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Browser war, Firefox at 20%. Google Chrome what?

November 14, 2008 · Filed Under In Depth, Networking

This entry is part of the series Browser war

After more than two months since the Chrome launch, the made-by-Google browser that should have revolutionized the whole market and the Internet perception itself among the users, the nowadays scenario is very much different from what the events anticipated then. Not only Chrome hasn’t been able to take a significant amount of netizens, but even its undoubted performance leadership will soon be called into question by the new releases from the competitors.

At least for now, the third great browser war aroused by Google to win the new generation web has been confined in a few skirmish of no particular importance. At the beginning of September, profiting by the coverage that the entire Internet gave to the event, Chrome’s share was gone up to 3.1% of the browsers market according to the GetClick data reported by NewScientist, a certainly awesome result considering that it had practically been achieved overnight and by releasing only the first early version of the software.

By the half of October, however, GetClick recorded an upright usage drop down to a 1.5% share. The data has remained stable until now, a clear evidence of how someone have actually adopted the new browser but on the whole, passed by the elation for the novelty, the sensation for the V8 JavaScript engine performance and everything Google have scratched not so much of the current market leadership of the strange twosome Internet Explorer - Mozilla Firefox.

As a further confirmation of how much this leadership is essentially unchanged, according to the Net Applications esteems during the entire month of October Firefox has been very close to the psychological landmark of the 20% market share, experiencing an average growth of a 0.51% share compared to the previous month of September. Firefox grows, and this is the most glaring sign of the fact that the open source browsers cannibalization that Chrome could have carried hasn’t been there, at least for now.

Even better, there is someone like the Opera CEO Jon S. von Tetzchner stating that the Google browser has had a positive outcome on the popularity of the Norwegian software. “The effect of Chrome so far has been 20 percent more downloads every day. It’s fairly logical when you think about it, because the biggest hurdle we have is all those people that don’t realize there’s an alternative in the market” Tetzchner says. Not only Chrome wouldn’t have harmed the “alternative” browsers, but it would have been even useful to spread the consciousness of their availability.

As I’ve written before, in the new browser war to have a great brand (and surely “Google” is so in years) isn’t enough to win but it is needed to demonstrate in the field the technologies effectiveness and the ability to meet the concrete users demands. Mozilla, from this standpoint, is dropping some heavy jollies: the Firefox 3.1 beta 1 brings performances on par with the Google Chrome ones, thanks to the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine that would be able to increase up to 40 times the JS code rendering speed.

Firefox 3.1 will feature the geo-localization tool Geode developed within the Mozilla Labs, an anonymous browsing mode similar to the one already available in Chrome, Safari and the next IE 8 (in short the so-called “porn mode”), the Opera “speed dial” for a quick access to preferred URLs and more. The red panda browser derives its features from all of its competitors, and the previews talk about a new killer-release able to snatch further market shares from Internet Explorer, literally leaved in the dust according to the first comparative benchmarks.

To sum up the current (battle)field situation, in the new browser war ignited by the Mountain View exploit the protagonists are resolute to not to grand an easy ground to Chrome while IE continues its slow but steady appeal loss among the public. After having set fire on the market, Google is currently playing the role of an indecipherable sphinx with a seeming identity and ideas crisis.

In its launch days Chrome was even advertised on the minimal search engine homepage, now that message is gone and, apart of the updates and some new beta releases the Google Browser isn’t giving particular signs of the will to fight against the opponents. What is sure is that Chrome has contributed to warm the competition among the browsers like it hadn’t happened in the recent past, and it’s easy to bet that there will be new chances to talk about it asap.