Online media planning: September 2008 Archives

From the perspective of a digital agency, you sometimes get the feeling that the entire world is using either Firefox or Safari.

But in fact the real story of the last few years has not been the remarkable rise of Firefox (and I am a massive fan, of course!) but of the resilience in Internet Explorer's market share.

I cobbled together the graph below (click on it for a larger version) from browser statistics up until the end of Q2 2008 from TheCounter.com.  (This will understate the impact of the launch of Firefox 3 on the 17th of June - Wikipedia quotes a share of 19.73% for Firefox in August 2008.)

So Firefox has eaten into Internet Explorer's market share - but as of June 2008, IE still enjoyed 78.3% of browser usage.  Over the last two years, Microsoft's share of the browser market has dropped by just eight percentage points.  For the majority of users, there have not been compelling reasons to switch from a browser that is stable and works pretty well.

Those who were dissatisfied with Internet Explorer will already be using Firefox or Safari - and it is these early adopters who are most likely to jump once again over to Google Chrome.

I've been thinking for a while that the one area where Google's domination of search is just a tiny bit shaky is around control of the browser.  That's why I got excited about the 'Awesome Bar' in Firefox 3, with its convenient ability to search through your browser history. 

And suddenly it really does look like we might have another browser war on our hands.  Internet Explorer 8 is now available for download in its second pre-release beta.  And around an hour ago came the news that Google is launching a new open source browser - Google Chrome - tomorrow. 

There are signs that Google has acted somewhat hastily to get the launch of Chrome out the door.  They admit that they sent out a comic book release explaining the thinking behind chrome a little early.  And the browser's homepage - www.google.com/chrome - currently hosts a hand-coded 404 not found message.

So a quick take on this news.  Anything that speeds up or improves internet access can only be a good thing.  Pushing the envelope on the web browser could potentially kick start a new wave of site development as companies look to take advantage of new functionality.  And Microsoft does seem to have been somewhat asleep at the wheel with its browser developments - IE7 came out almost two years ago, a lifetime ago in web terms.

On the other hand, Google needs to be careful not to flirt too closely with the 'M' word - its domination of search is clearly monopolistic, it owns one of the largest ad serving companies and is a major player in many other sectors.  Control of the browser as well may well just be a step too far towards global domination.

And this, presumably, is why Google's announcement is of an open-source browser, and they stress that any improvements they have engineered in - for example - javascript support, will be shared with competitors.

So welcome to Chrome.  A shiny, friendly metal... nothing for us to worry about. 

Probably.