I predicted that Chrome would eat into Firefox market share. Turns out that didn’t happen, at least according to StatCounter.

Chrome hit 1% share pretty much on launch day, then stayed there. Presumably a lot of people tried it then went back to Firefox/IE.

I’ve been using Chrome as my main browser since it launched and I’ve not found any rendering problems to speak of so I guess the lack of interest must be related to it’s non existent extensibility model. Use Roboform? Not with Chrome you don’t!

As a developer I can see the problem with supporting plugins – you have no control over them and a badly written one can kill your application, damage your users’ data and leave them with a bad feeling about your app. On the other hand it’s expected these days that browsers are extendable, especially by the power users that Chrome will appeal to.

There’s also inertia to consider – you have to give people a compelling reason to swap. I happen to like the Chrome UI, speed and general usability over Firefox but I’m also not a big plugin user (although I do miss the Google toolbar and I’m baffled as to why it’s functionality isn’t built into Google’s own browser).

So I guess no extensibility and no other features to make up for it’s absence == people sticking with Firefox. For now at least.

Google Chrome should need no introduction. In the past few days the buzz on the net has been about nothing else and I'm not going to repeat everything that's been said about it here. Put simply, Chrome is a brand new browser from Google, based on the open source and standards compliant Webkit engine. There are a bunch of other cool things going on under the hood that make it pretty compelling technically but that's not really what I want to look at here.

I'm trying it out and so far I like what I see. It's fast - really fast - seems stable and has some lovely UI touches. It does need some plugin support and I'm amazed they didn't integrate google bookmarks into it but for a version 1 product it's remarkably complete.

From the perspective of this site though the question is: Will Chrome overtake firefox / IE as the browser of choice?

Actually that's an almost impossible question to answer because generic browser stats are impossible to find so working out which one is more popular isn't easy. It depends on the site's target audience - sites concerned with web development will be 85% firefox but apple.com is probably 85% Safari! 

I think I can make a few assumptions though. To start with I think that firefox is used, by and large, by people who actually know it exists. By that I mean people who are interested in technology or the internet at large and are comfortable with experimenting on their PC. The archetypical "Power user" if you will.

There are an awful lot of other people out there who just use the browser that came with their PC - IE on a Windows box and Safari on the Mac. Those people will be harder to reach because by their nature they're not interested in changing something that already works for them.

Then there are corporates, who are a law unto themselves. Some won't touch firefox because it's not supported by MS. Some won't touch IE because of percieved security holes. Some don't care.

Chrome is really good, especially for a version 1 product and it can only get better with time. So here's my prediction: Chrome will eat significanty into the Firefox ("power user") market. If you own a website, give it 3 months and you'll see Chrome eating into firefox in your browser stats. I don't think it'll dent IE much, not because it's worse than IE but because google have some work to do in convincing IE users to switch.

And Safari? Google need to make a mac version first!

Microsoft Silverlight is, from the consumer's point of view Microsoft's answer to Adobe Flash. It enables very pretty, very rich user experiences on websites, effectively letting web applications have the power and sophistication usually reserved for the thick clients.

Flash is well established in the web world so to some extent Microsoft are playing catchup with silverlight. I'm talking about Silverlight 1.1 / 2.0 here - the one we (developers) were all waiting for. Silverlight 1.0 was basically a technology preview that had as much in common with Silverlight 2 as Javascript has with Java.

There is one single and very simple reason why Silverlight will go places: Developer adoption. Developing in Flash requires learning a whole new toolset. Silverlight enables any C# coder to use their existing skills and development environments to create web content. No messy HTML, no javascript, no page postbacks and stateless environments. Well, mostly. Running in a browser gives you some limitations and XAML is a bit crazy at times but at least it's all within a pretty familiar conceptual framework. (If you're a developer reading this, ScottGu's blog is a good place to start)

There's some incredible technology behind it in terms of how they've managed to take the 30-odd MB .NET Framework and fit all the useful bits into a 2.5MB browser dowload. That's not the point of this post though. The question is - will Silverlight take off, or will it languish forgotten in the dusty technology archives?

A few thoughts:

1) We won't see entire applications done as huge silverlight downloads. Not in this version. A complex business app will still be better off as a thick client. Plus in it's current form (beta 2 as I'm writing this) it's still a bit rough around the edges. I'm looking forward do the day when we will be able to do that but my gut says it's a few versions away.

2) Because it's instantly accesisble to developers we'll start seeing it crop up in all sorts of places - as non-web developers realise they can create web content they'll start using it more. I can see it in internal corporate intranets.

3) The need for a supported runtime player could really hurt it. In that sense it's no worse than flash, but flash has had the time to become adopted on all the major platforms - in fact it's one of the few "essential" plugins you really need when setting up a new machine. MS need to keep up the runtime support if they want to break Adobe's grip on that space. 

If you hadn't guessed, I'm quite excited by it. Personally I'm not in love with how we do web development today - I think we've stretched a whole bunch of unsuitable technologies to breaking point in order to get where we are now. We need a new techology to take us forward and Silverlight might just be it.

The impetus has to come from developers though - I don't think users care how their experience is delivered as long as it works. So Silverlight will become another plugin you need to download in order to make things go. It'll probably become as popular as flash in time but if it was going to be the backbone of "Web 3.0" (or whatever idiot name the marketing types come up with) then pretty much everybody developing web apps now would have to stop and start again in Silverlight. Which ain't going to happen.

The final verdict: Great technology, will become adopted but won't set the world on fire. Yet.