Minimalist Geek

Part of the Reason Why Chrome Share Is Growing Slowly

Following my “Chrome market share and Matt Cutts” post yesterday I received a tweet from Matt Cutts himself asking me which browser I do use. I replied FF 3.5 and what compelling reason he could give me to use Chrome, since moving from IE to FF was an easy decision since there was a huge leap in quality and user experience.

As usual I kept on thinking on why a user using FF should decide to switch over to Chrome. Granted Chrome has a harder time penetrating the market since the browsers are now more mature. However, as usual there is always room for improvement.

For example, FF sucks up huge amounts of memory for no apparent reason. I usually keep FF open all day and hover between 8 tabs open at a time. Nonetheless this does not justify consuming over 200MB. And no I do not have a single add-on installed or shaky third party plug-in.

Even if that was the case, the browser should take care of that.

So to give Chrome a second chance, since the last time I tried it was months ago, today I decided to learn a bit more about how it works and the motivation behind it. For a quick introduction, this comic book style look at the technology and motivation for Chrome is great.

I agree completely with what the Google guys are trying to do with the web browser. The browser has to behave more like an OS, with proper process and memory management. As they outline, having the browser crash while editing an online document or email is a big deal.

So next, I decided to take Chrome for a spin once again. Plus points, minimalist design, better memory consumption, faster to load. On this last point I would need more time to see how it fares after three months worth of browsing history.

At this point I decided to import the FF3.5 settings, especially the saved passwords. Without those it would be a pain to initially re-enter all passwords I use. So I clicked on the wrench icon, clicked import, chose Firefox along with the option to import passwords. Everything seemed to work fine. I then browsed to one of my daily sites, and the login and password fields remained empty.

Quick search on Google returned “Chrome won’t import passwords from Firefox 3.5” support question. It seems Chrome cannot import passwords when they are saved in the sqlite database used to store FF settings.

Now, since I am a geek and want to try Chrome I will use it anyway, but what about the millions of Firefox users out there. The conversion funnel does not look rosy if after getting a percentage amount of users to download Chrome they discover that their passwords are not available. Those users will uninstall Chrome as quickly as they downloaded it.

This surely is affecting the adoption rate of Chrome. If I were Google I would give it high priority. I think Google Chrome is a great innovative browser so it would be a shame if adoption was suffering cause of a minor glitch in those important early minutes when a user is experimenting with a new product.

Chrome market share and Matt Cutts

Matt Cutts, a huge fan of Chrome, has just released his own website Google Analytics statistics to show that Chrome’s share of his website visitors has climbed. This on the first anniversary of Chrome.

He doesn’t of course base himself on those statistics to say Chrome’s market share is increasing, but quotes figures from Net Applications, StatCounter, and Clicky. They all put Chrome’s share around 3.5%. That’s all good and positive. More competition always leads to better products in the end.

However, I do not agree with Matt Cutts that “That’s pretty good for 12 months”. Why so? Well the Google homepage happens to be one of the most visited sites on the internet, not counting all the other domains, sub-domains, services, and of course YouTube.

Chrome was heavily promoted on these websites and yet after a year only 3.5% of people use it. I personally use Firefox, but do not consider myself a fanboy, in the sense that if something much better pops up I would switch without hesitation.

But it must be said that Firefox have managed the highly improbable with their web browser. Being the underdog at a time when Internet Explorer reigned supreme with over 85% share they steadily ate more of the pie to now being the dominant player putting Internet Explorer in second place.

I agree with Matt Cutts that Chrome is helping drive innovation, such as private browsing and un/dockable tabs, not to mention better speed and secure browsing. But saying 3.5% share is pretty good after a whole year of Google promotion (read millions of visitors) could have only been said by a fanboy

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