Chrome Hits 20% Share As IE Continues Slide

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."

google targets AGGRESSIVELY ie users.

[gl4ss]

if you go with fresh ie to google.com it's like going to spam city. it has an advert bar at the top to change your homepage to google(a big one, 2x the size of ie's program bar), what's worse the "yes" choice isn't yes, in finnish it's "sopiihan se" which translates roughtly to "oh that's okay" - softening the menu, but it's straight out of spam advertiser course to do that, yes/no would be sufficient, but it woudl be better that they wouldn't do that at all, it's using their monopoly in search to try to push their browser. and it does a "would you like to install a faster way to browse" pop-over on the google logo for installing google chrome. it's an atrocity, really - and it's like if ms and google have traded places.

also the stats are a bit suspect. (I roll with firefox normally)

Google Evil (beta)

[ShakaUVM]

>>It's Google who just pushes their software. On our network, several users 'suddenly' had Chrome installed.

Yeah. I wanted to put the Google photo screensaver on my mom's computer. So a quick Google search, and here it is - http://pack.google.com/screensaver.html [google.com]

So you click on "get google photos screensaver" and it takes you, not to a link to the download, but to a page for "The Google Pack" which has a bunch of checkboxes for various software options.

None of which are the screensaver. But Chrome is checked by default, as is Google Desktop. So a non-technical user might think that Google Desktop = hey, free screensaver. So they might download that. And get Chrome. (And all the other bloatware like Avast! antivirus found here:http://pack.google.com/pack_installer.html). I knew that it was probably part of Picasa, so I unchecked all of the bloatware options, and just downloaded Picasa, which indeed had the screensaver my mom wanted, and there you go.

But the point is:
1) Google is acting evil (if my mom had tried to do this herself, she'd be stuck with a horrible antivirus product - or two, there's two in the Pack)
2) Chrome installs are up because of their evil.

Giving free advertising to Chrome on Google.com is borderline evil, too. Leverage of monopolistic powers and all.

Re:PC manufacturers and affiliate marketers

[phonewebcam]

Incidentally, I Installed Windows 7 recently and was asked to choose between Google, Yahoo and Bing as a search engine. No wonder Google wins everything when it gets listed twice like that [blogspot.com].

Re:It's the ADS

[kronosopher]

I'm confused, if Chrome doesn't do ad-blocking then what's this? [google.com] Are you saying that AdBlock for chrome is different in some significant way? If yes, please provide a citation.

And from a non-commercial source

[David Gerard]

Wikimedia browser share [wikimedia.org] gives Chrome at 15.6%.

(This is just one site, of course. But (a) Wikimedia has no interest in pushing the numbers (analysts' business model is selling out) (b) it's a top-10 general interest site used by normal people, not just geeks (c) this is worldwide.)

Re:PC manufacturers and affiliate marketers

[igreaterthanu]

Don't you mean thrice [techreport.com]? ;)

Re:And from a non-commercial source

[KiloByte]

And even more important, unlike StatCounter and other junk, they do show users with properly configured AdBlock.

Chrome's AdBlock is crippled, it allows you to remove only visual components but not tracking junk, that's why Chrome's stats seem better.

Re:PC manufacturers and affiliate marketers

[Luckyo]

Google pays to bundle chrome with everything but virtual kitchen sinks nowadays. Almost every piece of trial/free with hope of purchasing pro version - kinds of software packages seem to come with chrome installation bundled and offered along installation of software you want.

Frankly, it's getting annoying. The peak moment of rage came when I was installing stuff to a new Asus Eee PC yesterday, messing around with video codecs to get h.264 and x.264 decoding work in 720p without dropping frames, and tried divx h.264 codec.

It came with chrome and offered to install it alongside codec (and forcibly installed a whole lot of other crapware I didn't want with plain codec installation). I think it was fourth or fifth piece of software I had to untick "install chrome, the awesome browser" during installation that day, and the whole lot of other crapware that came with it really annoyed me, but chrome was the only name that got stuck in the memory because it was literally n+1st time I had to tell installer that "really, I just want what I was told I was downloading, and no AWESOME google bars and MORE AWESOME chrome, THANKS!". /venting

Re:PC manufacturers and affiliate marketers

[monoqlith]

I can understand why that might be annoying, but I would hardly count Chrome among other installer crap-ware. Chrome is by far the fastest browser I've ever used. It is quite snappy and responsive. It beats out Safari and Firefox- which has become, for me, unusably bloated - on an iMac Core 2 Duo by a pretty sizable speed margin. Since its layout engine is the same as Safari's, this must mostly be due to V8, which is lightning fast. Pretty amazing work, honestly. I can see why it's eating away at Microsoft's market share.

If you submit, those pesky installation questions will disappear. I submitted, and I'm happier now. If I'm a Google shill, I can deal with that.