by Marc
8. March 2009 21:14
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.