"According to all the metrics and everything we see out there, Chrome most is the most popular browser," said Sundar Pichai, VP of Chrome applications, during his opening keynote presentation.
Computer newbies, lazy PC users, companies, and schools mostly use IE, and don't bother to look for alternative browsers because they don't know they exist, or are too lazy, or don't know how or want to use a new web browser.
Man when a company is the one claiming their own software is the number one in the world then it's clearly not. It's sad when a company has make such a claim about their own software.
It is not just Google claiming Google Chrome is the most used web browser by beating IE to push it to 2nd place with a slight decrease in users according to StatCounter.com .
Firefox is the third most used browser with over 24 percent of the web browsing population using it according to Statcounter .
Note: Statscounter is a website traffic stats company which is used to see how much traffic websites with the statscounter badge have on a daily basis. Statscounter is a company not owned or affiliated with Google like Google Analytics.
I think Netscape was the only alternative to IE in the 1990s till early 2000s, and Netscape web browser was as bad as IE because Netscape was made by AOL which is not well known for making good software, so people use IE instead of Netscape, and Firefox was only well known by younger web users, and tech-savvy people who kept up with the web browsers.
Mozilla original browser called Mozilla before Firefox existed was also not very good back in the day.
Opera was also a paid web browser in the early days, so fewer people uses it.
I agree with DS that being number one in web browsing is getting harder since there are so many desktop web browsers, and mobile web browsers on Tablets and cell phones these days. I think over time the "Other" web browser might gain more usage since there will be a web browser made for all types of users like newbie, office, gamer, social network member, multimedia viewer, downloaders,etc, and not just a one web browser works great for all types of tasks and users.
I agree the updates for Firefox sometimes make Add-ons not work, and sometimes the updates for Firefox sometimes make Firefox run slower and crash more then older versions. I remember when Firefox was very stable, and faster, but the last few versions seem to not work as well.
I think this is one of the reason why a lot of users switch to Opera, Chrome, and other web browsers as their primary web browser which made Firefox number 3 instead of 2 or even 1 which Chrome now holds.
I'm surprised I only heard about this recently. It's fantastic that a non-IE browser is number one. IE has just caused so many problems for web developers who want to follow the web standards that hopefully this means that web standards are here to stay.
