO. Mac doesn't support extensions yet but they are presumably coming, and when they do it'll be the best browser on Mac, too, unless FF pulls something out of their hat ..
Real browser extensions allow you to do a lot more than this.