Geek Browser Usage

17 commentsWritten on July 25th, 2011 by
Categories: Off Topic

About a year and a half ago, i had a short post about the increasing userbase of Chrome. It included the following graph:

image

I was interested to see how browser usage amongst us (geeks) has evolved since then. In the original post, i mentioned that i still used Firefox at home (where it's a surprisingly critical tool for most of us geeks) but had started using Chrome at work. These days i don't have the patience to wait for Firefox to start, so i'm using Chrome both at home and at work. Not only because of speed and just an overall nicer user experience (IMO), but also because it wastes a lot less memory than Firefox (a pet peeve of mine).

So i quickly gathered the numbers of your visits to this blog between February 2010 and June 2011 to see how it was evolving. Obviously, it's a relatively small sample since i'm only averaging a little over 1000 views a day in that period, but it's not exactly insignificant either.

The colors for each browser remained the same, so it's easy to compare with the previous image. While i no longer use Firefox myself, i was surprised to see its market share (at least among my readers) drop from 70% to slightly over 30% in less than 3 years. That is quite a drop, though i do expect the majority of tech-related sites/blogs to have similar drops in their Firefox stats because i can't really think of a reason why my readers would differ significantly statistically in browser usage from most other tech-related blogs/sites. Meanwhile, we notice that IE is doing a remarkable impersonation of Microsoft's stock value.

Did you change browsers in the past year/months? If so, what switch did you make, and why? In my case: faster startup time, better experience and less memory usage made me switch from Firefox to Chrome. How about you? Also, with Microsoft's renewed focus on the browser, how likely are you to switch to IE9 or IE10? I don't use IE9 because i didn't like the UI, but have to admit that i haven't really given it a fair chance. The fact that i hardly use Windows at home obviously doesn't help either :) . And what are your thoughts on Firefox turning things around? I don't really like their odds, though i hope things remain largely competitive over the next few years.

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 25th, 2011 at 21:41 and is filed under Off Topic. You can subscribe to any comments to this entry via RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • Jef Claes

    I must be the only one using IE ;)

    My browser history: IE – FireFox – Chrome – IE.

    Made the change to IE9 beta, just because I wanted to give MS a fair chance. I’m still using it today. I have little to no problems with IE, still using FireFox+Firebug for js debugging though.

    • http://davybrion.com Davy Brion

      didn’t mention this in the post but i definitely love the Chrome developer tools, especially for JavaScript debugging

      though today i stumbled into IE8′s JavaScript debugger at work and i thought it was quite nice as well… i should install IE9 at work to see how much it has improved, but i’m expecting all kinds of work-related stuff to break when i do so i think i’ll refrain from doing that ;)

  • Emanuel Haisiuc

    I have been using Google Chrome from version 2. Before that I have been using Firefox from version 1, but abandoned it because of memory usage, as you have said, and poor Flash plugin. I starting to like Internet Explorer again, but I won’t be using it because it misses the feature of remembering the last browsing session. Or I have missed to find it, so I am sticking with Chrome.

  • Daniel

    For me, Chrome is still something unfinished, even though it implements more html5 and css3 than Firefox.
    Inspect element is far for Firebug, AdBlock for Chrome is not working as ABP for Firefox
    For just browsing I’m sometimes using Chrome but my default browser (for development also) is still Firefox – currently v. 5.
    Moreso, I could say that Chrome is a Porsche and Firefox an SUV.

    • http://davybrion.com Davy Brion

      just wondering what kind of problems you’re having with the ABP plugin for Chrome? i’ve been using it for a few months now, and i hardly ever see ads

      • Daniel

        Compared with FFX version is more difficult to add items to block list.
        And I can’t get used to the dev tools, Firebug seems so much more intuitive.

      • DR

        For starters, the Chrome AdBlock doesn’t properly block Youtube ads. Extremely annoying. Of course Google profits from this, which might explain why they don’t fix the issues that prevent AdBlock from working.

  • http://thezendev.com Dan Martin

    Switched from Firefox to Chrome about a year ago because Firefox was giving me too many performance issues. I still occasionally use it at home though. I never use IE unless forced to. I actually don’t really have anything against IE9, but I’ve found no reason to use it over the other browsers at this point.

  • http://budts.be/jeroen teranex

    Personally I really don’t understand what everybody likes so much about Chrome… There is ‘something’ (don’t know exactly what), which I feel is missing when I use Chrome. Maybe it is just because I have been using Firefox since 2003 (When it was still named Firebird, version 0.6). Currently I’m using Firefox 6.0 (beta channel) with the Pentadactyl add-on and I really like it.

  • Artem Koshelev

    I switched to Firefox from Opera few years ago for the

  • Artem Koshelev

    I switched to Firefox from Opera few years ago by the lack of Firebug and NoScript. I tried Chrome but it appears to be slower then Firefox on my netbook, when more than couple of tabs opened.

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_TKHCGNILTGGFZXUUKQUQGVRX6M Simon

    Been using Chrome for browsing for the past 18 months, FF is still my primary tool for developing though – Firebug I just find FireBug and some of the other extensions better than their counterparts in Chrome. IE… well we have to support that but It doesn’t get a good deal of usage from me, usually as an after thought as I’m doing cross browser stuff towards the end of things.

    I am a little surprised / dissapointed at how hungry Chrome seems to be though. Firefox will give me just 1 figure in Task Manager (usually about 140,000 – 200,000k. When I add up all the Chrome instances I’m up at about 250,000k – 350,000k

  • Battaile Fauber

    I’m slowly transitioning from FF to Chrome, mainly because there are some html5 sites that Chrome handles better.  The main thing keeping me tied to FF is that i’ve got a ton of addons that i love.

  • guest

    I’m using all 3. My main is usually Chromium, I use Firefox for some nice extensions and when Chromium doesn’t work, and IE9 for alternate logins. I hate all 3 with a passion. 

    I wish someone would create a USABLE web browser. I already gave up on a “good” browser – I’ll settle for something that doesn’t have serious memory leaks, doesn’t stay at 100% CPU and doesn’t crash constantly. 

    Firefox and Chromium leak memory badly. I have 8GB of RAM and it’s still not enough for these beasts. The difference is Firefox slows down badly as well and crashes right around 2GB, Chrome lasts much longer and can go up to even 5GB before I can’t stand it anymore and restart it. I guess that’s thanks to the dozens of processes Chromium spawns.

    On the other hand, Chrome (and Chromium) is Google’s spyware, and it should still be called a pre-release demo. Far from complete and full of issues (selecting text from pages doesn’t select the whole block, the ridiculous behavior when you save a file to a name that already exists, issues with adblocking, RTL support is utterly messed up, etc.)

    Am I really asking for too much?

  • Anonymous

    Yup, Chrome over here. Similar to your reasons: Speed + less UI noise.

  • Slo

    Used FF since beginning switched  to Chrome shortly after initial release. I still use FF at work since I’m better used to the environment and spoiled with Firebug (maybe I should try the Chrome developer tools). Chrome performs definitely  much better then FF . My favorite  chrome feature was the automatic update (I see FF is adopting that in the latest release), I wish MS would have implemented that with IE 6, how wonderful our world would look today :) .

  • http://scottkantner.com Scott Kantner

    I switched to Chrome (as much as possible) 6 or 8 weeks ago. Firefox started getting too heavy and slow.  There are still some older Javascript-based apps I have to use that Chrome can’t handle.

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