According to StatCounter’s figures (whatever they’re worth) Chrome is now the most popular browser in the world, overtaking Internet Explorer for the first time. How times change. Let’s hope Google, Firefox, and Opera have some good Metro stuff coming up, because IE on Windows 8 has a terrible UI.
Interesting to hear this, but I won’t be switching to Chrome until it gets a bookmarks sidebar (as Firefox has).
I have a huge number of bookmarks, and in Firefox I can effortlessly scroll down the list in the sidebar.
Not so with Chrome. I am not alone in wanting this either – there have been a very large number of requests made for this feature.
Chrome is nice, but to get closer to “awesome” it *must* have a sidebar.
You know you can have folders in your bookmark bar, right? Then you will have as many vertical lists of bookmarks as you want, on the screen only when you need them.
I also find this image http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Countries_by_most_used_web_browse… quite revealing.
Even if it masks places which have two (or few) browsers with quite comparable share, which is even more interesting situation – and, one could argue, an ideal situation for web standards.
As is the case in Russia, for example http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-RU-weekly-200827-201221 (well no wonder – all roughly equal, communism in action! ;p …though Opera would seem better at the top, like it sometimes was there – you have to admit, red on the world map would fit Russia better)
PS. I’m disappointed by most Nordic places and Benelux, I thought of them higher…
(well, and Canada)
Edited 2012-05-21 22:52 UTC
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=0&q…
Statcounter stats are pretty flawed. Above stats aren’t perfect either, but much less flawed.
To begin with, since Chrome precache links (=it fetches the links even if you don’t click them), if you don’t count precached links as +1 suddenly Chrome market share looks small.
The stats do not include pre-fetched links. If you read the FAQs on StatCounter you’ll find this:
“Further to a significant number of user requests, we are now adjusting our browser stats to remove the effect of prerendering in Google Chrome. From 1 May 2012, prerendered pages (which are not actually viewed) are not included in our stats.”
They also said that it made no very little to no change to their stats, which, well, you know, it’s not because it’s written black & white that it means it’s true.
It’s obviously not possible to have a so little difference and I believe they did this to preserve their apparent integrity.
Here’s a times article that compares all stats from various “counters”:
http://techland.time.com/2012/05/21/breaking-chrome-just-became-the…
The disparity is just too big to be legit. Clicky and net applications actually look more or less in the same ballpark (with the difference that netapplication weights by country which explains the IE lead).
In fact, if Netapplication would stop doing that, publish graphs with IE being 5% lower and say that “it made no or little difference”, that’d be exactly what statcounter does.
Of course it would be interesting to see the results from adclicks.. err adsense.
Somehow, I don’t see them bragging.
Edited 2012-05-22 01:59 UTC
I don’t get this weight by country thing. India has Firefox and chrome top leading in large gap over IE (only 20 percent) http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-IN-weekly-201215-201220 and its population is as large as China. until Netapplication release some more data to the public this is just bogus numbers.
There are differences between those web metric companies and it’s understandable but they all seems to point to one direction: IE down Chrome up (except Netapplication which indicates that they just playing with the stats).
Even though it may be the most used browser I am not going switch to it. I dislike the interface that for some stupid reason Firefox is trying to mimic. Other browsers also just suit me better. Firefox is more customizable, Konqueror has a better engine (At least I think so. KHTML is awesome) and Links2 is more suitable for my current computer. (With 64MB of RAM you don’t run anything that isn’t specifically designed for small amounts of RAM)
Well, I use the top 4 rather heavily (IE and Firefox on Win 7 and Firefox on SUSE at work, Chrome on Ubuntu at home, and Safari on my iPad pretty much everywhere).
I have a mild preference for Chrome, because it “feels” faster. Of course, Tom’s Hardware did extensive testing that indicated Chrome was the best Linux browser, while Firefox works best on Windows.
But I agree that Firefox is by far the most customizable, and the later versions “feel” much better (the ones that mimic Chrome, I’m afraid). But I’m glad you’ve found a browser you like.
Happily, we have excellent browser competition again, and for that I’m totally delighted. And in smartphones, too. Now if we can just get some serious desktop OS competition going…
64? Even my Amiga 1200 has more memory that man!
Why are you doing this to yourself?* And how did you even end up with such machine now? (my Pentium II 266, that I keep around, has 4 times that much RAM – in all offering fairly comfortable overall experience, browsing close to “modern” with Opera 9.27 …admittedly, partly because it’s a dual CPU machine)
It’s fairly easy to find something much better at ~dumpsters. Or (checking my local auction site, post-leasing machines) nice and slick IBM P4 HT 3 GHz, 1 GB of RAM, 80 GB HDD, for an equivalent of ~60 USD.
* Now, sometimes I used that PII 266 as the main machine, for a short time, just to get used to it – and afterwards really experience the speed of modern PC, just for kicks. But other than that…