I have been seeing a lot of press (mostly those not or on the edge of the computer industry) talking about how Google’s Chrome browser is going to try and take massive marketshare away from Internet Explorer. Ehh. Doubt it.
Given that IE still has a current market share of over 75% and heck even IE6 still have 25%, why do you think Chrome is going to make any more inroads then Firefox or Opera has? The fact is, they wont.
Chrome looks great and with the V8 JS engine its fast as all get out. The speed at which it loads Yahoo mail is amazing to me. So far, I have not found any major issues short of one of my heavy Flash sites stalling out on me. Not to say there have not been problems. On occation, the browser will just hang for 5 -10 sec for no reason. Just when I’m ready to give it the 3 finger salute (ctrl-alt-del) it pops back. Course, its buggy at that point so I just close and reopen and its right and rain.
Chrome will most likely get to the level of Opera IMHO. Perhaps 3% of the market, Maybe 5%, most of that coming out of Firefox’s cut. Soon Firefox will release its V8. Assuming FF does not become even more unstable, they should be able to hold most of their market share.
The telling sign will be IE8. If IE8 can perform at the level of FF and Chrome, then I think the bleed-over will continue at the slow trickle it has been for the last year.
As for the user in me, I’m happy as all get out. As a developer.. Eh.. Still have IE6 out there at 25%. Sigh.. 😦
Perivision's Blog : Written first, edited later. 
I don’t know the data for Google Toolbar, but expect chrome will reach that much.
Google ships toolbar with other application like Sun Java JRE and so on. It might start bundling chrome as well. Google paid $2 to $5 per download of firefox with google toolbar using their adsense program.
Comment by freecheese — September 3, 2008 @ 1:23 am |
Hmm. Thats a good point. And if we look at what Apple did pushing safari via itunes, we can imagine Google pushing via their google-mail application. In fact, if they could figure out a way to really make it worthwhile to get users to switch from Brand X to Chrome to improve ‘Google office’, then we could see some interesting changes in the market.
Comment by perivision — September 3, 2008 @ 1:29 am |