A new report from StatCounter says Chrome’s popularity now edges out Firefox. It says Chrome has a 25.69% share of the global browser market while Firefox claims 25.23%. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is still #1 with a 40.63% share. If true, Google has pulled off quite a feat with a browser they only introduced in late 2008. StatCounter claims to measure browser use rather than just downloads.
I used Chrome for more than two years, but somehow it got too bloated.
The competion with Chrome was really healthy for Firefox. It now runs as well as Chrome on my small netbook and it uses _LESS_ RAM (my usage). On a 1GB machine that is very important. You notice right away when you run out of RAM.
One feature Chrome was never good at is video ad blocking. I watch a lot video on sites that have an ad before every 1min video. That was highly annoying and now that FF works as well as Chrome I use FF. FF8 has not yet crashed for me once.
And besides I like the thought that my usage of FF supports a non profit instead of a rich US company.
I think this is because Firefox loads all site information in one process and Chrome uses separate processes as a security sandbox.
The Firefox developers also would like to do this, but I think legacy Firefox extensions is keeping them from implementing it quickly.
Firefox mobile already uses the separate processes I believe (no legacy extensions).
The Firefox and Chrome developers created a new extension model, at the time when the Chrome developers wanted to add extension to their browser.
These newer extensions don’t need to be compiled, they are mostly HTML(like) and JavaScript. The older Firefox extensions model was inherited from the old Mozilla Application Suite I believe and is build around native code.
That is why some Firefox extensions depend so much on the Firefox version and might have problems when upgraded (usually there is no problem, just caution by developers).
It also is the reason why with installing newer Firefox extensions you don’t need to restart Firefox. There is no native code.
You will be surprised of what the backing of a rich US company can do in the minds of some quite dumb and incompetent IT managers out there, who still insists in crafting IE only webapps for their companies and sometimes, their very governments…
So, although i really like Mozilla, its Google the only one that can really put a end to a near eradicated virus in the broad public internet who still thrives inside thousands of intranets out there: the insistence to ignore standards based on the assumption that everyone inside the company uses Windows and IE, and will do it forever.
Believe in me when i say that a good chunk of these “40%” that IE still has are people browsing from their PCs at work, in particular, IE6.
Yeah… I have a friend working at a large multinational corporation (one of the biggest supermarket chains in Europe). Very recently they’ve made the switch from IE6. Tens of thousands of PCs. They’ve made all this effort, spent all the money to switch to… wait for it… wait a bit longer… Internet Explorer, version 7!
A very welcome improvement!
I remember how the use of tabs changed the way I browsed the web, and justified the switch to Opera, some… 10 years ago! 🙂
This is so uninformed.
Many of these Web-Application were written when the only other browser was NetScape. IE6 actually had better standards compliance than IE6 at the time.
When you are writing an internal application, normally the only browser that is guaranteed to be on the users computers is IE as this is the only stable target.
Unfortunately these sort of comments really just show that most people on this site don’t know what they are talking about.
No it wasn’t… because now all Mozilla tries to do is replicate Chrome, piece by piece, from its stupid interface quirks to its ridiculous major version jumps. The choice is now basically Chrome Ripoff with proper Adblock Plus and NoScript or Official Chrome without these (IMO) major extensions (among others).
Yeah its no surprise that people are jumping off the firefox ship with this stupid update policy and interface copying. I already left and wont be going back.
I never understood why people got so dramatic about the fast release cycle. I’m really glad that my favorite browser is always up to date with the newest features. If Mozilla had waited another one or two years to roll Firefox 5, they would had been hopelessly irrelevant by that time. Some people complained about extension compatibility, but in my experience these situations are quite rare and in 5 minutes I’m usually able to find a suitable substitute. Not to mention that even with half of my extensions disabled, Firefox is still more useful than any other browser.
As for interface copying, the trend is to go minimal, because the browser is becoming a platform rather than a document viewer, so controls have to stay out of the way and be as low profile as possible. It’s true that Google started the trend, but IMO it’s a good trend and worth following (the same way tabs and the search bar were in their time).
Agreed, also Firefox gives you the choice to go back to the old interface (menubar and tabs down) so I don’t see the problem. You can disable animations on tabs, it comes with RSS support, a good integration with GTK+ (at least looks ok). I still don’t understand why Chrome is so popular…
It’s a good product, it brings something new to the table and Google poured enough money into it until it got the ball rolling.
The update policy is making somewhat better end user impression at cost of a huge pain for web and extensiondevelopers. I have already seen usefull ext. abandoned because of that.
Mind that every new firefox version is slightly backwards incompatible.
This seriously cripples firefox validity in prof/enterprise. environments where dedicated web apps release cycle is seriously misaligned with the one of firefox, not mentioning that validation testing effort after each version fairly outweighs the benefits. This unfortunately leaves IE as the only sane choice … again.
By trailing chrome FF devs are cutting the branch they are sitting on in the enterprise. The only hope is the new generation of fronted devs, raised with respect to standards.
Speaking about enterprise, Mozilla still continues to support Firefox 3.6 and will soon set the 10th version as the base for enterprises.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Enterprise/Firefox/ExtendedSupport:Proposal
Wasn’t it always getting updated with the newest features? Sure, a tiny feature or two that you may have otherwise had to wait a little for might make it just a bit sooner now, but whoop-de-do. It’s more version number inflation for marketing purposes more than anything.
Really? All Firefox 4.1…, er, I mean Firefox 5, added or changed in the user interface was the location of the “Do Not Track” option. Other than that, it was mostly a security update with a few improvements to the HTML and JavaScript engine with better standards support… you know, the kind of stuff that has defined pretty much EVERY new Firefox version in the past. But I guess the premature extension breakage caused by the quick and unexpected version jump somehow made it worth it to you.
It may be getteing rarer than it was in the early speed-up transition releases (ie. Firefox 4 to 5) but I wouldn’t really call it rare. And if you find an extension that you like, trust to work just right, stable and everything, you shouldn’t have to deal with breakage thanks to Mozilla’s greedy marketing ideas.
who cares? All version numbers do is tell you that the version you have now is different from the previous version and allow tracking of features.
You can tell more from version numbers than that. Just not those chosen by the Mozilla team. You know… major GUI or rewriting would probably call for a whole version jump (1.x to 2.x), a few new features might make the second number go up (1.0 to 1.1 or 1.5, depending on the amount of new stuff), and a simple security update might just bump (or add) the third number (1.0.1 to 1.0.2). Come to think of it… that kind of reeks the old Firefox model, eh? Yep, Mozilla at one time made sense with this version numbering. Now it’s meaningless marketing-driven bullshit.
Edited 2011-12-04 12:28 UTC
Again… that is the numbering scheme you want…. but a numbering scheme is simply to allow the developer to identify the set of features and enhancements that exist for a particular build of the software.
So you’re saying that a version number should be unknown outside of the developers of an application? Like Mozilla wants? I would have to completely disagree with you; how would you know if you have version X that contains more recent feature Y, or even newer feature Z?
And don’t say always keep 100% up-to-date; not all Linux distributions, for example, always have the most recent version of programs in their repositories (in fact: most of them don’t). Even then, there shouldn’t be any kind of race to update programs 5 times a damn week, like Google and Mozilla seem to want to do. Updates can also cause breakages occasionally (sure, maybe rare, but it can happen). And, come on, seriously–people have other, more important things to do than constantly maintain their Web browser.
I’m curious… you left for Chrome, that has the same update policy and interface?
The difference being that in Chrome updates are truly transparent to the user and extensions won’t break.
That’s because Chrome doesn’t have much to break. It can’t compare to Firefox in the number of available addons.
Fair enough, maybe that’s true… but maybe that’s also the reason why the rapid upgrade schedule is appropriate for Chrome but doesn’t work well for Firefox.
No. I left for Lunascape on Windows, and Midori on Linux.
Yeah, that is strange.
I have ad block, flash block and java script blocking on my Chrome…. maybe you should try looking before you open your mouth.
Let me repeat what I said, this time emphasizing the part you apparently did not get.
“The choice is now basically Chrome Ripoff with proper Adblock Plus and NoScript or Official Chrome without these (IMO) major extensions (among others).”
Notice I did not say a word about being unable to get some rough (translation: inferior) equivalent of Adblock Plus and NoScript on Chrome. Maybe you should read and comprehend before you open your mouth.
I’ll just say that NotScripts is sure as hell not NoScript (not even worth using), and the Chrome add-on called “Adblock” is nothing like the real deal on Firefox. Last I checked… it doesn’t even “block” ads; it just hides them from you. Your browser still happily downloads. The “official” Adblock Plus for Chrome? Well… that’s still in beta last I checked, and I bet it’ll be good, but because I don’t use Chrome I don’t know how it is. It needs to be released first, though…
Edited 2011-12-04 12:41 UTC
Hey, instead of being so rude, you could do some research: The reason why Adblock is less powerful on Chrome than on FF is the lack of functionality in Chrome’s extension API.
However, there is work being done and you can enable the experimental extension API under “about:flags” and install the development version of ABP. And, voila, you get the same powerful ABP like yiu get on FF.
PS: The fact that Chrome _is_ surpassing FF in market share should maybe make you wonder whether Chrome actually doesn’t deliver a better web experience for _most_ users than FF. Think about it
.
_IF_ Chrome is surpassing FF in market share. Drumhellar pointed to another set of web counter statistics and they show different results.
By that logic IE must deliver the best web experience _most_ users.
Sure, it naturally depends on the source. However, there is still the trend that Chrome is gaining more market share at Firefox’s cost. I think noone will disagree that Chrome is gaining market share with a large pace.
I agree. But since IE is pre-installed on all Windows machines (which form the largest market share among operating systems), there is a different situation to be faced.
Also, the Internet Explorer still has some advantages when deploying browsers in a corporate environment due to its tight integration into Windows (management with Active Desktop policies and so on). So, with IE, there is quite a large user base where people are more or less forced to using it. If you were able differentiate the cases where people are actually using IE as their preferred browser and not because they have to use it, the market share would be much smaller.
All in all, Chrome is undeniably the browser with the strongest growth. Sure, you have a strong growth when your market share was previously rather small. But if you consider Opera in that respect, you still see that Chrome seems to convince users with its qualities.
Adrian
Edited 2011-12-05 20:10 UTC
Actually it’s mainly at IE’s cost.
No, but that is often the case with what is the ‘newest and shiniest’, it was the same for Firefox and then it plateued. We’ll have to see if Chrome will do the same or if it will continue to eat into IE’s and Firefox’s market share. Either way it will eventually plateu aswell, question is what market share it has at that point.
I’ve never had a problem with FF and only 1Gb of ram, on my ancient P4 Northwood 2Ghz running FF8 on Ubuntu Studio I’ve got 118 tabs open across 3 windows with no appreciable lag in the responsiveness, but then again I don’t have Flash installed and have Adblock Plus, Grease Monkey, Stylish, BeefTACO, Ghostery, HTTPS Everywhere, Flash Video Replacer, Optimize Google, MAFIAA Fire, Right To Click, Redirect Remover, Skip Screen, Colorful Tabs, Bug Me Not, and Status 4 Ever.
So web crap is pretty well filtered out and I get allot of extra utility with none of the overhead and instability of Flash. Surprisingly, low res Youtube WebM video plays nicely, you can find WebM videos more reliably if you use marinos35’s WebM only search plugin.
http://mycroft.mozdev.org/search-engines.html?name=Youtube+WebM
No it doesn’t crash but it has some odd bugs, Firefox now aggressively caches certain pages (including forms), yesterday for example I was logging into phpMyAdmin and I typed the user name in wrong … even though corrected it, it would kept sending the incorrect username .. I verified this using Fiddler … this is unacceptable.
Also Firefox will hang when loading a page for no apparent reason, pressing F5 again the page will load instantly (including fast sites like Google).
Chrome is simply the best browser out there at the moment. Less than 1GB tbh is an edge case that IMO isn’t relevant anymore.
Firefox after 3.5 is a disaster. Many of my colleges at work (web development company), have dropped Firefox as their main browser, with most of the good extensions now in the Chrome store … there isn’t any compelling reasons not to use Chrome.
Google funds Firefox’s development.
Google don’t care whether you are using Chrome or Firefox, as long as you don’t use IE, because IE typically doesn’t support all the newer web standards, which costs Google in terms of development time (why they are only supporting N-2 version of each web browser). So indirectly you are helping out a large US company.
Edited 2011-12-03 18:44 UTC
This is completely wrong, but not the first time I’ve seen this myth being propagated.
The truth is that Google and Mozilla Corp. have a revenue sharing program around search. This is a contract between two commercial entities, there is no “funding” here.
You are splitting hairs, either way Mozilla gets cash from Google for using it as the default search engine.
Edited 2011-12-04 00:22 UTC
Well, it is not like Google is giving Mozilla money. The money is related to search. If nobody uses Firefox anymore Mozilla will not get any money PERIOD
So if you use Chrome instead of FF you take away money from non-profit Mozilla (although they have a corp to handle it all) and save the money for Google.
And I don’t give a flying fuck that less than 1 GB is edge case. There might not be a lot of geeks with less, but there are so many computers on this planet with less they might not be Google marketing target but they want to use the web too and Firefox is currently the much better choice for them. Trust me, I know. Chrome might be more secure and all but opening a lot of tabs it sure as hell uses a whole lot more memory.
Simple solution. Don’t open as many tabs.
Having like more than 20 tabs wasn’t the intended use of tabs in the first place.
If you have that many open you can’t be possibly reading them all, if you need to read it later there is already two mechanisms in place to help you … History and Bookmarks.
LOL. Sorry, but that is just stupid.
The way I use the web does not work that way. I search for something or look at RSS feeds, open things I want to read in background tabs and then look at them one by one and close the ones that I don’t need or have read. So I have usually have just a few tabs open but when I search for something it may be 20 more for a short time.
That is by far the fastest and most convenient way to do it and I am not going to change that just because Chrome gobbles up so much memory for each tab. Adding and removing bookmarks etc just to work around that is so stupid it really made my day 🙂
No it isn’t.
Wait a sec, you were arguing about people with lower spec machines, not yourself … stop changing the goal posts.
It has always been the case that if you have less system memory you can do less … If you have a 10 year old machine (AMD Athlon XP/Pentium 4) you seriously can’t expect one way or the other to have good performance whatever web browser you happen to be using.
Seriously most machines can be easily upgraded to 4GB of ram inexpensively that have been produced in the last 5 years.
Chrome has less bugs, it is simply faster than everything else out there, less intrusive update system and you are complaining it takes up more memory… nobody else seems to care, the statistics speak for themselves.
Edited 2011-12-04 14:07 UTC
Yadda yadda, Firefox lets me work the way I want to and Chrome does not PERIOD
considering an 8 GB kit is around 60 bucks… Memory is quickly approaching a marginal expense.
Where was this established?
Last time I ran Chrome on windows it installed a system service to check for updates, I’d say that’s quite intrusive.
Chrome is a good browser and it’s certainly fast. It’s also memory hungry and lack alot of the flexibility which Firefox provides with it’s plethora of addons/extensions.
We can all appreciate and prefer whichever one we want based on how their strengths map to our needs, but there’s no need to come across as a greasy salesman like you do.
Chrome has been around for three years now and it has maybe surpassed Firefox by less than a percent, most of which has been from IE. You can start masturbating to the Chrome logo once it has surpassed IE, because if that happens it will certainly have become the dominant browser.
Have you used Firefox lately? There are some quite irritating bugs … BTW my primary browser is Firefox, it is marginally better for web development.
less intrusive to the user FFS.
Chrome Store?
Firefox has been a car crash since 3.5 (not 3.6). Most web devs in my office (I work with 10) use Chrome. I am still one of the few using FF.
FUCK OFF
Yes I use it every day as it is the only browser I have installed at the moment. What are these irritating bugs? Are they related to addons (in which case Firefox can hardly be blamed) or the actual browser?
According to you, that’s an opinion not fact. And you don’t even back it up with anything tangible, you just throw out one bullshit statement after another.
Yes you got that ‘sleazy salesman’ down pat.
Chrome feels more bloated to you than FireFox? Are you kidding me?
IE8 is now (almost) NOT the most used browser-version in the world.
So hopefully webdevelopers won’t have to work around issues with older IE versions as much anymore on the long run.
There isn’t any issues with IE8 when it comes to development.
Standards that nobody uses such as SVG (I still haven’t seen one commercial website that uses it … Wikipedia doesn’t count).
Yes you can’t use all the goodness of CSS 3.0, but HTML 5 isn’t a problem. One tiny snippet of JS in the head.
When Chrome was first coming out I read several articles questioning Google’s privacy policies. It’s pretty clear their business model is based on gathering information about you. I’m grateful to have a free open source alternative in Firefox just because I trust the Mozilla Foundation more than Google or Microsoft.
Chrome is really, really fast. No matter what Mozilla and Microsoft say, there is really no discussion here. Maybe in some corner cases other browsers may eek out a victory, but in what matters, and that’s everyday use, Chrome is an absolute joy to use.
Still, I don’t use it. As a webdeveloper and power user, Firefox’s extensibility is simply astounding. There is an add-on for everything and even if Chrome has an equivalent add-on the Firefox one is almost always better.
What I think this means in the long run (if Mozilla doesn’t do anything about interface speed and responsiveness) is that Chrome will gain more and more non-power users (the majority of users) and Firefox will become some kind of niche geek browser.
I think Mozilla should stop everything they’re doing and put all their resources in separating each tab into a distinct process. I don’t know how hard it would be (probably very), but from what more knowledgeable people on the matter say, this would solve all their speed problems.
Also, it’s a pity that Chrome ate mostly Firefox’s market share instead of IE’s.
The Electrolysis project was suspended:
http://lawrencemandel.com/2011/11/15/update-on-multi-process-firefo…
Apparently it’s too hard … :rolleyes:
There is a misconception here: Having content in its own process(es) is not a silver bullet against interface lag. In fact, independent of where content lives a lot of stuff will have to be done in the single browser process (e.g history access, I/O, etc.). That’s where Firefox has some glaring issues currently like doing a lot of synchronous disk I/O stuff which leads to noticeable lag or badly performing SQL queries to their Places database (where history, bookmarks and favicons live).
This work would have to be done anyway independently of Electrolysis to improve the user experience and Mozilla thinks they will get better short and mid term results by pooling their resources into these areas. We’ll have to see how this plays out but the issues they are trying to solve are orthogonal to Electrolysis and not a replacement.
Electrolysis helps with other things: Content-induced load, security and better resources tracking (although Firefox does already a good job via about:memory).
You can also bring down Chrome easily to its knees, for instance, when restoring large sessions (>20 tabs). At least for me the interface becomes very unresponsive until all tabs are loaded.
Actually the mobile version of Firefox already ships with process-seperation (there is no such thing as tab-seperation, not even in Chrome or IE).
It is all the other things that do not need to be supported in Firefox mobile which depend on how Firefox currently works.
Like the old extension model.
They are currently working on other parts which actually can be delivered in a short(er) time without having to talk to all these other people and to prevent them from doing a lot of work.
I don’t understand the difference. Could you explain please?
Process seperation seperates content based on website/domain-name, tab-seperation would seperate by tab. But this would create a lot more unneeded processes and inter-process communication.
Example: 2 tabs with different pages on the same website is: 1 process
So to sum it up … what does Chrome have on the desktop version of Firefox?
That depends on what your everyday use entails.
The way I prefer to browse I tend to keep a lot of pages open. For example, opening everything that’s interesting on my daily news sites and forums, and keeping multiple pages open for reference or later reading. Even Internet Explorer can cope with that kind of usage far better than Chrome can.
I’d agree that Chrome is great for people who only keep a few sites open (I’ve recommended it to my parents who generally just email and shop on Amazon), but Chrome’s resource usage quickly gets out of control if you browse heavily.
I find browsing with Chrome an utterly miserable and frustrating experience on something like a Netbook. Even on a mid range system with 4Gb RAM it quickly bogs down, slows to a painful crawl, and eventually becomes completely unresponsive if I use it like I would another browser.
Of course Chrome’s limited and restrictive user interface discourages that kind of use by making it difficult to manage a large number of tabs.
Like the US .. oh, and every child should have 3 nucular missils!
Knew this day would come. A bad sign.
Sure, you can overtake Firefox if you forcibly install your browser and advertise it on one of the most used homepages in the world.
What, is someone surprised that Google’s scummy tactics worked?
^This^
No way I’m trusting Google, I already do everything I can to avoid them. They may be the lesser of the 3 big evils, but they are still evil enough to be avoided like the plague.
Exactly how are you forced to install it?
Update Flash, it tries to install Chrome.
Huh?
How is it scummy to advertise?
What most stories covering this data don’t mention is that, while Chrome is now beating Firefox by about half a percent, IE has lost 16% of the market share in the two year period (Firefox has lost about 7%).
IE was at 56.57% in November 2009 and is 40.63% now.
Firefox was at 32.21% in November 2009 and is 25.23% now.
Chrome was at 4.66% in November 2009 and is at 25.69% now.
Chrome is taking IE’s market share far more than it is taking Firefox’s.
Ars Technica uses Net Market Share’s stats when they do their monthly report on browser usage, and they still paint Firefox as 4 1/2 points above Chrome in usage.
http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/12/internet-explorer-stop…
Which means, it’s too close to call!
I think the competition is really very healthy. Chrome’s entry has kept both Mozilla and Microsoft on their toes. Firefox wouldn’t be improving anywhere near as quickly without Chrome pushing it.
I still prefer Firefox for my usage, but I appreciate what Google’s doing with Chrome. Hopefully all 3 vendors (and Opera and Apple) stay competitive and keep pushing each other.
The fact IE won last browser war put us 5 years behind on improving the web experience.
Google has been advertising Chrome everywhere, including print and electronic media. On this side of the planet, for example, you can see Chrome TV commercials every two hours or so and a huge block of Google Chrome newspaper ads every weekend. Google really is using its marketing muscle to expose Chrome to the masses.
Firefox, on the other hand, relies on words of mouth for exposure. Couple that with various ‘laggards’ that have haunted several last builds, Firefox becomes less attractive. Case in point: when a cousin of mine fired up his first Chrome installation (version 14, IIRC), he was immediately impressed by its 2 seconds cold start speed compared with Firefox 6’s 7 seconds (with clean profile). Firefox 7 and 8 didn’t give improvement in this department. He has then started to spread Chrome to other people.
On another note, CHMFox is what keeps me in Firefox. I can tweak any component of a CHM document with Stylish in Firefox — body font type, size, alignment and color, just to name a few. I know there are a number of free standalone viewers out there that can also decompile CHM files, but still, having the ability to just drag-and-drop a CHM file onto a web browser and customize it with a few lines of CSS makes my life easier. Duh! I wish people would stop writing documentations in that dreaded Microsoft file format.
My blog has about 20% visitors using Chrome and 54-57% using FF. Of about 20,000 visitors per month, on average. And recently, over the last 6 weeks, Chrome has come down a few % and FF is up. So my experience is to the contrary. Chrome still crashes a lot and I would NEVER use it as my main browser, only when I need to fire up quickly. You know what they say about lies and statistics.
and your experience is a proper sample of the web….
You might find this useful: http://tinyurl.com/26yvos5
Edited 2011-12-04 22:24 UTC
Chrome is ok, I prefer Opera myself, and FF is in second with Chrome as a close third.
My opinion: despite all its drawbacks, the sandboxing of each tab (and the browser process itself) automatically makes Chrome the best browser around, period.
Until every other browser around starts doing this, there is simply no way I’ll use anything else.