Monday, January 12, 2009

Is Chrome undermining Firefox or IE?

A very interesting trend indeed. If you look at W3Schools Browser statistics for Dec 08. You cant help but notice that Google's Chrome seems to be getting it's user base at the expense of Internet Explorer and NOT Firefox as everyone expected.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

The short term trend clearly shows (at least for now) that the discontent with IE continues. Why you ask? Perhaps its the bloated and largely irrelevant feature set or maybe it's ever present "Anti-Standards" approach that Microsoft stubbornly insists upon in an effort to exert futile and fruitless control over development decisions made at other companies?? I honestly can't even come up with a conspiracy theory as to why they do what they do with IE. That said, Internet Explorer is just barely ahead of Firefox by less than one percentage point (In this set of statistics anyway).

if this trend continues it won't be long before the tipping point is reached. At which time Web developers around the world, will no longer start a project testing in IE, rather we will amend statements of accomplishment with "Oh and it works in IE as well" :)

1 comment:

Lars D said...

My guess is, that the typical user in this statistic either wants the startup speed of MSIE or the web development features of Firefox.

Chrome provides a good alternative to MSIE, at an even greater startup speed, but it does not support the FF plugins.

Websites with different target groups show different results.