NetApplications has released its latest browser market share figures, and these figures show that Chrome has overtaken Safari as the number three browser worldwide, behind Internet Explorer and Firefox. IE, by the way, continues to lose popularity rather fast.
Chrome was introduced almost 18 months ago, but yet it has already become the third most popular browser in the world. NetApplications’ figures cover the entire month of December 2009, and they show that Google Chrome has gained 0.7 of a percentage point, putting it at 4.63%, ahead of Safari’s 4.46%. Internet Explorer lost almost a full percentage point, dropping to 62.69%. Firefox remained more or less flat at 24.61%, while both Safari and Opera gained slightly.
Chrome’s steep rise in December can probably be attributed to the release of the betas for Linux and Mac OS X, so we may see a slight decline again in January, as some people will most certainly fall back upon their established choice of browser.
As for operating systems, Windows 7 is, unsurprisingly, doing rather well. Microsoft’s latest baby already broke the 5% mark, and in December its share amounted to 5.17%, up from November’s 4%. Windows 7’s popularity seems to have little effect on Mac and Linux users, as both platforms remained more or less flat at 5.11% and 1.02% respectively. Since both Windows XP and Vista lost share, the logical conclusion is that Windows 7 is competing with previous versions of Windows. That really shouldn’t surprise anyone.
Of course, the usual disclaimers apply. These are statistics, and therefore, are troublesome. However, even though you shouldn’t take them at face value, they can be used to indicate trends. In this case, the two important trends are that Windows 7 is eating away quite well at the base of previous Windows versions, and that Chrome’s star continues to rise.
As always, do with it as you please.
I am sure there are a lot of ppl like me on that Mac that just wanted to see what all the hubbub was about and then promptly deleted it.
Well, you can count me among that group. Still, I doubt the betas were the main rise in any case. Safari held its number three position for one reason, it’s the default browser on OS X and an excellent one at that. A lot of Mac users, myself included, stick to Safari because there is really no need to look elseware. It supports all the modern web standards (via Webkit) and has a pretty nice UI on the Mac side.
However, Safari for Windows is nothing to brag about, and Windows still has the majority of the desktop market. I don’t think Chrome will rise much on the Mac, but it could easily stay at #3 or even go higher for the simple reason that there are more Windows users than Mac users… and, when it comes to a browser that works with modern standards, Windows users are forced to look elseware other than their default. With Google advertising Chrome on their home page now, what do you think a lot of people are going to try first?
What I absolutly can’t stand about Safari is the suggestions implementation in input fields. FF rules here, IMHO. Haven’t tried Chrome yet, though. The last Opera version I tried was pre 10, so maybe it’s gotten better there.
Yes, just like Apple’s arrogance claiming Safari is: “The world’s best web browser” and “The world’s fastest web browser”.
Chrome is a good web browser on more platforms and obviously Linux is helping their market share. Google are smart with a lot less arrogance.
Edited 2010-01-02 18:09 UTC
I use linux and I’ve recently swicthed from FF to Chromium: faster and cleaner interface.
I agree; it definitely feels faster than Firefox and I don’t know how I lived without tabs on the window border in Firefox.
The only thing I don’t really like is the lack of a good ad blocker. AdSweep doesn’t work on a lot of sites, the AdBlock+ port doesn’t seem to support subscriptions, and I really don’t want to use a proxy like Privoxy.
The only thing I don’t really like is the lack of a good ad blocker. AdSweep doesn’t work on a lot of sites, the AdBlock+ port doesn’t seem to support subscriptions, and I really don’t want to use a proxy like Privoxy.
Go to http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/46974 and click on the “The extension for Chrome” link. Install it, open its configuration windows and select which ones you’d like to subscribe to. Works like a charm.
Thanks! This one finally works. At first it looked exactly the same as the AdBlock+ port I had tried before (which supposedly supported subscriptions, but it never worked), but this one actually works fine. And sites like Phoronix load so much faster…
Thank you for this. This link is enough to make me now consider using Chromium (on Arch Linux KDE) instead of Firefox.
The one annoyance left for Chromium is that it doggedly insists on using GNOME-like file dialogs, whereas with Firefox I was able to set an option in about:config to get it to use the KDE file dialogs.
All browser vendors talk crap, it^aEURTMs called marketing. Heck, even Microsoft are claiming that ^aEURoeit^aEURTMs a tie^aEUR when it comes to speed http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/get-the-facts/br…
But then again, I’ve never seen such blatant lies coming from Opera or Chrome. Of course one can say Opera doesn’t market that much, and Google hardly needs to go aboard their websites to show off a product.
I predict IE and Safari will continue spreading lies for it’s indeed marketing above the truth yet again.
http://www.apple.com/safari/features.html
Just look at the amount of lies there.
Chrome does tabs wrong (open at FAR RIGHT OF LIST, thanks) and there’s no option to change it. There are no options for a lot of common things you can normally control. There are no extensions.
Firefox wins again!
There are no extensions.
Yes, there are.
In the beta version. Oh boy! Better to say there will soon be extensions.
When there are extensions I’ll look again. At that time if there are enough around to un-break Chrome’s terrible UI and add in the missing options then I’ll give it a try. Honestly, apart from tabs in the title bar, what the hell were they thinking?
Edited 2010-01-04 13:06 UTC
I, on the other hand, eagerly awaited Chrome on the Mac, and since I installed it, I haven’t even launched FF or Safari. For me, the integrated address and search bar is the killer feature.
For me, the integrated address and search bar is the killer feature.
I love it myself, too. A separate search box/bar is redundant. But well, there’s a lot of reasons why I like Chrome and I am not really surprised it’s gaining in momentum. Sure, it is not anything absolutely grounds-breaking or such, but it is stable, fast, doesn’t pack unneeded stuff with it, and it looks very clean.
If I could, I would probably ask Chrome to marry me, sleep with her, and make her pregnant.
I really like Chrome. It’s like Google’s engineers implanted a thought transmitter chip in my brain, recorded all my thoughts on browsers, and designed Chrome accordingly.
Oh, you didn^aEURTMt spot that clause in the EULA? Thought that one would have stood out.
Chome and I aren’t quite ready for that level of commitment, but yeah its a bit scary how subtly good it its.
For me it is process separation and plugin isolation. That feature alone is worth moving away from Safari and Firefox. I understand it is being developed for Firefox but by the time it is made available – it is at least a year at the earliest from being released.
I love having an integrated search and address bar. That’s why I have been using epiphany on Linux for ages now. It’s also lighter than FF.
You realise that Firefox has had that since the 2.x days, right? Just set your preferred search engine in the preferences, and type away in the address bar. If you have Google set as the default, you’re taken to the results page. If you have “I’m feeling lucky” set, it goes to the first page listed in the results.
I’m pretty sure it’s the same with IE since the 7.x days.
Not sure about the other browsers.
Funny, Mozilla suite had that since before 1.0.
It’s likely been in Firefox since Firefox started, albeit probably as an about:config toggle.
On the Mac, I am holding onto Safari. Does not mean I feel its great, just that the alternative is not there yet.
Firefox’ UI is slow. SLOW. I cannot stress that enough. It still pretends to integrate with the OS, rather than actually doing (opening zip files with Stuff It? That diplodocus has never been even installed).
Chrome is still beta and it shows.
Still, I *need* certain Firefox extensions (Rikaichan mostly). I love both Firefox’ smart keywords and Chrome’s keyword search. The search engine field now feels in the way after using Chrome’s location bar.
Safari’s location bar feels now so^aEUR| restrictive. It good for nothing but entering URLs!
The moment Chrome gets those Firefox’ extensions I need, while keeping its UI’s speed and OS integration, bye-bye Safari.
Not to direct this at you specifically but it’s the second mention of search through the Chrome URL field. Why is this so revolutionary for Chrome when IE has done it since at least v6 if not previous to that. Google Chrome searched through Google Search. Microsoft IE search through Microsoft Search. Is it somehow implemented differently?
This is a mostly honest question for the general audience. Is there something in the implementation I’m not seeing or am I really being tickled by the irony that the feature is revolutionary when Google does it but not so much when MS does it much earlier. I am probably missing something.
(I always did wonder why they first split out the search field when I’d been getting that effect from the URL field already.)
It’s not really anything new, I know. But Microsoft Search sucks, IE6 sucks, and to be honest, I didn’t even know it had such feature. Put that feature in an actually good browser, have it use a good search and POOF, you do have something useful and powerful.
I agree. Although I have to say that my firefox does also search at google whenever I type down any word on the location bar…
True. It was indeed a nice feature when IE introduced it (after tweaking it use Google). I did miss it when I switched to the Mac.
Chrome’s location bar enhances it, if you want, live suggesting domains and keywords as you type.
Although after getting some, I long for more: Inquisitor-like live results for web pages (title+fragment) as well as information like “weather in Barcelona”, “10 USD in RMB”, “sqrt -1” or “define:Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”).
So it’s the combination of Google Search on the internet side and polished implementation on the local browser side. I’ll have to look at that more then.
No there actually is more. the chrome location bar spots a generic search feature, it recognizes search forms in a webpage, for example http://dict.leo.org. Once that page has been loaded once to search for a translation is as easy as entering dic[autocomplete]+TAB and a word.
I was going to clarify this as well, glad someone else noticed. IE defaults to searching if you don’t type a URL on bing.com, but you can’t control the search with special keywords or anything. Opera first introduced the feature, though Firefox, Konqueror, and Chrome have had it quite a while now, which allows you to create custom search keywords in the address bar. If I type g linux browser site:osnews.com it is the exact same as typing that into the search box on the google homepage. If I type w Firefox it searches wikipedia. When using a small amount of screen for your browser, like on a netbook, this saves you a large amount of real estate space and you only need to go to one area to type.
Yeah, that was what I too did when I tried Safari.
Exactly. Although I did not install it for Mac when I found out there is a helper app installed with it. Google and Privacy is a joke so I am no longer using most google services.
Scroogle I say.
The betas probably mean nothing. Google just advertises Chrome more .. now even on the front page:
http://gizmodo.com/5434741/can-googles-chrome-banner-change-the-cou…
So my prediction is that Chrome will just grow faster, maybe Google wants to have a lot of users once Chrome OS computers are sold.
Maybe, just maybe, quality has something to do with it?
Marketing > Quality
It’s all about perceived quality, and marketing is only one factor in that. Very important is the perception of the geeks that recommend things to friends & family and companies; that’s how Firefox grew.
I found that the Firefox daily builds were using so much CPU somehow, that I had to switch to Chrome, which is light both on CPU and memory. It’s extendability is not as well developed yet, but we’re making do.
Do these stats include Chromium or just the official Chrome? Do Chrome and Chromium use the same user-agent identifiers or can they be told apart?
its Not a surprise its one of the best browsers out there. Its fast and light with nice features and now extensions, I have replaced firefox with it. But I still keep Opera 10.10 its useful with its turbo feature that works nice with 3G. And smartphone wise Opera still rules with the Opera mobile 10.
I still prefer Opera because I like the user experience it provides and with Opera 10.5 and its new Javascript engine I will still be stuck on it.
I love Opera but it has a somewhat “overcrowded” interface. I find Chrome UI fantastic. Nevertheless I’ll try next Opera version because it looks like that new JS is going to rock
I agree, it isn’t really a surprise at all. I used to use Firefox for everything but I love Chrome now. I like it since pages with Flash crash and I can quickly kill the tab without the browser crashing. I know Firefox is going to have separate processes for tabs soon. I will probably switch back to Firefox when that happens. The speed of JavaScript applications also has me hooked. I just need extensions to make the experience complete. It appears Firefox is becoming more Chrome like. I see the latest beta version removes the menubar. Sometimes people forget you can right-click on the Firefox toolbar and select customize to remove any UI junk you dislike. Even more unknown about Firefox, you can move urlbar, icons, whatever all to the top menubar to save screen realestate. Then you just hide the remaining toolbars and you are left with a sleek browser UI.
Edited 2010-01-02 21:48 UTC
Thats their only product which keeps them alive not their crap browser for pcs and hopefully with Google Android phones they gonna get wiped down.
I remember how did Opera force their users at the beginning to watch ungly banners in 25% of the screen if you didn’t buy the full product. How can a company justify the income by forcing people to watch ads…
Edited 2010-01-03 12:21 UTC
Yeah, right? I mean, it’s horrible to force people to see ads to use your product for free! What were they thinking back then, I’m pretty sure it’s against something on the Geneva Convention.
Come on, buddy. It’s just ads. If you can’t stand to see them, rip your eyes off. It’s not like TV didn’t work like that for ages.
Agreed, back then that is the only business model that they could of had as it was before making money from searches was big business.
People think the internet is bas for advertising now, back then it was much worse with the amount of popups etc.
I expect it double it’s percents when 4.0 will be released with the support of extensions.
It does support extensions already.
I don’t know if you have noticed but Chrome 4.0 has already been released with extension support. The about box on my Google Chrome for Linux says.. 4.0.249.43.
4.0 is still beta according to http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/
… officially, but most people I know do everything to to protect from all these analyst websites by various techniques. Besides this most websites they/we are interested in do not track that match.
So don’t believe in statistics!
Don^aEURTMt read too much into these though.
48% Firefox
16% Chrome
13% Safari
9% IE
8% Opera
That is very interesting, but what about OS stats?
Also, I am curious if there are any really weird combinations, like IE or Safari on Linux that show up in your stats, if you can see that at all?
I’ve been meaning to try it myself. I might be stuck using the standalone set of IE versions that someone has packaged nicely. That’s one way it could happen though.
I’ve also been tempted to change my ID response string. It’s often used to tell a website one is using IE when they actually have Firefox (some IE only sites work just fine except for choking on the browser identifier). The thought of messing with some sites browser visit stats tickles me. Maybe hammer an IE favoring site with FF and Chrome visits so the visit stats suggest that they should target standard HTML instead of IE specific crap.
The topic of this site would make the browser/platform visit stats interesting though. Top five percentages is interesting but top bizarre combinations….
These are the type of stats we CAN be reading something from because they show the reality of the situation.
The average Joe and Joanne Lunchbucket will use what is the default browser on the OS they are using. In most cases they don’t even know what a Firefox is, if they’re Windows users a Safari is something you do in Africa, and Chrome is the stuff car bumpers used to be coated in.
I’m certain Google will find a way of convincing the Lunchbucket family that they need Chrome, but until then the reality is that the percentage gain in market share of Firefox and Chrome – as is shown by the above stats – are really determined by the more IT savvy component of the world’s population and their family / friends. For the most part Mac users will stick with Safari and Windows users will stick with IE.
Now seeing as there are a bunch of mac users here, most won’t be able to understand this at all but the ease of use imparted to application which apes, that most basic of applications vi, is impossible to best.
Chrome has an extension called vimlike-schmooze but its really no vimperator. Still Chrome’s extension is make some impressive progress so maybe I will swap one day.
I switched to the nightly Chrome builds a while ago over Safari in OSX, previously i felt Safari was the best/fastest browser, but Chrome is just faster at rendering (specifically rendering cached content, like going ‘back’).
also the nightly versions have extension support and adblocking which is great, only thing i wish it had was ClickToFlash, however from my understanding someone is porting or making a chrome version of it.
I think ClickToFlash is similar to FlashBlock:
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/cdngiadmnkhgemkimkhiilgf…
I never understood the hoopla over Safari. It was an adequate browser that didn’t have a lot of substance to it. Version 4 is a good browser and Apple showed more concern over Safari 4.0’s security, which was a huge improvement.
Still, I remember Safari fanatics cheering when Safari showed up in statistics like these. I think they’ll be crying in the beer now, even just for 1 month’s worth of data.
I’ve tried Chrome/Chromium on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux and it’s an adequate browser with a lot of speed but it’s unfinished. They’ve apparently listened to suggestions, as I can type “osnews” and the bookmark shows up first, rather than being number 46 (or somewhere like that) in the list.
I trust it as much as any beta, which is to say that Firefox still handles more important tasks. Safari was my number 2 browser, but it’s now number 4 behind Firefox, Chrome, and Opera.
Am I the only one who detected a certain amount of snark in Google’s name choice for their browser? Anyone who knows Mozilla/FF development knows that ‘Chrome’ is the name of the UI-rendering subsystem in Firefox, and in any Mozilla project. Look through your Firefox installation directory and you will find it. Mozilla has had this convention from the beginning, and I’m sure the Google people knew this. Anyone doing development work with XUL for Firefox extensions or any other aspect of the Mozilla application framework uses this word often. I just found it a little, hmm… maybe passive-agressive for Google to use the name.
Anyway yes, Chrome has superficially bested Firefox in terms of raw speed, and perhaps in certain UI aspects, but I’m not so sure that Google has bested Mozilla in the long run. From the beginning, the Mozilla developers have taken a verrrry long view to how application can work in a connected world, and no one else has anything quite like what they have developed. And they have definitely been improving Firefox’s speed recently.
Firefox is just a single manifestation of the underlying framework, and it is very easy to re-chrome it a million different ways, even make it unrecognizable, and yet still have the same features (OR even change the features without breaking the core features). That the Mozilla team succeeded in making a truly re-chromable application when Google really has not is interesting irony. I know Chrome has an extension API, but here are a few things Chrome does not have:
– Javascript 1.8 (and soon Javascript 2.0 — which will be ground-breaking)
– XUL + the collection of extra Javascript classes and libraries that allow a Mozilla extension to do far more than simple HTML/Javascript.
– absolute unity of user experience on just about any OS in use nowadays. I can run Firefox on Windows, Mac, FreeBSD, Linux, NetBSD, Solaris, just about anything with a GUI, and the behavior is identical. NO other browser has accomplished this.
Either way, I hope the Google and Mozilla teams continue to inspire each other to give us the best. It’s going to be interesting to see how this plays out.
I think XUL is both the strength and weakness of Firefox. Its strength because it makes Firefox so flexible, it’s almost like a platform on which you can develop things like Songbird and Miro. And its weakness because it slows down Firefox a lot. The Firefox interface is entirely made in XUL and rendered by Gecko. Now that’s a bit of overhead.
…
Yes (although it is only one factor out of many), but it is a very useful abstraction, and I think history shows that in the long run, victory goes to the one with the more useful abstraction. Thus, web applications are winning over client-server network apps, scripting languages over compiled ones, declarative database queries over complex array manipulation, etc… And, history also shows that the perceived weakness of the abstraction can be more quickly optimized away than the converse weakness of the non-abstracted approach. There are all sorts of possibilities for optimizing or caching XUL rendering, just like with any other technology.
Also, there’s no reason XUL need be only for Mozilla. Personally, I would love it if XUL could be rendered by any browser, not for the existing UI, but for the ability to create rich internet applications. XUL allows you to deliver far more functionality with far less code than Javascript/HTML. The difference is almost ridiculous. HTML should be kept for document/communication purposes, as was originally intended, but it is a horrible technology for serious user interface work.
I think they worked on it for FF 3.6
XUL is an interesting development framework. It makes quick and easy work to prototype new ideas.
Here’s something I found interesting:
Enter the following URL:
chrome://browser/content/browser.xul
And you get a browser inside of a tab. (Sub-tabs if you will)
Thanks for that. It gives me a better idea of how XUL actually works. I wasn’t aware of this feature before.
It won’t even install on Windows 7, and I’ve tried myriad times, both on the Windows Ultimate beta and the Home Premium edition I’m currently running. They’re going to have to address that at some point or market share will fall back off.
Are you talking about Chrome???? I’m using Windows 7 and Chrome with it non-stop. It’s great!
your computer is borken.
Actually from a UI design perspective one thing in Chrome that drives me nuts is the way bookmark folder menus work from the bookmarks bar. If I click the folder it opens a “menu” showing me the bookmarks however clicking the folder again does not close this “menu”, instead is reopens it at the current pointer position. Now if these were tear off menus I could (maybe) forgive this behaviour, but they are static menus that you then have to click off somewhere else to close if you decide not to select something from them, and if you click in the wrong place you could very well trigger a link on the page or select another tab or background window even. Horrible implementation.
Good news: This has been fixed in the 4.x beta.
Not yet for the Page and Tools menus, though:
http://crbug.com/6241
Edited 2010-01-03 03:52 UTC
I have the daily build installed and updated daily of Chrome. I just can’t seem to gel to it. Its good but things just don’t seem to be right on the UI for me. I find things are not where they should be, maybe its a case of just getting used to where things are.
On a web engine side of things I find it is faster in many ways but some things don’t work right or take longer to load. For example the web page hosted on my server which is a WordPress page takes longer to load on Chrome 4.0.266.0 than on Firefox 3.5.6
For the moment my main browser is still Firefox but I will not say it is perfect. It takes a long time to load (probably due to all the plugins I have installed) and I wonder how Chrome will behave with more and more plugins installed. I guess I am just used to Firefox as I have been using it for years.
I will continue to try Chrome and lets see what the future version on these browsers bring to the desktop.
There’s no way around it; lots of extensions will slow down Firefox, because each one must be loaded and cached on startup. (Hmmm… makes me wonder whether one couldn’t create an extension which acts as a load-on-demand manager for other extensions, so you don’t need to wait for them all to start up)
The main thing Chrome has going for it is the blazingly fast V8 Javascript engine, and I think this has been good for the browser community in general, goading he other developers into focusing on performance for awhile. All browsers have had some good Javascript performance increases over the past year.
but Chrome has an advantage when it comes to speed. Not a big advantage but it’s there.
Chrome fits in with OSX better than Windows. I suspect that the google UI designers are using Macs.
I still prefer IE8 for Windows notebooks because Flash in IE is better for battery life. Watch some flash videos in different browsers with a cpu monitor if you don’t believe me.
Firefox (and others) have a “stop loading” on the menu bar, but Chrome doesn’t. That had me scratching my head. With a bit of googling, I discovered that you can stop loading a page in Chrome by pressing the ESC key. And can reload by pressing F5. Apparently, that works for other browsers too, but I didn’t know until just today.
Still, would be nice to have a “stop loading” icon. I guess they wanted to save screen real estate.
I’m using Chrome-beta now on Linux, and performance is great. Just what I want, no frills fast browsing.
cheers,
Oz
don’t you have an ‘X’ on your address-bar?
Chrome’s Stop button replaces the Go button while a page is loading. Unfortunately, since it’s transient and on the opposite side of the screen from Reload, it’s easy to miss and hard to reach.
People have submitted bugs on it in the past, but Ben always Wontfixes them. And the new extensions system can’t put buttons on the left side of the Address bar. So toolbar customization is our last hope. Star and/or comment here:
http://crbug.com/24498
or
http://crbug.com/1656
F5 has been a standard feature in IE for a long time. F4 (in IE) is used to show the address bar drop down list
and similarly F2 (Desktop) to rename a file where F1 is for Help and F3 (Desktop/IE) for Search.
ESC? Yes, you can use that for Chrome but again it is a standard feature – equivalent to hitting ESC in Windows app (closes the dialog discarding changes) and ESC in BIOS exits the BIOS discarding changes.
Unfortunately I have found (unless I don’t know), in order for ESC to close a dialog, one has to code it – it is not automatically linked to the form (Borland, unless I am wrong) so you may find apps that do not follow this standard for various reasons but I like it when they do.
Edited 2010-01-03 09:50 UTC
It doesn’t differentiate between Safari on the Mac and Safari on the iPhone. I wonder whether, as far as desktop browsers go, Chrome beat Safari a while back.
So between Safari and Chrome, webkit has about a ~9.1% market share… Sounds like a win-win to me.
Exactly. So while I do realize that webkit is based off of previous open source, google uses apple’s webkit implementation. So really it is a win, but more for scroogle then apple.
Edited 2010-01-04 15:35 UTC
…has been my browser of choice for a year now. I do revert to IE or FF when I have to for some bizarre task coded to MS IE, or when I need some of the cool developer plugins out there for FF.
This is simply not true. Rewording:
These statistics are troublesome.
Just so that we reasonable people do not believe that all statistics are troublesome.
If you get the “Personalized Web” extension, you can also force fonts with a simple CSS script. By January 2011, Chrome should be much more polished, but as it is on openSUSE, it’s highly stable. (it crashes and burns on ubuntu, of course)
Sorry to here that you think it would ,of course, crash on ubuntu. It’s quite fashionable to bash somebody, but I personally would have rather heard the why it crashed. Of course you filed a bug report, so I can sleep better at night knowing that’s been done. Say , since you obviously use openSuse, did they make a live version that boots my hp mini 110 yet? Using ubuntu 9.10 here, works great, especially Chromium !!
I’ve been hearing a lot for Chrome, so I decided to check it – heck – yet another web browser, let’s see what we’ve got. Surprisingly, I didn’t see anything different. I had some issues installing it – ok, scratch that. Couldn’t install it on W7 Ultimate, ok, fine, let’s see a virtual machine with XP – we’re good here. Strange UI, ugly overall look, couldn’t find differences in the speed, in fact, most of the pages loaded slower than FF 3.5.6. The same was repeated on Linux, OpenSuse 11.0, with the same result. Now, I’m not saying it’s bad, I see a lot of people like it, but it’s just not my browser. Just like a car choice – there are some that you live in harmony with, and other that you want to get rid of.
A word on FF being slow – why, really ? I have the same version on Opensuse, W7, XP and Mac, but I don’t think it’s slower. Bad config or wrong addons ?
How about Fasterfox, Firebug, NewsFox, Download statusbar, FlashBlock, FireFTP, ReminderFox, thousands of themes, the search bar auto-options ? I’m not aware of browser that has so much customization ability, but I may be wrong.
Edited 2010-01-03 13:46 UTC
A word on FF being slow – why, really ? I have the same version on Opensuse, W7, XP and Mac, but I don’t think it’s slower. Bad config or wrong addons ?
I haven’t used FF in a while now so I don’t know if it’s sped up recently, but when I moved away from it to Chrome it was both slower to start up and it rendered everything a lot slower. Especially on Linux FF was dog slow, a lot slower than its Windows counterpart. And yes, even without any addons.
How about Fasterfox, Firebug, NewsFox, Download statusbar, FlashBlock, FireFTP, ReminderFox, thousands of themes, the search bar auto-options ? I’m not aware of browser that has so much customization ability, but I may be wrong.
I kinda agree, FireFox is probably the most customizable browser of them all. But not everyone needs all that and as such other browsers suit them better. Oh, and FlashBlock is no longer FF-only, I use FlashBlock and AdBlock+ happily on my Chrome
Unfortunately I have found that these extensions for Chrom do not work properly. They hide blocked material from view OK, but the browser still downloads the hidded data.
Adblock Plus and Flashblock on Firefox can both prevent the unwanted data from even being downloaded, saving both page load times and user’s bandwidth.
This fact alone can make Firefox effectively faster that Chrome/Chromium, even though the latter can render the page’s data quicker once it has been downloaded to the browser.
…I just do not like Chrome. I doubt I ever will. I dislike how it handles scrolling, I do not like the tab placement at all, I do not like the download manager.. etc etc
I know my preference for Firefox probably stems from the fact I’ve been using it since the pre-1.0 betas.
I just don’t see the reason for all the hubbub over Chrome other than it’s “made by Google!!1”.
The process-per-tab and the plug-in isolation is nice, but I honestly cannot remember the last time Flash actually crashed FF in Windows or Linux. And the V8 engine IS fast, but if your computer is new enough (like, the last 5+ years), then you really won’t notice much of a difference between engines. At least I don’t… But perhaps I’m not using sites that are extremely js heavy. GMail works just as smoothly in Chrome as in FF from my experience.
No accounting for some peoples tastes
Is that preference or bias?
Perhaps Stockholm Syndrome has set in? 
I’ve used Firefox since the Phoenix/Firebird/name-of-the-week times, and find myself liking it less with each release.
I have to restart Firefox at least once a week to due locked up Flash and Java sites. It’s irritating, since these are sites I have to access for work, and I usually have 5-20 tabs open during the day at work. With Chrome, I only lose 1 tab instead of all tabs. Firefox’s auto-save/restore feature doesn’t always save things correctly.
I would say you’re not using JS-heavy sites (GMail isn’t all that heavy). Try using Zimbra with a 1+ GB mail store, 80+ folders, with a couple thousand message per folder. You’ll find using Firefox 3.5 to be very hard … after you’ve used Chrome 4.x to do the same.
FF 3.5 seems fast … until you realise just how slow it actually is in comparison to Chrome and even Safari.
Presicely.
lol, nice comeback
As I stated, *I* do not use JS heavy websites, so I do not notice the speed difference. I prefer lighter sites
Like for work email, we use Pine which is extremely fast and works pretty darn well 
Our Director of IT finally gave up Pine (via SSH) this year. He managed to hang onto it through upgrades/migration to three different mail systems. But, the shared content features of Zimbra finally won him over.
Haha! I shall have to look at it. If it won over a hardcore Pine fan then it might be nice
Chrome(ium) works with Zimbra? Hmm…when did that start? Just before xmas it worked less than stellar with our Zimbra (granted it’s not upgraded to 1.6 yet).
I’ve been using Chromium and Google Chrome to access Zimbra Network Edition 5.0.x since … October-ish? Around there. For the first month-ish, I had to keep swtiching between Chrom[e|ium] and FF for some things. However, by November, I was using Google Chrome full-time for Zimbra access. It’s just so much faster compared to FF. Especially on Linux.
My only beef with Chrom[e|ium] is that clicking on a PDF or .doc or whatnot causes the file to be downloaded and saved, and then opened in the associated app. Which clutters up the downloads directory, as nothing is ever deleted.
Konqueror, Firefox, etc all save the file with a random name to a temp folder, and the file is deleted when the app closes. Which is great for things like PDFs that just get read, maybe printed.
Now, I have to go through my downloads directory once a week to clean out all the crap.
wow, that is a PITA. Hope that gets fixed.
I believe this has more to do with them started pushing it on YouTube.
Even more tests at work – I just tried the latest beta of Chrome under OpenSuse 11.0, and I happily deleted it after few minutes of testing. I’ve downloaded the 16MB .rpm file, installed. I specifically told the app not to import anything, but it insisted on importing some stuff from Firefox, however, it said that it can’t really do it while FF is running. No way I’m closing it, moreover, I told you not to import anything. Then, I’m presented with some Task Manager and the best thing – NERD stats – let’s see … The BAD FF is using 200MB, whereas Chrome only 20MB. Konq is at the bottom with its modest 5MB ?! I don’t have Konq started or even used in the past few weeks. OK, Chrome uses less memory than the rival, cool, somehow convinced me. Started working with it, opened a few sites, watched few videos, the RAM usage grew dramatically – up to 800MB. That’s not a big issue for a system with 6GB on board, but it’s not lightweight, at least here. Then, I wanted to change this or that, the tab placement, I want clicking on the navigation bar to open a new tab – I can’t. I wanted to get rid of the speed dial, I can’t. There are few Google pages inserted on my behalf – no, thanks. I can’t get rid of them either, or at least not in the common way – I don’t have a whole day learning new shortcuts – I don’t want to change my habits. The options are narrowed, the themes are ugly. I don’t have the extensions that I use daily available – that’s fine, maybe they will develop them. The UI itself is really ugly, no matter what modifications I will apply – either the default GTK theme or the other, I forgot the name. The tabs with the rounded edges reminds of Eclipse, and that’s not exactly my favorite place, while the other UI parts reminds of .. Opera. The buttons’ placement is like in IE. I also noticed that some of the command line switches don’t work. When opening a page, let’s say some news page with a lot of content, it displays the images and the text, immediately, while downloading the heavy stuff in the background – clicking the X button, provided you can find it, doesn’t stop the loading process. Thus it creates an impression of loading pages quickly. Haven’t noticed built-in spell-checker, but I may have missed that. Doesn’t remember passwords and input information properly, or at least the way I like it. So, what’s really new then ?
Last but not least – I wasn’t able to terminate it ! Click the X – no, Alt+F4, no, Ctrl+W || Q- no. So I had to go via ps -ef | grep -i google, etc ….
Bottom line – still beta, nothing impressive, at least for me. Not faster than FF or Opera, looks bad. Modest, but honest opinion from a freethinker.
By default, KDE pre-loads Konqueror, and keeps 1 instance in RAM, for speedy starts. This is configurable.
CTRL+T or click on the + icon in the tab bar, same as with Firefox.
I believe you can change the default start page in the options.
There’s a close button on each of these icons, just like on normal windows, just like on tabs. Nothing new to learn, just takes 2 seconds to actual look.
It’s there.
That’s a definite bug, and should be reported.
Note: pkill works a lot better and is a lot less typing, than using “ps | grep”. And it’s more cross-platform.
Heh, it’s definitely faster, if you access JS-heavy sites, or work with a lot of tabs open. However, it’s just another browser, and different people will like different things.
I think one of the most advertised strong point in Chrome is the script engine supposedly delivering far better performance than any other browser.
This may be the case in the pages written specifically for Chrome but it is really not true on the everyday pages you can find on the Internet.
On the contrary, Chrome may prove to be the slowest. I had noticed that when developing my site that uses the Image Flow js component from Finn Rudolph. Have a look at http://faltiska.net/en. Use your mouse scroll on the visual navigator.
Do that in Firefox, Opera, IE and Chrome. Chrome is really bad. IE is annoying because of the tearing but the movement is more fluent. Firefox and Opera are near perfect.
So, what is Google bragging about?
Edited 2010-01-04 20:54 UTC