Google Chrome Displaces Safari As Third In Survey 235
Azureflare writes "According to a Net Applications survey, Google Chrome has replaced Apple's Safari as the number-three browser. This may be partially explained by the release of the Chrome beta on Mac and Linux, but may also be due to users jumping ship from IE. More analysis on this topic can be found at ComputerWorld. As anecdotal evidence of Google Chrome usage gaining steam, Bank of America has apparently recently added Google Chrome to their list of officially supported browsers."
Chrome (Score:5, Informative)
Has passed? StatCounter shows [statcounter.com] they already passed in August 2008, far before Chrome beta for Mac or Linux was available. However Internet Explorer still seem to have majority of marketshare with 63% (interestingly the Net Applications site seems to use IIS..)
Interestingly other countries seem to have a totally different market shares (wiser users?):
Opera is leading with 32% in Russia [statcounter.com], with 35% in Ukraine [statcounter.com], and 44% in Belarus [statcounter.com].
China saw a huge 7% decrease from 95% [statcounter.com] in just recent two months, with Maxthon picking up the same percent and Firefox as 3rd with only 3%. (Maxthon uses IE engine tho)
Google has huge ways to market Chrome; they can do tv/billboard ads, internet ads, include a notice on their sites (like they're doing with YouTube) and enable option to install it along with their other apps, and pay manufacturers to include Chrome with their pc's.
Worthless (Score:5, Informative)
Such metrics are almost always worthless. And such is the case here. Their methodology is fundamentally flawed, and you can't fix flawed methodology by just getting more of it.
Ars Technica notes [arstechnica.com], 'The company tracks OS and browser use among "member sites" that use Net Applications' tracking services, which the company says encompasses data from some 160 million users per month. This means that the only OS and browser numbers being tracked are those from users who specifically visit those member sites, which include the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and InformationWeek. If specific demographics of users—like, say, Linux users—don't tend to read those types of sites, they are going to be underrepresented, and similarly, other demographics may be overrepresented.
It obviously could be the case that Chrome is used by people more likely to use those "member sites" than people who use Safari.
Unfortunately, Ars Technica then writes, 'That being said, browser metrics such as these aren't worthless. Even though they may be an inaccurate way to make comparisons between operating systems, they provide a good picture when it comes to trends within a specific OS. For example, Net Applications tracked the Mac OS at 7.3 percent at the end of 2007 and 9.63 percent at the end of 2008, showing more than a 2.6 percentage point jump in only a year for the Mac. In this sense, it doesn't matter if Mac users tend to visit the Wall Street Journal's website more than Linux users. The trend is clearly showing that Mac users, with all their unique browsing habits, are growing steadily.'
That's obviously false, because it doesn't take into account the fact that demographics can trend from year to year (perhaps the WSJ introduced a new, and popular, Mac-specific section on their web site).
Re:Getting off the train to crazytown (Score:4, Informative)
Since the beginning of December I've seen loads of adverts in London (mostly on trains and in stations) for Google Chrome... have Google been advertising anywhere else?
Re:Getting off the train to crazytown (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Getting off the train to crazytown (Score:2, Informative)
Chrome on Ubuntu (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Worthless (Score:5, Informative)
This means that the only OS and browser numbers being tracked are those from users who specifically visit those member sites, which include the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and InformationWeek. If specific demographics of users--like, say, Linux users--don't tend to read those types of sites, they are going to be underrepresented,
The Moz Foundation is a Net Applications client.
Opera. Nokia. Adobe. Apple. Microsoft. RIM. D&B. CNN. Roche. Amazon.
The geek who hasn't ventured out of his grandma's basement in the last decade might be overlooked.
But the odds seem very good that you will be counted.
Re:Jumping ship from IE? (Score:5, Informative)
> But the bigger sisue is that WebKit/KHTML is now a better core than Gecko
Based on what metric? It uses more memory, is faster in some cases and slower in others, is easier to hack in some ways. It also just provides a renderer, as opposed to an entire browser. So which is better depends on what you're trying to do and how much effort you want to expend on the non-renderer parts of your app (e.g. to use webkit you have to provide your own http stack and so forth).
If you just want to embed a non-browser HTML renderer that you're going to feed data into, then webkit is better, sure. That's what it's designed for; it's not what Gecko is designed for.
Re:Worthless (Score:4, Informative)
...of that list, very few of those sites are actually "general interest". They are strictly vendor sites that someone might visit when they need a driver or a plugin update. The rest of the time they should be pretty invisible.
CNN and Amazon are somewhat interesting. The rest represent clearly skewed user sets.
Re:Was waiting for Chrome on OSX until... (Score:5, Informative)
I worked at Google as a developer for many years. I have also worked at other huge corporations, like Adobe and Xerox. Google is nothing like every other huge corporation. They are exactly like some hippie, "don't be evil" group of socially conscious software developers. That's because that's what they are, both in the engineering department and all the way up to top management, including Larry, Sergei, and Eric. Not saying this is true of the sales department, but they're not in charge; the developers are. If Google were an advertising company, the sales department would be in charge.
They search engine came first. Of course something's gotta pay the bills, and the search engine by itself is an expense, not a source of income. If Google were an advertising company, the ad system would have come first, like it did with Overture.
Re:Getting off the train to crazytown (Score:5, Informative)
My experience has been the opposite. I've worked with some very smart engineers in the financial industry. Any time we tried to diverge from the MS path we were told to stay on it by management. These companies had signed very large contracts with Microsoft (for licenses and support), and so management felt they needed to commit completely to get the full value from their contracts, even when other solutions would save them money in the long term. This was most definitely corporate policy, straight from the CTOs / CIOs.
Re:And yet... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Jumping ship from IE? (Score:5, Informative)
One other note... Webkit and Gecko have different priorities in other ways too: for example, correct behavior of CSS selectors in the face of DOM mutations is a top priority for Gecko (and hence behavior is correctin all the cases I know of) and is not for Webkit (and hence the behavior is not correct in various cases; "for now we will just worry about the common case, since it's a lot trickier to get the second case right" as the Webkit code comments say). There are various other areas in which Webkit is behind Gecko in terms of standards support, and vice versa. They seem to have different future development priorities (e.g. in terms of things like SMIL vs CSS Animations).
It's also not clear which is developing faster, and that aspect is subject to rapid change. I think at this point there are more full-time engineers employed to work on Webkit than on the equivalent parts of Gecko. That may or may not continue to be the case.
Another interesting question, of course, is IE. IE9 has a bigger development team than either Webkit or Gecko, from what I can tell, and they're rapidly working on closing the existing gaps. IE's support for CSS2.1 is better than either Webkit's _or_ Gecko's in my testing (easier to do in some ways because the spec has kept changing so in some cases Webkit/Gecko implement earlier versions). Of course IE has a lot of catching up to do in other areas.
It'll be an interesting next few years all around.
Wrong. (Score:2, Informative)