Friday, March 18, 2011

Browser Wars! Is Chrome winning?

Just as the launch of iPhone suddenly heated up the smartphone sector, the launch of Google Chrome greatly heated up the browser war which till then was simply a competition between IE and Firefox with IE having a massive lead.

I was one of the first ones to download Google Chrome when it was released on 2nd September 2008. It was love at first sight. I never went back to IE after using Chrome for just one day. What pleased me the most back then was the ultra minimal interface. I simply loved the fact that there were no space wasting toolbars and that there was a single box for both search and address bar.

While stats from http://j.mp/usageshare indicate that IE still leads with 45% and is followed by Firefox 36% and Google Chrome 16%, I am pleased to know that most of my friends prefer Chrome like me. Here are the browser stats of my blog:

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A majority of my friends prefer Chrome just like me!!! Yay!

Amongst the pageviews for my blog, IE comes in a lousy third position. Since my friends are all young and largely tech savvy enough to know about how to install alternative browsers, this shows that Chrome will really be the leading browser in the near future as awareness spreads further.

However, browser wars as a whole have proven the age old economic concept of the consumer benefitting because of competition. Chrome’s innovative each tab as a separate process has now been introduced in latest iterations of Firefox and IE as well. Similarly, despite starting off with minimal interface as its speciality, Chrome, now has a extension gallery and themes gallery, bringing to it the customisation features that made Firefox so popular. Chrome also adopted the speed dial feature of Opera into its new tab page since the first version itself.

Not only have the established browsers improved from adopting each other’s innovative ideas, but many new ones have sprung up as well. I have heard that two in particular – Rockmelt (designed for lots of social network integration) and Epic (designed specially for Indians and by Indians) are especially good.

Incase, you are still using outdated browsers here are the links to the latest version of each – Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Internet Explorer 9

While I have said that IE is losing its lead in the browser war, don’t count it out just yet. Internet Explorer’s latest version is garnering some great reviews and might just make a comeback with IE 9.

Afterall, it has the unique advantage of being bundled with the most popular operating system platform in the world which has an almost absolute monopoly in the operating system market. IE comes with Windows almost everywhere except Europe and the Windows OS continues its monopoly. Checkout the operating system stats of this blog -

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The only competition to Windows seems to be coming from mobile platforms.

Which operating system and which browser do you prefer and why? Do let me know through your comments!

4 comments:

  1. Yes, I am commoner - Chrome and Windows

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  2. A point to note is that it is ranked by page-views and not unique hits. As (probably) the only user of Pale Moon (http://www.palemoon.org/ for info) who visits, I have only 5 page views since I have only viewed 5 pages. Whereas as you Sagar, the owner of this blog uses Chrome, would most likely visit your own blog a lot and hence skew the results of Chrome higher than it normally would.
    As to the ability of the browsers, IE9 is still lagging way behind in terms of web standards despite the claims by Microsoft; its HTML5 and CSS3 rendering is still crap, and what the heck is with the tab bar doing beside the address bar. Firefox (and its derivatives like Pale Moon) is for people who like customisation. Chrome (and its derivatives like SRWare Iron) is for the layman who wants a quick and efficient browser, but thats just my opinion.

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  3. @Bjorn:
    Blogger takes care of the issue you mentioned. There is a option called "Dont track your own pageviews." and I have turned it on meaning that when I open my blog it does not get counted in the number of pageviews...
    I do agree with you that combining the tabbar and address bar makes IE9 interface very weird indeed!

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  4. Even if I am strong supporter of Chrome, one point to be noted is "Each Tab - New Process" makes chrome RAM hungry which is evident when you open Windows Task Manager and Check Running Processes when you have 4/5 tabs open. With Mozilla 4 out with Chrome like interface, I want to see if it does anything to reduce memory footprint. Also One Observation: Some payment gateways don't support chrome (thats the only time I launch Firefox :P)

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