Here’s what the web browser market looks like right now: 70% Internet Explorer 20% Firefox 10% Opera and then the rest fighting over the scraps. (Here’s what the Business Hacks demographic uses: 56% Firefox 34% Internet Explorer 5% Safari 4% Opera and 2% other.) One analyst has guessed that Google’s new Chrome browser will reach 20% in two years–partially because it will be installed on Android phones and partially because it’s just that damn good.
It is good, as and it’s fast, but it’s much more useful as a replacement for IE users than Firefox users (which make up the majority of our readership). Here’s why:
1) Chrome is faster than IE, allows you to import your settings from it, and is willing to do thing like store your passwords. Plus, it has that really cool feature in which every new page you open up has tabs of your favorite sites on it. It is everything that IE is and more.
2) While Chrome doesn’t seem to suffer from any of the stalling problems that Firefox succumbs to once I’ve got more than ten browser windows open, it doesn’t yet, as Rick pointed out yesterday, allow necessary extensions like Session Saver, ScreenGrab!, etc. If you use any of these extensions (and you should!), you’ll quickly realize how much you miss them if you start using Chrome.
In other words, that market share that Chrome’s going after will probably come from Internet Explorer users.
