Google Chrome: 1% Market Share In Less Than a Day
Spoiler Warning : While I intend to develop this blog into a web-design and UI resource and discussion lounge, I cannot refrain myself from tracking the progress of Google Chrome.
While the early release of the Chrome comic might have changed the way Google went about launching its new browser, it definitely did not hurt Chrome’s early success. According to data from Net Applications, Chrome captured more than 1% of the browser market within its first day of release. Since then, it has been growing steadily and is now at around 1.5%, as both technology blogs and mainstream publications have written about it almost nonstop since Monday morning. Good Timing Even if it was accidental, the timing of Chrome’s release could have hardly been any better.
Good Timing
Even if it was accidental, the timing of Chrome’s release could have hardly been any better. As the news leaked during Labor Day, which, by all measures, is traditionally a very slow news day, anticipation built quickly in the blogosphere and Chrome easily dominated the tech news cycle for the coming days. Also, the fact that Google streamed the announcement live and had the browser ready for download even before the announcement had finished surely helped to keep the momentum going.
What About the Rest?
In this short time, Chrome managed to become the 4th most used browser on the net after Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari. As Chrome only runs on Windows so far and given that Safari has a far smaller user base on Windows, Chrome is now the third most used browser for Windows users.
Here are RWW, we have been seeing the percentage of Chrome users rise steadily over the last few days. As of this morning, about 3.3% of RWW readers were using Chrome.
This quick ascent for Chrome is even more astonishing, given that Apple had to resort to all kinds of tricks to even get to 0.2% of the market.
Firefox and Safari Lose
Clearly, there is a demand for a better browsers. According to StatCounter, Chrome’s users have been coming from Firefox and Safari, while IE actually gained market share. Most of current Chrome users are still early adopters, but over time, we think that Chrome will mostly drain users away from Opera and IE, as its simplicity and ease of use would most probably appeal most to these two groups, while a lot of advanced Firefox users won’t be able to switch until Chrome supports extensions.
My Interpretation
While I am not a certified industry observer, I can comment on this Owing to my extensive work in the web-develoment and promoion area. The Chrome does sure canabalized FF users as i thought, coz’ the die-hard MS fans and dumb-ass IE users will never feel the urge to experiment and explore any way!!?? ha ha?
But, as it hapens I cannot use Chrome for my day to day browsing habbits, as It depends a lot on the 20+ extensions in FF that makes my work a breeze or so i think. May be I’ll get quick peeks in Google services using Chrome. (As u understand I use GMail, GCAl, Gdocs, Blogger, Adwords, Adsense and Analytics not to mention Webmaster central)
For others I have FF2 and 3 (yes FF3 doesn’t yet supports my fav extensions(or the developers of that extensions are more lazy than me, it seems.)
Keep on guys, In the next post I’ll explore the implications of Chrome in Detail.
–Ramkumar.
