Chrome and Internet Explorer - two trains about to crash
The people who know me will no doubt be closing their eyes and shaking their heads at reading the headline of this latest post. I admit it, I'm a big fan of Google Chrome and not a great fan of Internet Explorer. But there you go....
Things weren't always that way though and I used to be a strong supporter of IE in favour of Firefox. I switched from Internet Explorer to Firefox though sometime between late 2007 and early 2008 and used it for most of the year. Then I discovered Google Chrome and haven't looked back since.
A fair number of non technical people I have spoken to in passing haven't actually heard of it though. This isn't surprising though because these people tend to stick with what they no and not change anything unless they have a really good reason. And why not? If it ain't broke then it doesn't need to be fixed - or so the old saying goes. Well... I'd say that IE back then was pretty broken and needed fixing. Joe public doesn't seem to care though and Google doesn't exactly advertise Chrome so I'm very surprised at what is happening at the moment.
That brings me nicely to the point of this post. There's going to be a big head on crash sometime within the next couple of years and it isn't going to be pretty! Google has been gaining market share with their Chrome browser by one or two percent a month and at the same time Microsoft's Internet Explorer has been loosing ground by the same amount. It's been the same story each month for the last year or so.
Looking at the pretty graph provided by netmarketshare.com it doesn't take a rocket scientist to extrapolate when the two lines are likely to meet and both will have about the same market share. In fact I'd go as far as to say that it may accelerate and we'll see an equal market share for Chrome and IE within about 18 months.
Chrome just keeps getting better and better in my opinion and whilst Microsoft have finally come up with a really good offering with IE9, is it too late to stop the rot?
I guess we'll just have to wait and see and in the meantime we've got next month's stats from netmarketshare.com to look forward to!
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