Chrome Hits 20% Share As IE Continues Slide 308
jbrodkin writes "Google Chrome's rise in popularity has been remarkably fast and it's just hit a new milestone: more than 20% of all browser usage, according to StatCounter. Chrome rose from only 2.8% in June 2009 to 20.7% worldwide in June 2011, while Microsoft's Internet Explorer fell from 59% to 44% in the same time frame. Firefox dropped only slightly in the past two years, from 30% to 28%. While other browser trackers show Chrome with a lower percentage, there's a reason: StatCounter tracks total surfing, not the number of users. It's the Web's power users who are pushing Chrome to new heights."
Better than IE (Score:3, Informative)
Better to see some Chrome installs out there because: it runs on multiple platforms, does a hell of a job in supporting web standards and is fast. Although it does crash on occasion, especially with web content. It also dies when you have 60+ Google Maps tabs open.
For me as a web developer I prefer to see more Chrome installs than IE, just it makes life easier. The only positive thing about IE is that they have gotten better at supporting web standards. Even though stuff that worked in IE 8 doesn't work in IE 9. and stuff made for IE6 and special modifications in IE7 still break IE8 and IE9. But I'm getting off-topic here.
It's the Web's power users who are pushing Chrome (Score:2, Informative)
Seriously? It's Google who just pushes their software. On our network, several users 'suddenly' had Chrome installed. If I remember correctly, it was bundled with Google Earth. None of them of course paying attention to the fact they got more than they bargained for. The very few "power" users - or in our case the people who just want to pretend they know anything about it, could install Google Chrome on their PC's without admin rights... Yes, Google's very sneaky with their setups. The only way to prevent it, is to already make certain directories on each PC and set it up so that no one but adminsn can write to these folders.
Recent convert from Firefox (Score:1, Informative)
Something about Firefox is ridiculously slow since FF4. It takes several seconds to start, webpages load slowly, scrolling is choppy. Maybe something is wrong with one of my add-ons, but I don't want to turn them off and then turn each on one by one to find out if that's the case. Nah, it was easier to just switch to Chrome. It's fast as hell and has almost all the features I need as someone who does not do any web development.
My only major gripe is that Chrome lacks the feature where it does an in-page search as soon as you begin typing. There is an extension that does it, sort of, but it's not quite as polished as in Firefox. The Chrome team has come out and said that they will not make it a built-in feature, which is sad. Once you get used to browsing text-intensive web pages by in-page search you'll never go back. It saves your eyes and your mouse hand a lot of work. Especially your eyes. I hardly read stuff anymore, I just type what I'm looking for. But I digress...
If Firefox fixes the speed problem they will get me back, whatever that means. It's not like I'm paying for anything.
Re:Better than IE (Score:5, Informative)
IE9 finally implemented DOM level 2 and otherwise change it to match other browsers. Previously the DOM has seen little change since IE5, which was good in 1999 but not so good now.
Re:google targets AGGRESSIVELY ie users. (Score:4, Informative)
You said it, as well as someone else above, and it goes like this: "Google is using its search monopoly to push Chrome"
Google does not have a monopoly in search. You can go e.g. to Bing with no consequences. Doing so will not prevent you from using any other programs, features of your hardware etc. The stuff that is online is just there. They do not need a specific search engine in order for them to be found or (nowadays) a specific browser to be viewed. You can type the address in the bar and navigate to your target directly (I know that is starting to change, but this is another story).
My point is, what Google is doing is different than, e.g. what MS was doing with Windows and IE6 and Windows Media Player. Not having Windows in the 90's meant you could not use your hardware properly (driver issues), you could not play most of the audio and video formats and you could not view a lot of websites appropriately.
Google is just exercising aggressive marketing strategies, that's all (and I don't like that either). But in this case, unlike 10 years ago, you have other options. Use them!
Re:Firefox dropped the ball (Score:4, Informative)
Mozilla should understand that the 90s are over and people are no longer buying a new computer every 2 years and upgrade their software even more often. The new features (ALL of them) are not needed in the default install. They could be tested using extensions but there is absolutely no reason any more to change ANYTHING just for change's sake.
Compared to Firefox 3.0, Firefox 5 has significant performance improvements in its JavaScript and render engines. You can't reasonably implement those changes as an add-on because it will be too slow. You really are missing out if you're still using Firefox 3.0. Firefox 5 is faster and more capable.
Re:Recent convert from Firefox (Score:4, Informative)
The Classic Discussion System works fine, though.
Re:WebGL (Score:4, Informative)
You have of course reported any known bugs to nvidia.
I haven't, no, but the person who discovered the hole did, about a year ago. Still waiting for the fix.
Unfortunately, both the silicon and the drivers were designed to run trusted code very fast. Being able to run untrusted code safely is an entirely different design requirement. The latest hardware is designed to be able to run semi-trusted code fast (although the drivers aren't really), but the older hardware isn't.
Addressing security holes by ensuring those who need to know about problems can fix them helps.
That only works if they have an incentive to fix them. 99% of nVidia customers don't care if shader code can compromise their system, because they trust all of the shader code that they run. They do care if they see a performance hit. If you produce a new driver that gives people a 10% drop in framerate, how many are going to thank you?
You'll notice that the responses to Microsoft's comments were all from browser developers, not from driver developers. People who work with the drivers know that they shouldn't be allowed near untrusted code. A typical driver for a modern GPU is a huge chunk of code that was developed with only one design constraint in mind: speed. The fact that the recent hardware is a bit safer is due to this same requirement: customers don't want the overhead of switching to kernel mode to talk to the GPU, so the newer chips just do some basic setup in the kernel and are designed to have all of the commands sent via a ring buffer mapped into the userspace process. Because the userspace process has more or less direct access to the hardware, the hardware now needs to provide proper isolation for unrelated processes. This makes it a bit more likely that it's safe. Of course, this doesn't prevent the WebGL code from being able to compromise the browser, it just prevents it from being able to compromise the system without compromising the browser first.
WebGL is nice in theory, but it's inserting untrusted code into a software stack that was never designed to be secure, and that's a problem.
Re:Google Evil (beta) (Score:5, Informative)
Giving free advertising to Chrome on Google.com is borderline evil, too. Leverage of monopolistic powers and all.
Sigh this again.
Google search does not dictate the terms by which people use it to search the web.
Google search does not have the sole product in the market, and users are free to use any alternative at any time without reprise.
Google search does not have a lack of viable competitors.
These are the terms which define a monopoly. People choosing to use Google search does not make Google search a monopoly, and pimping their other products on their page is not even remotely anti-competitive.
Google have ONE product that is a monopoly and that is internet advertising. You can apply the above rules to see:
Google does dictate the terms by which people run advertisements in a non-negotiable way.
Google does not have the sole product in the market, but advertisers are not free to use alternatives due to a lack of customer base by the alternatives.
There is no viable alternative to Google's advertisements due to a lack of customer base by the alternatives.
This is a monopoly.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)