Five by Five

I’ve tried to resist the urge to write a post on the latest flavour of the month Google’s venture into the Browser market Chrome, guess my resistance isn’t that great. Being hailed by some as a market changer I have a somewhat more sceptical view of what impact Chrome will have on the market. Whilst there are obviously some good innovations in the browser, the one process per tab thing being in my mind the most notable, what impact will Chrome really have? This has been quite a point of debate here in the Five by Five Tech Team. I decided to give it some time (well 3 weeks!) and have a look at some of the stats I have available to me. Taking a sample of a few sites with widely different audiences I thought I’d take a look at the impact Chrome has had.

Using a UK based consumer site, a European based consumer site, and a Global based product site to give a relatively wide spectrum of sites, here are the last three weeks stats:

So what does this tell us? Well not a lot really, its still early days and the stats are from a very narrow time frame. The most interesting thing I can see is when you factor in the type of audience. The UK based consumer site is not for a very tech savvy crowd, nearly 90% of users are using IE, here Chrome has made little difference to the browser share, 0.3% which users these were previously is hard to tell, they could have been IE or Firefox. However if you switch over to the Global site which is very tech savvy, high percentages of Firefox and Opera, Chrome is already at 3.2%, however it would seem that most of these users were previously Firefox users, perhaps a worrying sign for Mozilla?

I can’t say I am surprised by these stats and to be honest, it’s what I’d expect given that the only users of Chrome will more than likely be the tech savvy early adopters. Google’s challenge will be to get the browser out to the masses, and if anyone is going to succeed in this it’s them. What impact overall they have remains to be seen, as I’ve said before, one of the keys to breaking Microsoft’s dominance of the browser market is if they can also get into the enterprise market, something which Mozilla is probably still failing to do.

Even if Chrome doesn’t manage to become a mainstream browser, hopefully at least it will help drive innovation further in the browser market, something which has been a very hot topic this year.

Tags: browsers, Chrome, firefox, Google, ie, Microsoft, opera, safari

This entry was posted on Monday, September 22nd, 2008 at 1:10 pm and is filed under Front Page Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.