Chrome or Firefox for 2011?
p2pnet view Open Source | Advertising:- Everyone knows that there are “lies, damned lies and Web analytics”, writes Glyn Moody in Computerworld UK.
But, he says, “the latter can at least give a feel for what’s going on.
“And the latest figures for browser market share in Europe certainly do that”.
The “key event is immediately evident”, he says.
“As the graph shows, “Firefox’s market share has overtaken that of Internet Explorer, with 38.11% against 37.52% (although I wouldn’t place much – any – faith in those last few significant figures)”, states Moody, going on >>>
Now, it’s true that this is only for Europe, which has historically always led developments here, but it’s still a moment to savour. After all, when both Mozilla and then Firefox began, few gave them much chance of succeeding in taking on the Microsoft behemoth. There just weren’t any precedents for a plucky newcomer – let alone an open source one – to start from zero and then power ahead of a company that seemed unstoppable in its key markets. It’s true that on the server side, Apache is ahead of Microsoft’s Internet Information Server, but it got there first, and so was effectively the one to beat: the client side was quite different.
Of course, that’s not the only story the graph tells. Firefox has actually gone down slightly over the last year – it’s just that Internet Explorer has gone down even more. And the slack has been picked up almost completely by Google’s Chrome, whose share has risen from 5.06% to 14.58% during that period.
That’s pretty stunning by any measure, and confirms Chrome’s ascent into the browser pantheon. The question is obviously whether that heady ascent will continue, and what happens to the other browsers?
Naturally, a lot depends on what features new versions of Firefox and, to a lesser extent, Internet Explorer have, but I see no reason why Chrome won’t rise to above 20% in the short term. This means, of course, that the market share of Firefox and Internet Explorer will continue to drop. But as I noted some time back, this really isn’t a huge problem for Firefox – although it is for Microsoft.
The reason is quite simple: Firefox was never aiming at world domination, it was fighting to create an open Web where no browser held such a dominant position that it could ignore open standards and impose de facto ones instead. We pretty much have that now, with Internet Explorer increasingly standards-compliant – and proud of it, amazingly.
With the continuing rise of Chrome to the point where we have three browsers with more or less the same market share, we will have a perfect situation for friendly competition that is three-cornered – even better than simple two-sided rivalry. I feel confident in predicting that the Web will become even more open as a result (it’s a pity that it remains threatened in other ways – ACTA, censorship etc.)
But that does not mean that Firefox and Chrome are identical for these purposes, and that we needn’t worry about Firefox’s market share. It’s important to remember why Google created Chrome, and why it released it as open source. It’s simply that it knows that placing the code in the open, and allowing others to build upon it is the fastest way to establish a product in a competitive market. In doing so, it’s true that Google promotes open standards and open source – but only up to a point.
The key difference is that Google sees open source as a way of generating more revenue elsewhere, while Firefox regards the revenue that it generates from its search box as a way of furthering its work to protect and deepen the open Web.
“I know which one I’d rather put my trust in for the future”, adds Moody in Computerworld UK.
Computerworld UK – 2011: The Year of Firefox – or of Chrome?, January 4, 2011
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January 7th, 2011 at 1:30 pm
I love fire fox! it is so freaken fast and so stable. The thing is totally zooming running java script.
Chrome is good but is way too centralized plus it is a spy-ware and I don’t like spy-ware.
January 7th, 2011 at 4:56 pm
Say what you want of market share and all that stuff, I remain a proud and very satisfied user of Opera, and I’ll remind you that Opera has been on the frorefront of the battle for an open Web standards from the beginning.
January 8th, 2011 at 12:26 am
Firefox is showing age and it’s only keeping people who enjoy fox icons. It’s staying pretty much stagnate and slowly dieing. Some paranoid people in tin foil hats might call chrome spy-ware, but at least it’s not bloat-ware. ff seems perfectly fine with stealing chrome’s minimal look but doesn’t do much for the inside. IE9′s beta is already way faster than Firefox4′s 7th beta and there’s no way average people are going to bother downloading ff over a competent ie. As for the power users who like the plug ins and development, they’re just going to turn to Chrome. Site’s like tech crunch already show that power users are now using chrome. So where does that leave ff, for people who just really want the fox icon.
January 8th, 2011 at 12:57 am
@ Edwardo: ‘So where does that leave ff, for people who just really want the fox icon.’
I guess it leaves people such as myself who, as Glyn puts it, prefer to see Firefox using revenue to protect and deepen the open Web, than as yet another tool for Google to hijack so it can generate more revenue elsewhere; and (although Glyn doesn’t say it) get its hands on user data for considerably less than principled purposes.
Cheers!
January 8th, 2011 at 11:50 am
Plugins. Firefox did it first, and does it best. Still.
If you want some kind of measure of privacy/usability/tweaking/no ads/the web the way you want it, you are going to look at the one browser that allows you to tweak the everloving hell out of what is sent out when you browse the web via the largest and most comprehensive plugin stable.
January 8th, 2011 at 1:54 pm
“Firefox is showing age and it’s only keeping people who enjoy fox icons”
I disagree. I don’t see what Firefox is not doing that chrome is doing. And by the way Chrome is way bigger in size that Firefox so if you are talking about bloatware that would be chrome. On window Firefox does not need installing and does not write shit in your registry unlike chrome. And yes chrome is a spy ware since it report to a Google server your browsing habit for commercial purpose. This is well known. Finally Chrome is network centric and that make it actually slower than Firefox.
January 8th, 2011 at 2:08 pm
By the way I am using Opera too in combination with Tor. I believe Opera is really good and is also better than Chrome hand down.
This is my classification of the 5 main browsers:
1) Firefox in a tide with Opera. (Opera is even smaller than fox! I like that! I am more familiar with Firefox though so I will not comment what Browser is better. I am biased)
2) Safari. (extremely stable on OSX pretty good on windows. Good speed.)
2) Chrome. (A capable piece of code but not the best too network centric and an evil corporate product full of spy-ware for future cyber-slave.)
3) IE a massive piece of shit! Talk about an unsecured, unstable and slow piece of bloatware!
January 8th, 2011 at 2:12 pm
Google will be destroyed since it is a evil company specializing on spying on people and violating their civil right.
Mark my word.