As we noted yesterday, version 3 of Google’s Chrome web browser is now available for PC users. But in an interview yesterday with Reuters, Google revealed a couple of interesting tidbits about the project.
The first is that while Chrome currently has just under 3 percent of the browser market currently, a year from now, they’re planning to have at least 5 percent. More importantly, 2 years from now, if Chrome doesn’t have at least 10 percent share, Google will be “exceptionally disappointed,” Chrome Engineering Director Linus Upson told Reuters. And Google’s own internal projections for the browser are even higher, apparently.
While I think I have yet to meet anyone who doesn’t like Chrome — a lot — this past year has proven that it may be hard for Google to hit such numbers. While plenty of people in the tech scene have posted their internal numbers (like Google’s own Matt Cutts) showing some pretty impressive Chrome share numbers from visitors coming to their sites, the general public is clearly not as quick to switch as the early-adopters in the tech scene. Just having a great browser may not be enough, Google will likely have to step up its advertising campaigns (mostly on the web) to get real gains.
But Google also has a big wildcard it has yet to play: Mac support. And in the same Reuters article, Google confirmed that it Chrome for Mac will be available before the end of this year.
So yes, sometime in the next 3 months, Google’s 3 percent share should see a fairly big bump from Mac users who will at least try it out. Right now, the majority of Mac users browse with Firefox or Apple’s own Safari. But Firefox is typically pretty slow, and Safari, while fast, has some quirks and doesn’t allow for the easy use of plug-ins. Chrome promises to bring a combination of both speed and plug-ins to the Mac. I’ve been using the developer builds of Chromium (the open source project behind Chrome) for months now, and it’s definitely getting really, really close to being ready for prime time.
hooray chrome for mac!! can’t wait.
they need to make bookmark toolbar buttons smaller like FF. That’s what’s holding me back yo.
ie8 is way better
Haha. MG is deluded if he thinks Mac market is gonna boost Chromes share to any significant share.
MG there’s a reason Google put its B-Team on developing for Mac/Linux. Nothing quite says Novelty OS like when you’re supposed Corporate BFF treats your platform as not as signficant as “eeew” Windows.
It’s hilarious that Google didn’t release Chrome initially for “The World Most Advanced OS”.
Well no doubt Chrome is much better and user friendly but i doubt it could perform better on MAC .
Well of course it couldn’t peform better on a Media Access Control address. It needs a full computer such as a Mac.
+1
If they had Bookmark Sync on Mac I would have switched already.
Opera does.
Wow, shooting for 10% market share of a free product that has never made anyone any money.
Maybe Google should “eye” the 10% market share in paid search that Bing just achieved.
Not made any money? Are you serious?
First of all, it more or less consolidates Google’s marketshare in the Search Engine marketplace. Moreover, there’s the whole Google OS to consider.
@Kevin.
Please tell me what you are doing on a Technology blog? If you can’t grasp the concept of why the Chrome is important for Google or how it makes money, then perhaps you shouldn’t be here.
Perhaps this will be a little more suitable for you.
http://www.theballetblog.com/
And how much money did Netscape make off their browser? Did it consolidate their market share in the search engine marketplace?
Both FireFox and Safari make tons of money. Money which, incidentally, comes from Google since its all from that little search bar on the top right. Do a little research.
Netscape made a lot of money for their investors. As memory serves they were also the fastest company at that time to reach 100m in revenue.
Firefox is paid 75m a year from google for sending searches to their site… so if google can capture a large share that’s less money they have to pay out.
I doubt though they will get to 10% that fast.
Exactly.
Hey Kevin, Netscape didn’t have a search engine. Guess what? Google does.
What did IE do for MS? Even to this day, it drives a lot of traffic to Bing and MSN. In fact, when the IE8 updates were pushed to users, Bing’s share increased (I’m not saying this is the only reason, Bing is neat by itself).
Chrome is also central to Google’s OS strategy. Like Igor said, get off TechCrunch if you don’t know shit.
that mean. but i like it
Wow, talk about no understanding of the current marketplace. I hope you don’t make business decisions in your day job!
Been using Chromium as a default browser using the TC Chromium updater. So far so good. Has a little quirks with the video playback, but over all, its pretty damn good. One Love.
Using Chromium on the Mac we have been testing our realtime analytics app, which is heavy on JavaScript, with a very large DOM, and integration of multiple flash plugins on a page and have not experienced a single problem.
Speed has also been great, especially since we are pushing the boundaries quite a bit. It feels like Chromium might actually be a bit snappier than Safari 4.
I think that Explorer will continue to lag far behind unless they manage to cut themselves off from their past and adopt one of the open source engines. It isn’t that hard for me to imagine that some webapp developers will soon stop supporting IE7 (we don’t) and IE may drop to 30% or less in certain market segments sooner than later.
There is an entire ecosystem of people who simply don’t care about IE anymore.
I’m loving Chrome. I find it about twice as fast as Firefox. Only thing I’m missing is the Delicious plugin and (ironically) the Google toolbar so I can see when emails come in.
I noticed that when I had a popular link to my blog on Hacker News the other day, the % using Chrome shot up to 23%!
why don’t you get dev version and install Gmail checker?
too little too late
I love Chrome but I’ve found out in the past two days that most of my students haven’t heard of it!!! Google, you need to invest more in advertising for Chrome.
It’s gradual adoption. Nobody knew what Firefox was when I was in high school, and that was only four (five?) years ago. Now it’s the default browser in virtually every school I walk into.
It’ll take time, but with the Chrome OS on the way + Google’s tendency to rely on word-of-mouth, I have no doubt that growth will continue.
Chrome rules, but they really need to get some decent plugin functionality happening. Awesome plugins of win are the reason I’ve stuck with firefox so far.
Everyone should do their part, to get people to migrate from IE to a modern browser (Chrome or otherwise).
Try the following Acid3 test, on IE 8 (or earlier) and compare the results to Firefox 3.5, Chrome 2, Safari 4 and/or Opera 10 (see Wikipedia, for a description of Acid3).
http://acid3.acidtests.org/
You should see results, like this:
Chrome 2.0 – 100/100
Safari 4.0 – 100/100
Opera 10 – 100/100
Firefox 3.5.3 – 93/100
IE 8 – 20/100
Now…try viewing the following HTML5 video, with IE 8 (or earlier). You CANNOT!
http://demo.spr...core.com/video/
Try viewing this same video with Chrome 3+ or Safari 4. You CAN! And, it looks AWESOME!
Microsoft prefers to do what it wants, the way it wants, whenever it wants. And, as a result of IE’s large market share, this makes the lives of web developers miserable & stifles web innovation.
Let’s fix it:
- Encourage/help your family & friends, to move to a modern browser.
- Encourage your employer, to use a modern browser (or install a 2nd, if there’s an IE dependency).
- Have modern browsers installed on shared computers (libraries, schools, internet cafes, …).
- Buy PCs from vendors who default to a modern browser (e.g. Sony & Apple).
- Buy smartphones, eReaders & other mobile devices, equipped with modern browsers.
- Buy game consoles, TVs, set-top boxes, etc., equipped with modern browsers.
Chrome shows 100/100 in Acid3 test, but the resulting page does not match the reference rendering.
They can do it.
Most internet users are noobs who don’t ever switch the browser that came with their machine.
It’s reason why IE has dominated the marketshare for so long (with a shitty browser).
So Google can engineer and advertise all they want, but it won’t help these noobs switch. So what can they do? They can work with PC makers and get them to use Chrome as the default browser. If they sign up enough partners, they could easily hit 10%.
They’ve already got Sony in the US: http://bit.ly/4DQ1cn
I have been such a Firefox fan for so many years now… and I still love it. It is still the default browser on my home desktop. That said I find myself using Chrome most often these days. I sometimes have both open… intending to use Firefox most of the time, but I find myself using Chrome more often. I’m kind of browser agnostic (well… I have an “anything but IE” rule). I use Chrome, Firefox, Safari (Windows and iPhone versions), and occasionally Opera.
and how big is the Mac marketshare again? yea… “Google’s 3 percent share should see a fairly big bump from Mac users who will at least try it out”…it might go from 3% to 3.5% if they are lucky
Not using Chrome unless it has extensions; I use Yammerfox and Forecastfox every day. As a web developer, Firebug and Yslow makes it a non-issue.
Firebug is hard to beat, but Chrome’s built-in developer functionality works quite well, too.
I will move to Chrome when plug-ins are available; specifically, or something similar to xmarks, clipmarks, & Adblock.
Oh yeah, can’t forget Adblock!
I won’t even consider using Chrome as my default (I do play in it occasionally) until there’s an adblock equivalent. It’s scary what the web looks like without adblock!
Since ads are Google’s primary (only?) revenue source, this may not ever happen!
10% too less.. Even if they don’t want they will grow more thant 10%
lets note the thread and come back to this thread after one year.
Hey TC folks, is there a way we can have this post come back after one year. I know mike likes these stuff.
cheers, Nag
It’s very fast and looks good. Without Flashblock, however, it’s unusable on today’s web. If and when it gets that, I’ll be happy to use it more.
way to go chrome! love its speed, simplistic UI design and support from open source community
Gave chrome a whirl for about a week and loved it.
Ever since, I keep accidentially trying to use Chrome shortcuts on firefox such as google searching the the address bar. T_T
I just wish there were more addons on it, like NoScript or an ad blocker or something. I also like how each tab is it’s own process.
Lovin’ it as my default browser.
I really hope Chrome takes off soon with more website support. I keep going back to Firefox because it’s compatible with 99 percent of the websites out there and I don’t like to switch back and forth with different browers. FF feels so bloated in comparison to chrome (even without addons) and it crashes on me way too many times when I do a bit of heavy tab browsing. Chrome is less about dealing with the browser and more about getting more accomplished by forgetting about the browser and reading more websites.
Gee, I wish I’d saved all the URLs of previous reports of promised dates for Chrome Mac
Chrome is missing one key thing… listening to color profiles properly. I’m pretty much bound to FF because of this (not that it’s bad, I do like FF and it’s vast extension system).
I use a wide gamut monitor and everything is day-glow/neon if the app isn’t color managed.
Chrome 3 is very slick. I’m torn between it and Firefox — the add-ons are making all the difference, here, so I hope Chrome’s extension support is *REALLY* good.
I am going to give it a shot since a new version is out and see if I like it better than Firefox. What ever happened to I Explorer. Microsoft doesn’t seem to care that they aren’t competitive in a number of businesses.
Other than bookmarking, Mac Chromium seems ready to go for me. Linux version looks good, too. Of course, as long as Windows machines come with IE, that’s all most people are going to use, yuck.
Can’t understand why if a PC user knows about Chrome, s/he won’t use it. Its installation is trivial and it is really better than IE. I am have been using it since it first launched. I must be missing something?
If it had an ad blocker to kill all those ad-sense ads, then it might be worth looking at.
I have been impressed at the speed at which Chrome has progressed. While I’m a huge fan of Firefox and respect all the work the community has done to drag the web forward, it just isn’t enough. Firefox in my personal experience suffers serious memory and stability issues, that just haven’t been resolved. Bring on the browser wars.
I don’t understand why everyone talks about Chromium – I am using the Google Chrome for mac beta – have been for more than a month. On version 4 and use it as my main browser – it may not be production quality but it beats firefox hands down.
Where’d you download the beta from? I can’t find it on Google’s site. Only allows you to sign up for notice of when version 1 is released.
I have been using Google chrome since the day it was launched .. I like it for its speed .. actually I m die heart fan of Mozilla Firefox .. I cant work on a computer which doesn’t have firefox installed .. What chrome is missing is extensions add ons .. and ofcourse … Google toolbar
Best,
Daina
I’d be surprised if they really aimed for “just” 10 percent. Once you reach that kind of market share you certainly want to attain more.
One too many currently’s in that sentence.
“The first is that while Chrome currently has just under 3 percent of the browser market currently”
Firefox is just as fast with about 30 plugins on my machine, so no need to run CrippleWare with no features that’s owned by spooks only interested in harvesting your data.
Some about:config tweaks, sqlite pruning and optimization, and a few hundred MB Ram Drive with cache and profile dir mapped to it so it’s running in RAM instead of on Disk.
Startup is about 1.5 seconds slower, pageloads no notable difference and in some cases are faster than Chrome 3 and i have thousands of extra features that boosts productivity further.
I guess people would hand over all their data for a free lollypop these days.
yay.. I just really can’t wait.. really!
I am sure all of those selling the wonders of Firefox for Mac have not run into the troubles some of us have faced with the upgrade to 3.5…
Talk about crippled software. I can no longer install any version of Firefox on my iMac. And, it isn’t only me. Mac and Mozilla forums are full of horror stories about this piece of crippled software.
I have been a long-time and devoted used of Firefox but have now switched to Apple’s Safari. Not exactly what I wanted or need but serviceable nevertheless.
I will not go back to Mozilla given their disdainful approach to fixing obvious bugs in a new release. If you find this hard to believe, take a peek at some of the on-line forums. I don’t have the time to waste to try and get Mozilla’s buggy software up and working.
I am looking forward to Google’s release of a polished version of Chrome and will be one of its first adopters.
donviejo, are you still reading this page? The only problem I’m aware of in moving to Firefox 3.5 on the Mac is possible loss of passwords, for which there is usually a simple solution. I haven’t come across horror stories of crippled software. Could you be more specific?
dont forget chrome for linux
what about chrome for linux!