Google appears to be spending quite a bit to increase Chrome's market share - not just through advertising, but also through aggressive bundling deals. For example, Skype's installer also installs Chrome and selects its as the default browser—if the current default browser is IE. There's a choice to opt out, but the installer's standard action is to install and select Chrome.
I assume the Skype installer deal will change once Microsoft finishes acquiring Skype, but Chrome is also bundled in the installers for other popular software like Avast Antivirus and (I think) Adobe Shockwave.
I can see two benefits of increasing Chrome market share for Google, that justify these expenses:
1) It speeds up the web. Since every second internet user makes Google money, making the web a great place for both consumers (speed, security) and developers (standards, up-to-date browsers) is very much in Google's interest.
2) It makes Google the default search engine. Instead of being at the mercy of browser developers and having to pay them huge sums of money, they can directly make lots of people use their search engine (and look at their ads).
I personally believe the second point is what actually finances the Chrome team. Like android, Chrome is but "moat" for Google, protecting their main source of revenue: Search. Shaking up the industry for the better is just a nice side effect.
I've always thought it was a clever move by Google.
1. You can't accuse Chrome of being a trojan horse for their search engine.
2. It makes Microsoft look bad when they default to Bing.
3. When asked, people almost always pick Google anyway.
4. Google now have (another) way of quantifying #3.
Re: #4, I would imagine the percentage of Google Chrome users who would pick Google over an alternative would be a bit higher than the percentage for internet users overall.
Agreed, but I'm sure the trend data would be useful for quantifying how their brand is tracking (not to mention how their competitors are tracking).
Plus I'm sure they can separate statistics based on whether they installed it directly, or whether it was installed as part of Skype, or whatever. The skype-installed user base would be somewhat closer to typical users.
I seem to recall for a while (pre-Chrome) Google used to pay people a dollar if they got you to install Firefox with the Google Toolbar[1]. So I'm guessing having 20% of web surfers using Chrome is worth quite a lot to them.
It's actually somewhat ironic, since chrome wasn't ever specifically intended to take over the browser market. It was intended to shake up browser development and get everyone building better, faster browsers that supported the lattest standards. I think it's fair to say they've succeeded tremendously. When chrome was launched web devs were looking at a landscape where maybe if they were lucky they could start thinking about html5 and css3 in another decade or so. Now things couldn't be more different, people are deprecating ie6 support left and right and lauching a business that uses bleeding edge web standards is far from a death sentence.
If that's true, then their attitude of "we don't want to be the biggest player, we just want to change the game" seems to be a habit for them, as they've said the same thing with regards to their ISP service.
I think Chrome and Firefox, together, have really pulled the web out of the dredges and put it on a path of more frequent updates and a more diverse market. Kudos to the Chrome dev team and all the people who contribute to Chromium.
I'd save my biggest thanks to the guys who turned the cute little KHTML library into a seriously modern and scalable engine. Not only do their combined efforts power a full quarter of the desktop market, but probably something like 95% of the modern smartphone market.
Anyone who's ever had to develop for the shitty custom browsers written by LG, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Nokia, Siemens (etc etc etc) knows what I mean.
Nokia is often cited as a big contributor because they bought TrollTech. Much of Nokia's own work on WebKit for the S60 never got merged back into the mainline.
Similarly, RIM's contributions were actually Torch Mobile, who they acquired less than two years ago. Torch employed several long-time KHTML and WebKit contributors.
Google are (I believe) the biggest single contributor today, but their contributions aren't yet substantial overall.
Apple's contributions included extensive work on standards compliance, web compatibility, performance, security, robustness, testing infrastructure and butt loads of major features. You know, the important bits.
Not this again, we were just over this a few days ago [1]. And even if I granted that Apple was solely responsible for WebKit (which is beyond absurd)... what is your point?
Apple has a WebKit browser. They ship it. They shove it down your throat if you're an iTunes user... and yet it has pathetic share. It had a huge head start on Chrome and it's bundled with the OS on laptops that have exploded in the last few years. Yet Chrome beats it.
Chrome iterates faster. Chrome has forced others to up their anty. Chrome has a better auto-update model and a better, richer extension model and ecosystem.
So if we're being thankful of browser vendors for really pushing the web forward, even if we pretended that WebKit was all Apple's... it still doesn't make sense to be so snooty about thanking Apple.
"even if I granted that Apple was solely responsible for WebKit"
Straw man. Nobody said that. Nobody implied that.
"So if we're being thankful of browser vendors"
I wasn't been thankful of browser vendors. If I was, I'd be thankful to Google for Chrome. In fact I'm being thankful for WebKit which freed the world from a long tail of shitty in-house mobile browsers.
I don't want to be misconstrued as an Apple fanboy, but surely credit should be due when it's due. Apple (through David Hyatt and others) took a ghettoized library and turned it into a cross-platform, cross-ecosystem, cross-device library so good that companies like Google and Nokia can't help but contribute massively.
No question Chrome is the superior implementation of WebKit on the desktop. Chrome iterates faster, but it's iteration on the back of giants.
Similarly the KHTML team deserves recognition, but even they will admit their plans didn't go beyond the KDE ecosystem.
I'd start with thanking Mozilla, since if they didn't create the potential for a vendor-neutral web then Safari and the iPhone's compatability issues (which were already substantial, since they actually followed standards) would have been insurmountable and the hegemony of IE6 would have continued to this day (and incidentally prevented Apple's resurgence which was partly built on iPods, but partly built on having a semi-compatible version of IE and Office, then Safari after IE got killed.)
> It's actually somewhat ironic, since chrome wasn't ever specifically intended to take over the browser market
I remember that was the early line about Chrome, and I believed it then. I no longer believe it; Google is spending waaay too much money advertising Chrome for it to be true. I recently came back from Europe to Melbourne, Australia to discover the central train station with every available advertising space plastered with giant ads for Chrome. And I'm being quite literal about that - Google clearly went and bought out every spot in an entire section of the station.
I don't quite understand Google's full motives for Chrome but I now believe it matters very much to them that it gains substantial market share. Chrome is technically excellent and my browser of choice on any platform it is available on. But that is only half the reason it is succeeding.
To be fair, they probably pay another firm that actually owns the ad space and which throws all the ads up. Google likely isn't directly deciding to market Chrome like that.
I'm not sure if the one-space-full-of-ads is a strategy, or just laziness by the space owner. I've only seen it once for a local news station on the L in Chicago, and it seemed weird since no other car even mentioned the news agency. Made me think communication was warped somewhere along the line.
I can't speak to Google's actual motivations for developing Chrome, but I think it is safe to say that taking over the browser market is more than a nice side affect. Let's not forget that Google makes their money by targeting Ads, therefore there's a lot of money to be made by knowing _all_ of your browsing habits.
This is a good sign for us Chrome developers. I've been seeing increased purchases of my app recent even to be quite frank, it's pretty rough around the edges. When the Web Store was released to the stable branch I saw a huge spike in page views and then it quickly trailed off. My page views haven't gone up but purchases have; I'm guessing it's new users.
I'm hopefully that the Chromebooks will be successful because my particular app is designed for Chrome OS (it uses the "panel" mode which launches the app in a little window in the bottom of the screen. In desktop Chrome it launches as a new window which isn't as good of an experience). This news is still good; shows that even if Chromebooks are not successful Chrome proper is.
Remember: results vary greatly for individual websites. So if your livelihood depends on web presence, monitor your own statistics and make sure there is a good user experience on all the browsers that matter to you.
I upgraded to IE9 to test a web app I'm working on, with the usual "1st IE test" dread. Surprised and super pleased by how well it worked. Way less awful than previous IE versions, in my limited testing. Even looks better - less cluttered ui. If chrome, ff and ie9 had a 3 way tie, I'd be perfectly fine with that..
After briefly using IE9 after using Firefox and Chrome for ages, I felt exactly the same way. Not only was IE9 substantially better than IE7 and IE8, but some of the UI decisions seem better than Firefox. If its support for HTML5 and CSS3 have improved by a similar amount (I honestly have no idea), then we finally have three relatively comparable browsers.
As a web developer (and Firefox user), I believe that IE9 is miles better that any previous version of IE but I still think Microsoft have a lot of catching up to do. Hopefully IE10 will lessen the gap even more.
I feel that if IE wasn't so terrible it would still occupy the top spot. All other things being equal, IE is still distributed as the default browser to more systems than any other browser. The issue is that users have many reasons to switch. If Microsoft can rebuild IE's reputation and make it into an honestly good browser, it will keep the top spot.
It's only because Microsoft got lazy with IE that it has fallen so far, and the power of integration with the rest of the Microsoft suite is demonstrated by the share it still has.
The numbers are already out of date. Google just upgraded 160 million people to Chrome 12. Firefox will hopefully upgrade 200 million people to Firefox 5 this week. I've watch the numbers for the past couple of weeks and IE9 has caught IE7.
The web could really get a bump if we just nudge the remaining legacy browser users to upgrade. Why anyone would run IE6 or IE7 is beyond me.
People still use Windows XP, and people still use old ActiveX software that was developed when IE6 ruled and Microsoft was still pursuing dominance through lock-in.
The real question is why Microsoft hasn't developed a way to install newer versions of IE on the older OS'. There must be a way to isolate the browser from the rest of the system, even if they have to wrap a VM around it.
An equally likely situation is that users are migrating from IE to both Chrome and Firefox. Now there are also users migrating from Firefox to Chrome. Thus Firefox has remained stable, while Chrome has had immense growth.
It's also true that users have moved to Firefox from Chrome, being that for example depending on the metric Firefox is faster, but mostly the same speed. QEMU in javascript is a good example of a real world example where Firefox's javascript engine doubled Chrome's speed or thereabouts.
I would bet that most of that ie6 and ie7 share is business computers. It's the IT department that decides when to upgrade those browsers and not the users. In home computers ie might not be the dominant browser anymore!
I wonder if chrome was counted twice? The fact that some are still running 11 and other were running 12 makes me think that maybe users were in the middle of that switch? I'd put their numbers around 12% then.
Whatever it is, I think it good. My app is biased to chrome because that's what I use. I keep seeing more and more people on chrome at my browser research lab (snooping on people's laptop at starbucks ;p)
They way they count that can't happen (or rather it always happens for all browsers, since they count browser usage, not unique users) so it's definately 20%, at least by the count of this source:
First of all, Chrome's advertising campaign is immense. Chrome ads are plastered all over the web, including crucial places like google.com. Chrome is spending more on advertising than other browsers have available altogether.
Second, Chrome is a good product. Google has invested enormous resources into it, the kind that only an industry giant like Google, Apple and Microsoft can do, and the results are exactly as you would expect - good.
Third, we are also starting to see some special integration between Google web properties and Chrome, optimizations that appear only in that combination of browser+website. (Even if these are not proprietary protocols and so forth, Google still has an incredible advantage in the direct connection between the teams.) Leveraging Google's websites like that is a special advantage of Google that other browser makers do not have.
In summary, for these three reasons, I don't think Chrome's market share is surprising at all. In fact I am surprised it isn't higher.
Those are good reasons, but the subtext of the parent post is how absolutely intractable IE's share has been for years, despite (once) poor performance and being appallingly behind the curve on new features (tabs, extensions, etc.). Google's own research showed that users didn't even understand the abstraction of a browser application - they were simply "ummm, on the internet".
Clearly, Google made headway on these issues, but I think you underestimate how profound consumers needed (and still need) to be educated that they even have a choice of web browsers and that choice impacts their daily web experience.
> First of all, Chrome's advertising campaign is immense. Chrome ads are plastered all over the web
They're even in meatspace. There have been Chrome ads in Paris's métro since early 2010, and they were still going strong last time I went there (a week ago), although they're only in a few places now (during the early part of the campaign, Chrome ads took over whole stations)
Yes, and no. Firefox is actually bigger than it used to be when Chrome launched. It was at around 20-24% back then. But yes, Chrome did steal market share from Firefox. I think by now it got most of the early adopters and devs from Firefox.
But in the same time they both kept eroding IE's market share, so overall Firefox grew by getting some IE users, and losing a few to Chrome, while Chrome grew from both IE and Firefox.
I think it's a pretty win-win situation for both, at least for now. Together they are big enough to standardize some features, even without Microsoft's support (like say WebM, WebGL, or Native Client). So, I think that's good.
On a side note, I think something like 40-50% of Techcrunch readers are using Chrome, and that's a pretty good indication to where Chrome is going, just like it used to be for Firefox, when it had only 10-15% overall marketshare, but around 25-30% on tech sites. And now has caught up to that.
TechCrunch isn't really a good indication of browser market share, the type of user is more likely to use Chrome (usually sticks with the defaults even if they use extensions).
Also I'm not sure early adopters is a good description, Firefox users are more likely to care about usability, security, privacy, extensions that aren't possible with Chrome or that Google considers not important or don't want it (something like NoScript or RefControl) and open source (which Chrome is not, sure Chromium is but the distinction is important because of real world implications and other reasons). These things do tend to be more important for some early adopters, I'm not sure I'd grant "technical proficiency" to mere "tech enthusiast".
But it does raise a question, since they count browser usage, and not unique users -- I fully expect that ppl who use Chrome/FF to spend a LOT more time on the web browsing more sites. If we count unique users do we see a sharp uptick in IE percentage?
I think browser usage is a better metric anyway. Why should I count as an IE user if I only open it once per month, or even once per week? How does that help them? Browser usage is much more important.
I think they're both very valid metrics -- but of different things. For example, I spend about 50x more time online than my parents do, and I think we need a metric to capture that. But we also need a metric that points out that people who open up their computer once a day for 20 minutes to check email, pay bills, and read the news -- may have very different browser characteristics.
Yeah -- the actual user count probably favors IE. Especially if you define "user" as having used the browser in the past week or something (I know I have, but not because I like IE). Also, it seems that Firefox would've grown a lot more over the past couple years if not for Chrome (I feel like Firefox got a lot of new users over the past couple years, but also lost a decent amount of existing users).
Actually, that doesn't appear to be the case. You can see some long term trends from StatsCounter[1]. From May 2009 to May 2011, Firefox's marketshare has been fairly stable, while IE's dropped ~18% and Chrome's rose ~17%.
hard to believe that in this day and age, browsers aren't standardized to the extent say cars or televisions are...then we would not have these problems.
I assume the Skype installer deal will change once Microsoft finishes acquiring Skype, but Chrome is also bundled in the installers for other popular software like Avast Antivirus and (I think) Adobe Shockwave.
Some details:
http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=67785482-1A64-67EA-E4A686A8...
https://blog.avast.com/2009/12/03/avast-and-google-chrome/
[Disclosure: I work for Mozilla. My comments are based on my opinions, not my employer's.]