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.
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.
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 at 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. UPDATE: later in the day, Chrome is 8.95% in our browser stats over the past two days!
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.
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.
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We'll see if they still have 1% by next week. I used Chrome all day yesterday, probably not going to use it anymore. Love my add-ons!
Posted by: GundyGroup | September 4, 2008 9:52 AM
In all sincerity, I find the percentage of market share actually quite low, given the amount of press and bloggers attention the launch has received across the globe, aslo mainstream media.
And I don't blame the fact that there's no support for Mac / Linux yet.
The majority is still on Windows, Google has a significant means of distribution through it's search homepage (in Belgium, the Chrome download link was featured prominently on Google.be), and it was a lightweight, light-risk download from a household name.
1% is low, no matter how you spin it.
Posted by: Robin Wauters | September 4, 2008 10:11 AM
It will most likely be 1-2% more by the end of the day or at least by the end of the week as Google now is promoting it on their homepage.
I have to agree with GundyGroup in that I won't use it in replacement of my customized Firefox. However, we are not the majority and Internet Explorer users are. We'll just have to wait and see if they prefer Chrome over IE and how hard Google pushes their new browser.
Posted by: Kevin | September 4, 2008 10:12 AM
It will be better to be 1% at the end of the year. But I don't think so. This software is not mature and Firefox will not loose market because this app is produced by Google.
My verdict is some kind of failure. It will reach less than 5% in 2 years.
I love Firefox and still believe in Opera.
Posted by: Andy Gongea | September 4, 2008 10:17 AM
How many download Chrome just to test it out and still use something else as your browser? I am, just to see the hype and still stick to my Firefox.
Posted by: Ad Manager | September 4, 2008 10:23 AM
1% market share on day one is impressive for any browser, let alone that it is a BETA. I have had minimal problems with it, but it does need add ons and more control panels. Once it hits final release, Chrome will dominate! It is wicked fast in so many areas and I love that when stupid MySpace crashes it can only drop the tab instead of the entire browser!
Posted by: James | September 4, 2008 10:28 AM
Regarding percentage, I like the crash thing. When you type :% in your search-address bar it will die. This is truly amazing.
Posted by: Andy Gongea | September 4, 2008 10:33 AM
Google's relatively low market share is not unexpected considering that the browser market is relatively mature by Internet standards. Time will tell.
I certainly liked Chrome on first impression. Then I found it had significant bugs in dealing with Facebook's interface. It also couldn't cope with some advanced Javascript features of an online CMS I use. So I have dropped Chrome for Firefox. (Carrying on switching between the two didn't make much sense.) (See my Twitter posts)
So for now I'm sticking with Firefox, but I'll give Chrome another chance as they iron out the bugs.
Posted by: Roger | September 4, 2008 10:42 AM
I agree with other posters, I also downloaded it to test it out and that is all. Its real market share is no more than maybe 0.33% or so. Leading browser is IE followed with FF and with marginal support for Opera and Safari. Many others out there that don't matter including Chrome. Not that the ones that don't matter are bad - many good browsers out there.
Posted by: Tom | September 4, 2008 10:44 AM
Yeah, market share numbers in the short term include tire-kickers. Let's see where the number stabalizes at.
I disagree that IE will see a market share loss to Chrome though. Think about it - if IE users haven't been intrigued by Firefox will the download another browser? We continually overestimate how many people care about this stuff or even how many understand it. A lot of folks simply use IE because it's there and it works for them. The don't understand or even really care about a lot of the issues with alternate browsers. Security got a chunk of people to migrate, but those folks are on Firefox or Opera or Safari by now and IE7 plugged enough holes that it's less of an issue. Most of the people who continue to use IE will never move off it - they just want to get to Yahoo.com, CNN.com or something.
Posted by: rick | September 4, 2008 10:51 AM
Google is promoting Chrome on it home page and could get only 1% marketshare.
Posted by: TanNg | September 4, 2008 11:04 AM
I'd like to see these statistics in a few weeks time. It's way too early to say if these people will stick. Let's not forget Chrome is still very buggy. People might give up and switch back soon.
Posted by: Timen | September 4, 2008 11:07 AM
Nothing like distribution:
http://flickr.com/photos/tobiaspeggs/2828265192/
Can you imagine what someone would actually pay for advertising on Google's home page...
Posted by: tobias | September 4, 2008 11:29 AM
it's not an easy task to get even 1% market share or maintain it, plus lots of people will try and revert to what they were using. It's a beta and not ready for everyday use. We should see more credible figures in terms of percentage, downloads and usage after a month at least which will in all likelihood be quite insignificant comprising early adopters comfortable with using beta software as their main browser.
Who are they targeting, Firefox or Internet explorer users or did they just engineer a browser because they could according to their idea of how a browser should be.
I suspect its the latter, most internet explorer users don't 'choose' or seek out a browser they just use what's there, and most of these folks are scared of change - they don't want to mess too much with what's working for them, happy with what they have, indifferent or all 3. Now for these folks Google engineering means little and the UI is very different from what they are used to making it less appealing. To get these folks to adopt you will have to launch a very expensive and intensive marketing campaign, and hope to shift some percentage.
For Firefox users Chrome may be a interesting diversion, something to try out, but most users of Firefox use extensions and this will prevent them moving to Chrome.
Which means it has to be an experiment if they wanted to target Firefox they would have launched with extensions, if they wanted to target Explorer it would have a more familiar UI to shift those folks. Since this is a radical departure this is Google doing its thing. I don't think market share is even important to them, simply because whichever browser you use they win. They could eventually shift some Firefox users as they improve this but Internet explorer users are going to be tough to shift.
Posted by: Raul | September 4, 2008 11:31 AM
Impressive.
Posted by: David Risley
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September 4, 2008 12:36 PM
Curious as to how long they'll actually hold on to that.
Posted by: Chris Pallé
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September 4, 2008 12:41 PM
I think its going to go up, never mind hold still... but then that's just my 2c :)
Posted by: Kim
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September 4, 2008 12:46 PM
Chrome works well for some things. I'm a college student, and I used it to download about 30 ppt for my class materials. It's faster and simpler than Firefox for that. I make a web app with it just for my university site, for quick access from my desktop. Not a replacement for Firefox but useful for grab-n-go file downloads.
Posted by: rowanrook | September 4, 2008 1:36 PM
Lots of mention of market share, but none really on speed. I would consider myself a FF power user, and am typing this using FF. Chrome? Very fast. Will have to see how the next version of FF handles this. Don't plan on using it for my online banking yet!
Posted by: Rob | September 4, 2008 2:13 PM
There's still at list one thing to do. Right now, on my machine, there's a 7 processes called GoogleUpdate.exe, sitting, and doing nothing (I think). This processes cannot be killed by "End Process"
Posted by: krdr | September 4, 2008 3:54 PM
so far Chrome only seems usefull for plain surfing.
None of my work applications work
Cisco VPN client fails as needs active X
Citrix client fails, something about encryption not supported
My work web applications don't open under chrome
Posted by: Richards brother | September 4, 2008 8:40 PM
Clearly if everyone downloads the demo then stats will show this. As with most people I think it is a bad move by Google and one more step too far on privacy. How much do Google people to check the EULA before it goes out?
Posted by: Gareth Murran | September 5, 2008 12:15 AM
awesome.. even I was within the 1% and I really loved CHROME.. cheers
Posted by: quality website designing | September 5, 2008 12:47 AM
May it's beacaue new and Google product.
Posted by: Jack Carol | September 5, 2008 4:52 AM
Chrome is a better browser than Firefox for the simple reason that it has superior software architecture.
Google made some important decisions when it came to engineering their new browser, such as running each tab in a separate process and writing their own Javascript Virtual Machine (V8) from the ground up to do things right from the start, such as compiling javascript and doing precise garbage collection.
I downloaded it yesterday and I have been using it non-stop since. It is now my primary browser. There really is no contest when I compare it with Firefox, IE and Safari, all of which I have installed and continue to use.
Firefox is a much better browser than IE to be sure, but I've been having a lot of problems with Firefox for some time now. When I first started using Firefox, it was pretty stable, but somewhere along the line they managed to upgrade Firefox into less stable software.
Firefox 2 began to crash frequently and everyday. It became practically unuseable for me. I switched over to Firefo
Posted by: Richard Catto
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September 5, 2008 10:36 AM