Google’s Chrome browser is officially ready for prime time. As we reported earlier this week, Google has dropped the Browser’s Beta label after a mere 14 weeks (many Google products, like Gmail, have been billed as Betas for years). The browser now claims over 10 million active users worldwide.
Since launching, Chrome has implemented a number of major bug fixes (audio and video are less glitchy), increased performance on the browser’s V8 JavaScript engine, added a bookmark manager, and introduced UI changes to make privacy settings more accessible. The company’s blog post also says that an extension platform (similar to Firefox’s add-ons) is on the way. Mac and Linux versions are still nowhere to be seen.
During our talk at LeWeb with Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of Search Product and User Experience, we learned that the (relatively) quick turnaround is due to the fact that Chrome is a client software application. Many OEMs won’t touch software that is still in Beta, so Google had an incentive to conduct a thorough but finite testing Beta program. Conversely, cloud-based apps like Gmail can retain their Beta status indefinitely so long as Google feels that there are still major features that should be added.
So how has Google Chrome fared? It was clear from the get-go that this thing was fast, touting new features and enhanced stability that made it a great new entry into the browser market. Within a few days after launch the browser made up 6.23% of our traffic - a few weeks later it was up to 8.12%. Some analysts guessed that it might even be able to overtake Firefox within the next two years.
But since then that number has fallen to around 6% of our total traffic - nearly three times more than Opera, but well below Safari (9.87%), Internet Explorer (28.37%), and Firefox (52.05%). For a browser that is only a few months old this is still an impressive feat, but for Chrome to take on Internet Explorer (which is Google’s ultimate goal), Chrome’s market share needs to be showing consistent growth. TechCrunch traffic is by no means representative of the web as a whole (a recent report pegs Chrome’s overall US market share at .62% vs 81.36% for IE), but a large number of early adopters read this site and may be indicative of future trends.
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Google Chrome will become the user-pick browser next to Mozilla Firefox. Internet Explore won’t be going anywhere no matter what happens to the market. Remember that IE is the pre-installed and default internet browser for all windows OS. Now that means almost 90% of all education services will use the default application, IE. Nothing will change about IE being there. I give it another two-three years and google will buy Mozilla.
Google will buy open source project Mozilla?
Give me a mac version please.
Exactly, no mac version means no care.
i hope so soon…but my guess we won’t see even a beta for mac until 2009?
I think the Google guys will release a Mac-Version of Chrome in January at the Macworld #speculation
1. Chrome’s speed will be irrelevant with time as the other browsers catch up and surpass its temporary advantage
2. BUT that in itself is unimportant since Google’s bargaining power with OEM’s means it could well become the default bundled browser for Windows users. Hence, I presume, the lack of OSX and Linux ports.
Chrome might gain market shares in the future and it surely will when it’s released on Mac/Linux. However, I guess that the most affected browsers will be Safari and Firefox.
As long as IE is the only preinstalled browser on windows machines, Chrome won’t be able to take over. Moreover, don’t forget that a huge percentage of those 81.36% use IE at work where there are no alternatives.
Google has to win two battles : first, with the manufacturers to ship Chrome with their machines and second, with companies’ IT services to convince those that the browser is secure. Don’t forget that some guys are still stucked with IE6 (or IE5.5 for what matters) because of inertia.
Nevertheless, I hope Chrome will start rising, it’s a condition to a more stable and innovative web.
Most work places do indeed not offer an alternative to IE and this is exactly why I run Firefox Portable from my USB key
Is there a Chrome Portable?
“…with companies’ IT services to convince those that the browser is secure.”
You mean the same IT services that won’t let employees on the company network use Firefox?
I’ve never understood that - why so many IT departments are so adamant about people using IE.
To have Chome come standard on computers would be another useless thing to uninstall (along with about 3/4 of the other things on the desktop). I already had to waste my time getting the pre-installed Google toolbar off my laptop. Basically one pre-installed browser is fine (and I don’t think microsoft is going to give up have ie be that in windows). The people who are going to want different browsers/add-ons are the ones who will take the time to find them, so don’t waste peoples time pre-installing it.
The only reason I switched away from Firefox (to Google Chrome) was over the “memory leak” issue (yeah, its not the correct term, but you know what I am talking about).
While Firefox was (and is) a lot faster than IE, it constantly ate up memory–regardless of how much RAM I used.
If Firefox really fixed that, I would switch back. But despite their recent updates, the problem remains the same (although its not as bad as it use to be, but it still is not fixed).
I, for one welcome our new gChrome overlords.
Trying to use multiple tabs in Chrome actually used up more RAM on my laptop than Firefox does.
This comment is in a review of Chrome done by PCMag
[...]Chrome was somewhat less frugal with memory than the Internet Explorer 8 beta. When I loaded ten media-heavy pages into separate tabs, the browser required 212.4MB as opposed to 174.2 for IE. Firefox, however, was by far the leader, taking only 90.6MB to display the same set of pages[...]
Macs and Linux distributions (eg: Ubuntu) are becoming more and more popular each year. Soon Microsoft will be a minority (unless they fix up their OS properly) and either Firefox, Safari or Chrome will take the market.
Dream on
It shure is a penguins dream, nothing more.
Never forget that most of the companies won’t go away from their beloved windows for their desktop needs. If they decide to do that, they will most likely end up with Mapple and OS X in their office enviroment. But even that is very doubfull (and sad),
6% still respectable.
Love Chrome
I ran several tests tonight with IE7 and GC1, and curiously the download speed test showed much slower download speeds in Google Chrome (IE7: 8600 kbps vs GC1: 5200 kbps, see the link below for the site used to test). Admittedly, this is by no means a scientific test, but this emperical observation does show a potential difference in overall browser performance for a single scenario, in this case of 40%. Perhaps it has more to do with how Flash performs in the browsers. Anyway, I am curious what others are experiencing.
http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest?flash=1
You should be testing rendering speed, not download speed. Quicker download rates are pointless if the rendering engine is slow at drawing the page.
They should add a “SetHomepage” method to Chrome.
There is a way to set the home page in the Chrome options. Is that what you want?
On Clicky, we saw Chrome flatline at about 1.5% for quite a while, but in recent weeks it has climbed to 1.7-1.8% consistently. Currently we’re tracking over 62,000 web sites, which is where this data is coming from.
http://getclicky.com/global-marketshare-statistics
Also, with this new out-of-beta launch, I noticed that Google changed the version number to 1.0 (last “mass” release was 0.4).
I really like Chrome, I just can’t use it as my main browser until they release their plugin system. I still dont know if I would ever switch to it as my main browser though. I really love Firefox. Chrome is definitely the second best browser out there, though, in my opinion.
Mac …mac ….mac …. please. Surely, it can’t be that hard to port it!
I love the Chrome speed and thus started to use it more and push it harder… with several tabs open there is a crash and burn point that I have hit repeatedly when putting it under stress. For dependability and all of the handy plugins I am still counting on Mozilla as my base and Chrome for quick check-ins.
I was one of those 8% that became 6% when I realised how poor Chrome’s support was for RSS, is that fixed yet?
No active bookmarks, unformatted viewing on XML - POOR show
Still waiting for the Mac version. Since I’m still on a Powerbook G4 I’ve yet to even try Chrome. I like to hope that it’ll be the fastest browser available for such an old machine, but who knows when we’ll find that out.
Google, please give me a mac version!
The V8 Java script engine is awesome, but I have doubts on overall chrome performance since it does not have any plugins developed by thirdparty developers and I am still waiting for RSS feed handler in the browser.
I am really in love with Firefox. From the very first moment. Firebug and some other add-ons are great. A lot of webdesigners and engineers will agree. I tried Chrome and I like it too. My second choice of browser would be definitely Chrome or Opera.
@Mac users:
1) Download the WebKit nightly.
http://nightly.webkit.org/
2) Download Stainless.
http://stainlessapp.com/
3) Set Stainless to load the frameworks inside the WebKit nightly.
The result (Multi-processing architecture + Web Inspector + SquirrelFish Extreme) is a pretty decent Chrome imitation.
Thanks for pointing out Stainless, looks like it could come in useful
Webkit is the base for Chrome but it’s also the base for Safari.
There is also the option of Lunascape which has Trident, Gecko, and Webkit together.
Initial wave faded, so google PR tries to re-stir the hype again. Why don’t they release a comic book to outline the differences between the beta and this one? Yawn
I tried chrome but gave up pretty once i realized that much of the speed comes from the fact that every tab is actually a new process and every process takes up a small amount of memory which added up actually surpasses the memory used by firefox.
Did not like the file association in chrome.
Linux and Mac users still have to wait. Oh Shhh!
I would move to Chrome if there are as much addons like Firefox.
Corporate sites will need a .msi version. They don’t get over without it.
i still prefer firefox, more features and support. best of all, supported by Hibernater which can easily save my links. perfect.
All are became fans of Google chrome because of its speed at which it renders pages,I don’t want these most visited sites ,recent Bookmarks showing and separate Google toolbar.
Yep when they give an option to get rid of that damned thumbnail start page and load a home page instead (I mean whose bright idea was it to not at least give an option?) and give a proper bookmarks menu I will likely use Chrome as my standard browser. I love their tabs and the speed but without these very basic things it is totally unusable for me.
Try the Options menu for setting the homepage (put any urls you want in there) and bookmarks were fixed a while ago. Enjoy.
yea man, hype again…too many hype nowadays…
agreed with justin! i use hibernater too! it’s great to be able to save my work easily, solve my problem of remember which websites im at after i go home.
I love chrome, however, it’s would be my second choice since I can’t install google toolbar or other add-on, I need them for my daily job.
so I’ll just try Chorme for fun.
will Google release a new version that come along with toolbar?
chrome is really great in its speed . but lacks the handy addons that come with mozilla. hopefully newer versions will have this feature added..
Give us a Linux version !
(or at least a planning)
oh, i guess it’s time to upgrade then …
i want one for my mac too … it’s my fav. windows browser.
I have been using Chrome mainly since its launch. Love it.
I really love chrome. But the problem is it doesn’t have the Toolbars/addons that I need.
I tried Google Chrome and it was more or less a “so what” thing for me. I only had it on my computer for about 2 days. I couldn’t figure out what the hype was about.
Now Opera I actually like. I’ve kept it on my computer along with the staples (firefox and explorer).
As a developer, I use Firefox because of the tools that are available: Firebug, View Source Chart, and the Web Developer Toolkit are BIG helps. If Chrome had something like that, it would probably become my primary browser.
sticking with firefox for now. i can’t live without my add-ons…
I won’t use Chrome just because it gives too much power to Google. They already know far too much about me, using their browser also is a step to far for me.
(Just had a thought - I wonder if in the future they’ll making breakfast cereal? with real time adverts displayed on the box, hmmm that’s a rather disturbing thought actually)
Firefox forever, I don’t like Chrome, Non monopolio
Thats a great experience.
Att,
Marcelo
I just clicked ‘make chrome my default browser’ after having to close IE or FF from either crashes or just from being too slow every time. I had no idea speed was so important to me, but it is. FF will stay my development browser though, the command line javascript debugger in Chrome is not going to beat Firebug, ever.
Terrific, so when will I be able to use Google Bookmarks in Chrome? The most obvious feature they fail to integrate in v1. Nevertheless, it’s fast, and that will keep me interested in seeing what else they have planned.
Once a beta used to be a beta and a product was going out of Beta when it was really ready for prime time. I was Chrome beta at the beginning. Now when I try to install the release version I get error 6. I did some research and I see that many beta testers are having the same result. Well, if that was a small startup, it could be forgiven, but Google needs to regard its users better.
Did you guys know that chrome is not allowed to use in some countries as germany? it seems to be something with invading your privacy through cookies and somethign like that, i read something like that in the blogosphere a few days ago, you should better check out and get info you can trust before considering this your default!
its amazing how you think that a product that has what 10% of the market… o I’,m sorry Mac users 12.0032427432874234% or whatever, has the ability to choose the market. Mac users are so full of themselves buying over priced stuff. Maybe you should travel to the poor side of town and realize that no one gives a you know what.