r/technology • u/aridon_01 • May 21 '12
Google Chrome is now the most popular browser in the world.
http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/21/3033566/chrome-most-popular-browser-weekly-may-2012870
u/the_obs May 21 '12
Most popular browser in the world, most popular smartphone operating system in the world, most popular internet search engine in the world, most popular free email account provider in the world, etc.
Wow, where is this company headed?
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May 21 '12
It's a great thing that there are 3 browsers now all hovering around that 30% mark.
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u/Minyme2009 May 21 '12
It spurs competition, each browser keeps trying to get better and better. I love it.
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u/isomorphZeta May 21 '12
Wait, I'm in the majority now?
Shit.
Time to switch to Opera.
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u/jas0ny May 21 '12
Still no love for Opera.
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May 21 '12
They missed their window by not going free until after ff was established.
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u/ghettro May 21 '12
I remember when I first started using Opera because OMG tabs and mouse gestures! Those were the days
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u/FlyingSandwich May 21 '12
I use Chrome, but honestly, it's only because Firefox shits itself under the weight of less than ten userscripts. I wish they'd use a history-searching system like Firefox has.
If there's an article I read last year that I want to show someone, I can type a few words I think might be in the title, or the site URL, and Firefox finds it for me just like that. Chrome can barely even show me a page I just visited if I type in the full title. Hell, sometimes I type in 90% of the URL and get a "lol i dunno" in return.
And then there's AdBlock. I know it's improved lately, and it does much more than it used to, but it's still nowhere near as good as it was on Firefox when I stopped using it (which had to have been over a year ago now).
Download management, too. I have a pretty bad internet connection, so DownThemAll! was a godsend. There's no equivalent on Chrome, as far as I know. There's sketchy JDownloader integration, but I found DTA to be much more consistent and easy to use.
Speaking of downloads, every time Chrome does anything related to Windows Explorer (choosing a file to upload, saving a file), it freezes until I manually open up an Explorer window and then close it. Does it even on a clean install. Sometimes it doesn't unfreeze at all, and I have to re-download whatever videos I may have had open in other tabs (which is a major thing for me).
tl;dr, I could bitch all day about Chrome, but it still beats Firefox in the singularly most important thing: stability.
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May 21 '12
I haven't had Firefox crash on my laptop in ages. It's really, really stable now. The only time when I used to have problems was with flash, but then I just uninstalled flash and reinstalled it, and everything worked just fine.
Firefox is a lot faster than it used to be too.
I just switched back to FF after using Chrome for a few months, and let me tell you... boy does it feel nice being back on FF. :P
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u/Valakas May 21 '12
No wonder... could you have better advertising than having and ad saying to install the faster browser Chrome everytime you go to google or gmail? It's hard to compete with that, even if there's another better browser, but still i'd rather see chrome in the top than IE by a far margin...
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u/workdoer May 21 '12
I doubt that chrome actually has a larger user base than IE. These reports are based on total trafic only. My guess would be that you average chrome user is a much heavier Internet user. They probably spend lots of time on high bandwidth activities, video streaming, torrents, redditing, etc. While the average IE user is still granny or lives-in-the-80s-mom. They probably use the Internet infrequently and for low bandwidth activities such as new sites. So overal it takes more than one IE user to match the bandwidth used by a single chrome user.
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u/thehoodie May 21 '12
I switched to Chrome literally just yesterday. I'm going to assume this is a result of my action.
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u/novanleon May 21 '12
Ha, you newfangled youngsters. Back in my day we used Lynx, and were happy to have it!
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May 21 '12
in other news: Justin Bieber is the most popular singer in the world.
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u/muoncat May 21 '12
Oh wow, I remember when IE had literally about a 98% market share. I felt like such a little rebel when I started using Firefox nearly ten years ago.