Earlier this week, Profy.com’s Svetlana Gladkova sent an email reminding me that Google’s Chrome Browser was one month old. How time flies, and how quickly we forget: or at least I did. After my initial few posts and thoughts, Google Chrome has fallen off my attention radar since it is not available for my preferred computing platform – OX X. I typically divide my browsing time between Safari and Camino.
I have checked it out occasionally by booting it up on Windows running via Parallels on my MacBook. Apparently, I am part of the median: Svetlana has been tracking the usage using Google Analytics, Clicky and Net Applications has seen a gradual decline in the usage. Gone is the download Chrome link from the Google home page. She points out that there are some fixes the browser needs and as a result Google might be quietly taking a step back. (Related Post: Why Chrome isn’t a killer browser just yet.)
Svetlana is right in being cautious on the chances of the Google browser, though I am not sure how to view the fact that it now accounts for about 5.6% of the traffic to GigaOM and now ranks as the fourth most usage browser. Across our network, here Chrome’s share of total visits by site: 6.13% (jkOnTheRun), 5.78% (OStatic), 5.06% (WebWorkerDaily), 3.09% (NewTeeVee), 2.43% (Earth2Tech) and 2.24% (TheAppleblog). [If you want to share information about your website/service in comments, it would be pretty cool.]
Those numbers can of course mean many things, like I have a lot of readers at Google. Of course, they remind me that I need to use Windows more often. Jokes aside, I think Google isn’t likely to give up on this browser for anytime soon. There are many reasons why they won’t let it become their Waterloo.
Google has realized that web is no more a mere collection of plain web pages or simple interface to databases. If not today then sometime in the near future we would expect equality in the experience (if not feature parity) between desktop and web applications. It is a future where browsers can’t be just html renderers but containers for a runtime environment. Anyway follow Svetlana – I have a sneaky suspicion she would be following Chrome’s progress (or lack of it) for a while.
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