Habitually Good

There has been a lot of criticism for Google Chrome as a browser. People have been cribbing on how it crashes, doesn’t have plugins, is half-baked, and so on. I liked Chrome and have been using it exclusively since its launch. Its a rare day when I launch either IE or Firefox.

So, I wondered, how Chrome is doing outside my PC and decided to check out the visitors on my blog for the month of January. Here’s a distribution of the visitors for this month by browser:

Before I tell you which one is which (as if I need to tell you and its not obvious), take a look at the numbers from May last year. Back then, Firefox was 56%, IE was 39%, Safari 3%, and others 5%.

This year (the numbers on the left), Firefox is 47%, IE is 35%, Safari is 3%, and others are 1%.

Google Chrome is 14%. Chrome has obviously become browser of choice for many people (such as for me). What’s surprising is that it has converted more Firefox (9% loss) users as compared to IE (4% loss) users. This begs the question, are people switching from Firefox to Chrome for the same reasons for which they switched from IE to Firefox in the first place (assuming that everyone used IE at one time)?

It looks to me that Chrome is a major contender in the browser market. Of course, my data is from the tiny sliver of the total Internet population that visits this site, and is representative of certain subset of people (after all IE still rules as the most popular browser). Wikipedia has a great page which details much more authoritative statistics collected by various sources.

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