Even more interesting (if you project out further) is that by this time next year, Chrome will have eclipsed IE to become the #1 browser in terms of market share. But only if you continue to project on the exact paths that each of the three are taking, which doesn't account for saturation or mindshare caps whatsoever. Still, it's satisfying to imagine IE being overthrown in a year from now.
I can't imagine that happening. It seems to me most people are locked in to IE largely out of indifference or workplace constraints.
If anything, IE has vastly improved as a browser over the last few years. If IE was ever going to be dethroned, my money would have been on the mid 2000s when IE6/IE7 were noticeably inferior to Firefox.
That being said, I'd much rather be proved wrong. :)
Two forces that may play against this: there are a growing number of people browsing from non-Windows devices (OSX, iOS, Android) on which there is no IE option, and for businesses that choose to save money by using Google Apps, it's probably preferable to put their users on Chrome to ensure the best possible compatibility and performance. Yes, IE has tremendous inertia in its favor, but most of the trends seem to be washing the other way.
I think you're right about the growing number of non-desktop browsers forcing IE getting on board, but I've always felt the "web apps" angle was overplayed. I've never worked for a company that migrated to web apps, nor am I personally familiar with anyone who has. I read about them sometimes, but really, what company that employs 500 people is using web apps over enterprise solutions?
Hanging hopes on web apps seems a like a startup echo chamber. Sure, the potential is there for lots of things, especially in the collaboration space, but Google Apps is a Mount Everest away from usurping MS Office.
There are in fact a lot of large organizations in the for-profit, government and education space that have moved over to using web apps at this point. Microsoft Office isn't about to disappear, but it's fairly established now that an organization can exist without buying Office licenses for their employees, especially if they don't have heavy dependencies on Excel.
There are some pretty big organisations that use Google Apps. For example, BSkyB use gmail for customer email accounts, and the University of Cambridge and the University of Sheffield both use Google Apps to some degree for staff/students.
There's a local tech college that uses it for email as well. But that does very little to shake IE's hold in the enterprise. Providing customer or student email is one thing, migrating your staffs away from an MS Office workflow (especially for academics, who's job is publishing), is something wholly different.
I'm not saying that businesses don't use web apps, but counting on web apps to shake IE's dominance in enterprise, at least in the short term, is wishful thinking.
Unfortunately, what I foresee happening is home user market saturation reaching 100%, but Chrome never taking a majority thanks to business types (you know, the people still on IE6.) Too much reliance on ActiveX and AD and being able to lock down the homepage and other things that get corporate IT control freaks all hot and bothered.
It's a "security" thing. Big companies pay Microsoft money in order to have a "secure IT infrastructure" that "regulators" will like. Microsoft's lawyers wrote some words that appeal to those folks. Google's stuff is free, and so Chrome doesn't come with any guarantee that it won't single-handedly take out the company's entire technology infrastructure.
Obviously this is very far removed from reality (you can read Chromium's source code and audit yourself. IE? Nope.), but these people aren't operating in the real world. IE is the best browser for the imaginary world that the "decision makers" live in.
(On my work machine, running chrome.exe causes an alert to be triggered and execution is denied. Of course, renaming it to not_chrome.exe allows it to work fine. Secure!)
Hmm, an externally-audited "certified" version of chrome may be an interesting product to sell. Web browsers are a primary source of risk exposure (next to e-mail) for corporations. Slap on a few logos, auditors, and clip art of happy people in suits, and you have yourself some corporate confidence.
I do think the "no one ever got fired for picking Microsoft" is part of it, but it's also a very well developed eco-system for a mid-sized shop that don't have the man power or expertise. With MS you have tools like group policy and tons of vendors do tie ins with Active Directory to make offering single sign in services (VPN, email, extranet, etc) very easy.
People are down on MS because they feel that it's just the "easy" decision, but they also have a mature and well developed product that works pretty well for a midsized business with a small IT staff.
Chrome supports SSO with NTLM/Negotiate.
On Windows it will even automatically turn on SSO for sites in your Local Intranet security zone, which is much smoother than the Firefox about:config, network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris method.
