On Sunday, Google Chrome surpassed Microsoft Internet Explorer in browser market share.
I would now like to welcome our new Internety Overlords!
(Please don’t hurt me.)
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or Paperback
*Please note:
Links to books and other items on this page and elsewhere on Greg Ladens' blog may send you to Amazon, where I am a registered affiliate. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, which helps to fund this site.
Something else interesting in the data: IE’s market share drops every weekend which Chrome’s market share spikes every weekend. Safari and Opera also seem to have less notable spikes on the weekend. Firefox seems pretty flat.
That suggests to me that IE is popular on work computers while others are either more popular on home computers or are more popular with the type of person who uses their computer a lot on the weekends.
Good news, I suppose. The way MS treated Navigator left a bitter taste. The simple fact that IE was absolute crap in those days. Hiding the browser in the OS to avoid legal issues and give IE the inside track didn’t make MS look any more honest, and did I mention that IE was crap?
Over time, with many iterations and false steps, IE did actually become a solid browser and equal to most but the way they got there is a sordid tale of double-dealing, theft, skirting the law, and abuse. I vowed to avoid this browser as much as possible in the 90s and with the exceptions where I was forced to use it, bastards, I have kept that vow.
Chrome is a very nice browser but, so far, it is not as friendly as I would like. But the main reason I don’t use it much is because Google seems poised to take over the world. Bothersome. If they change their name to Skynet it will be time to get a dog, and some guns, and …
So far I’ve settled on Firefox. My faith was shaken by some serious stability issues a while back, mainly memory leaks, that made it damn near unusable and had me using Chrome but they have fixed the worse of them in the last year and stability has markedly improved. I love the ability to customize and a select suite of adons has my browser playing pretty much how I want it to. There is no danger that Firefox will take over the world.
Honorable mention goes to Opera. A sweet little browser that is swift, easy on the system, and quirky in the many features it has that others don’t. Before I got into Firefox it was my browser.
Interesting, and probably true. Put a slightly different way, IE hangs on only because of the dampening effect of the work or institutional environment on the usual market forces. Put yet another way, we continue to see Microsoft keep a product in play because of trickery and coercion rather than qualithy.
That weekend spike is interesting. People on their work computers often don’t have a choice of browsers to use. So could this indicate not so much the type of person but more about WHEN people (who do have a choice) actually install new software?
If so, it would show that that a greater number of people do such installations on weekends rather than weekdays.
Or, it could indicate that Google, after collecting a weeks worth of mind reading data, updates their mind control algorithms on Friday night as a batch process. I wonder why that can’t be done in near real-time?
There are still many corporate intranets with services customized for IE. It implements many things in a non-standard way, and cannot be thrown away.
Re Firefox
Firefox 11 just came out. They’re really getting aggressive in pumping out new versions.
“It implements many things in a non-standard way, and therefore must be thrown away.”
.. fixed that for you!
People may poo-poo FireFox, but Chrome isn’t free enough for me.
To me, Chrome is the only choice simply because of the non IE browsers, it is the only one that hardly ever causes me to lose work. All other factors are unimportant. I don’t use very many plugins and stuff.
I’ve said before and was told by experts that I was wrong but I’ll say it again, dammit: Firefox does not cater to Linux. The Linux version is crappy and behind in development. That may also be true of Chrome, but Chrome as it works on Linux now is better than firefox on Linux.
Having said that, I do want to mention that Unity breaks in annoying ways. In Gmail, scroll bars no longer work. In Google Map, the default “view” scale is so far off that you can’t read any of the text associated with the page. Of course, Unity has also forced me to make about twice as many mouse gestures than I formerly needed to to and it has entirely broken the desktop paradigm, turning it into something it never was … I can’t imagine how they thought up this monstrosity … so, chrome working with unity (or not) is a non issue because I’ll be removing the latter as soon as I have a ten minute break.
Meanwhile, Get Off My Lawn!!!
Chrome keeps crashing my hotmail Silverlight when I try to attach files. Not always, just sometimes, but enough to annoy the heck out of me as I’m using it for work-related reasons and often send files back and forth as I work from home.
I’ve checked online for fixes and it isn’t the file size, it isn’t the type of file, it isn’t add-ons. I switched to Chrome because Firefox became highly unstable. If Chrome doesn’t fix its issues, I’ll switch back to Firefox as I hear they’ve fixed many of the problems that made me switch in the first place.
“If Chrome doesn’t fix its issues”
Care to reread your statement again:
“Chrome keeps crashing my hotmail Silverlight”
Now, who wrote hotmail? Who wrote Silverlight? Who also makes Internet Explorer?
Do I have to draw you a picture?
Yes, draw the picture, it would be interesting! I imagine the use of interesting iconography.
Greg & Ken,
I agree
re 12:
🙂
If it were something open like an IETF RFC regarding a standard such as x25 communication, then I could see the program writer implementing that functionality to be at fault for screwing it up.
But Silverlight is a closed Microsoft product written specifically for Windows users to ensure lock-in. Hotmail was bought up by Microsoft and changed (after huge problems because they tried [admirably enough] to “eat their own dogfood” and use Windows to serve up the content) to become specifically enhanced for Windows users to ensure lock-in.
Given that Microsoft themselves can’t manage backward compatibility without doing the brute-force method of “include all the old code verbatim”, which is impossible for copyright reasons for anyone else, how is a crashing Hotmail Silverlight actually Chrome’s (or Opera or Firefox or anyone other than Microsoft) fault?
THis blog has had more comments than the source. Weird.