Chrome passes Firefox in global browser share

Definition of "usage"

Surely if browser "usage" is the benchmark here them Firefox plus Adblock and/or NoScript will naturally have less results than Chrome and its umpteen adserver connections.

Methinks the results have been skewed.

A far more meaningful survey would be site visits surely.

Iron?

Would be nice to know what percentage of the Chrome browsers are actually Iron.

The same paymaster?

It's quite hard to find in Mozilla's website, but here: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2010/faq/ you will find their 2010 Financial statements. On page 5 it shows of the $123m revenue they made, all but $2m came from "Royalties", and further in the report on page 20, Note 9 - "Concentration of Risk", it talks about a contract with a "Search Provider" that provided 84% of royalty revenue. I am fairly sure that the search provider isnt Bing or Yahoo!, so it seems that Mozilla is dependent on one of its largest competitors in the browser business. According to the document, that arrangement is due to expire in Nov 2011 - with such a dependency, Mozilla would likely collapse if it were not renewed.

There is a lot of affection for Firefox especially among tekkies, but I think nobody should be confused on who it is that pays the majority of the bills at Mozilla.

@ashdav It depends on how you measure "usage", and the details of how the measurement was made is conspicuous in it's absence from this article - so it's impossible to say how valid the comparison really is.

@tony72 I just opened FF and Chrome side by side. Both clean with no plugins and FF was twice the size of Chrome. RAM may be cheap but the time I spend waiting for them to open is not.

Where are the phones?

Is this only about desktops? How are smart phone browsers (and apps) factored in? Is phone access not yet significant yet?

Well of course

Firefox isn't packaged with everything and the kitchen sink.

Almost every non tech computer user I know has chrome and doesn't know how they got it. Many just use it until I am there and they ask me where it came from and how to get rid of it.

Chrome took over South America...hmm wonder why.

... oh yes. Since the IT department won't install another browser besides IE just because you asked, you have 3 choices:

- Keep using IE. Yeah, right. Since Windows Update is disabled, you are stuck in version 7.0.0.0.0.-1 or whatever came with the last image. Have fun.

- Portable Firefox. Doable, just install it in your pendrive at home, copy over to your Desktop, and profit. But the flash thing will break with every update. It is a hassle, but it can be done. But still a hassle. If you can use pendrives in the first place.

- Chrome. It just installs, and God helps you if the machine gets borked. Alas, it won't, since you don't have admin privileges, so doesn't the browser. Hope not. It won't update by itself, because the googleupdate.exe can't embed its key in the registry behind your back. Just run the about screen once in a while. And the flash thing is already shoved deep there somewhere, so it just works. Hope so.

Most users don't even take a second glance at admin privileges if they can install it, without asking permission first. The remainder won't bother and use IE. The geeky ones will go for firefox if convenient to them.

And home users, well... no comments.

The real issue, it seems to me, is that Chrome (or Chromium in my case) is simply very much quicker at loading web pages that FF, and feels even a little quicker than Opera. And that is probably the main reason for migration.

In my case I run FF as my main browser and Opera for certain sites because it seems to handle them quicker. However I've recently done a reinstall of Sabayon linux, and that came with Chromium as the default browser. It really did seem very quick, but I just can't bring myself to put up with that horrible Safari-like interface.

@The Reg: Better Reporting Please

Whilst I don't dount the rise in Chrome users*:

1) StatCounter statistics are derived from hits, as opposed to unique visitors.

2) The article states 'market share'.

It may just be me, but I find it difficult to correlate a true reflection of market share against the number of raw hits. i.e. How do we know that Chrome users aren't just more active?** Surely raw hits are not exactly the best indicator?

Also, what the article does not mention is that IE made a larger gain in share from October to November than Chrome.***

IMO - and like I said, I don't Chrome's rising popularity - this article is slightly flawed, uses inaccurate data (hit based) and is focused solely on one thing - the rise of Chrome.

Let's hope any future articles are better reported.

--

* From what the kids say, many school age kids use Chrome because 'my friends say it's cool' (cool as in kewl-aid but not necessarily as in 'good') and 'my friends nearly all use Chrome, so I switched'.

** The kids waste many an hour trawling that YouTube (and similar) tosh watching inane videos whilst using Chrome. They probably exceed my hit 'hit rate' by a factor of at leat 25:1 for this very reason. So from my house, Chrome would have a massive market share when based on hits, but in reality this is not the case.

*** Combined desktop and mobile stats from StatCounter show IE increasing by 3.13% and Chrome by 2.13%. Now, I am not suggesting that I believe IE will continue in this fashion, but it is something that article totally fails to mention.

Caching

Chrome caches in circumstances I.E, and Firefox simply do not . If you're writing a dynamic application, relying on AJAX responses , shift-reload is simply not an option, half way through a set of transactions.

Other than that - its speed, and built in developer tools (which demonstrate the same caching problems) - are great!

IE in the workplace

Form a support point of view, IE is just easier than Chrome or FireFox. There are aspects of browsers which don't really matter at home but are important in the work-place. For example, if Chrome doesn't work properly with a website at home you just write it off as "one of those things". If Chrome doesn't work properly with a website at work, you'd be on to tech support asking them to fix it. At home, the inadequacies of FireFox and Chrome are hugely outweighed by the advantages, but in the workplace the inadequacies are much more significant and the advantages much smaller. You may not see the difference as a user, but to a support tech in a large company with a network built upon an MS infrastructure they're a big deal.

One thing about the stats:- considering how many people are allegedly spending all their time on the web using their iPads, and that this is the year of the tablet, why has the growth in Safari been so small?

hits vs users

Wouldn't the 'number of hits' metric favour browsers that are more likely to allow pop-ups? Just sayin'.

Goes to show

It's not the quality of your browser, but how much money you have to tell people about it.

It's ironic and slightly sad that the best browser has the smallest marketshare, but then I suppose that's life. The worlds most popular car is the Toyota Corolla(Chrome), a very average car. Me, i'm more than happy with my Audio R8 (Opera).

As Chrome is also included with a lot of software people will install on their computers without thinking (and I've never seen Firefox bundled in that way) I'm not suprised at the results.

Call me a cynic but....

For us Mac fanbois It just works ..

unlike f*ref*x which hoses for no readily apparent reason every half hour - or when I ask it to do something complex like render a picture or scroll some text quickly .. Now if the Chrome chaps would like to turn to that other former favourite bit of Open Source 'productivity' software, Thunderbird which exhibits similar behaviour to the aforementioned, and write for us a leaner, meaner mail/calendar program ..

Inb4

the Opera fans arrive.

How many people have had Chrome installed when they have been installing something else. I've seen it on numerous PC's and the people have not actually made a point of installing it. It has just turned up with something else.

Chrome isn't that good

I'm on Chrome now but I'm using it less because I'm finding that actually it's not that awesome compared to Firefox anymore, it tries too hard to make my browsing experience their way, keeps trying to push that awful web store on me and quite frankly I'm tired of it.

I also don't like that I can only have a max of 8 websites on my homepage. Seriously, do they think if I have 12 that's going to ruin something? I don't like things being dumbed down and made safe so slow people can't do something stupid.