The numbers gave me the following chart which covers the period from  November 2007 to June 2010

This chart covers all browser versions that have more then 0.25 percent market share in Romania. As you can see, from December 2009 Internet Explorer 6 started to loose market share rapidly and i put this on the account of Google. Last December i think was the time when Google announced that they won’t support IE6 on many of their apps anymore. Also since my last study IE8 is steadily taking share from her older siblings IE6 and IE7 while Firefox 3 was taking share also from IE6 and IE7 claiming the title of the most used browser version in Romania.

My last year’s prediction that Google Chrome will reach 10% by the end of the year didn’t become a reality, now Chrome being somewhere over 7%. This is understandable because Google Chrome failed to deliver its initial promises as i recently pointed out. Still i think that because of the aggressive promotion conducted by Google it will reach well over 10% this year. Opera is steadily at 4% while Safari being under 1%. Firefox 1 is the least used browser in this study with an average of 0.29%. I guess next year we can ignore it and we can also ignore his younger sibling FF2 which is below 1% and is dropping fast.

This time i made another chart that covers browser market share by vendor. More specifically i didn’t break up specific versions so all Internet Explorer versions appear as IE and all Firefox versions appear under FF.

It is well pointed out in this chart that IE took a serious hit last December and the main gainer of this hit was Firefox. Chrome’s rapid ascension can be observed too.

I will not come up with any predictions this year. But i can say this. 2010 will enter in browser history books as the year of demise for IE6. By the end of the year i think everyone will drop support for this ancient browser. It is time.

Related posts:

1. Romanian browser usage trends
2. Upgrade your browser!
3. Fatality: Google drops IE6 support in 2010

I never had any issues with you besides your appetite for memory. You really like eating all the memory you have available. But after all i bought 4 gigs of RAM for you. I should have just let you eat as much as you could.

But you know some new guy named Chrome (from Google)  came and he was full of promises. He promised me that when he will crash he will do that only with one of his tabs, the faulty one. So my other work won’t get lost. He promised that he will be the fastest browser i’ve ever seen. And he promised many other things. He managed to fulfill some of his promises. But he failed miserably with others.

Just minutes ago i was writing my weekly article batch, and opened up a pdf document in another tab.  And Chrome froze … needless to say that all his tabs froze. And after waiting 30 minutes he didn’t recover. I had to kill it. But he took away all my tabs!! Even that one with the article being written. So my work got lost (no recovery). This wasn’t the first time that Chrome hang on me with a pdf file (i cannot even count how many times he did that), but this was the first time when he managed to loose about one hour of my work + half hour waiting after him. And this was the thing i was always afraid of.  Yeah… maybe is Chrome somewhat faster then you … but if he looses my work and wastes my time that doesn’t matter anymore. I will come back to you.

But there is a good thing about me using Chrome. Did you know that  Chrome managed to raise my blog’s number of visitors to new heights ? Yeah, remember when i complained  that Chrome’s popup blocker sucks ? Well it seems that many people think that.

That article become the most popular post on this blog, on daily basis people  end up here using queries like:  chrome popup blocker, disable chrome popup blocker, chrome popup blocker sucks. Well i guess the guys from Google should focus more on fixing bugs and implementing basic browser features before they roll out new versions every few days.

I can’t promise you that i will uninstall Chrome, after all i have to test sites in it from time to time. But i will be using you more to do my work.

I cannot rely on a browser that

• is having issues with opening a pdf file or running some heavier flash
• displays the popup blocking notification for like 3-4 seconds and then hide it when i try to allow it.
• is just refusing to log me in with my current password on some sites that work perfectly on other browsers
• for some weird reason runs Plesk in slow motion compared to other browsers
• and countless other little annoying things

Sincerely yours

The user

Related posts:

1. The 5 best Firefox extensions for web developers
2. To my chain letter loving “friends”
3. My thoughts about Firefox 3

But no more. Google announced today that it would release an Internet Explorer plugin called Google Chrome Frame that will allow developers to take advantage of the new technologies like HTML5 and modern CSS layout handling. And this inside Internet Explorer.

Developers will be able to place a small javascript code that detects if the user has the plugin and if not prompts him to install it. Sure not all users will install it, but in any case more of them will install the plugin if they can get away with this instead of replacing their browser. And if they really want to use a good website then they will install it. Especially if the install is easy and straightforward as Google products are. After installing the plugin it can be easily tested adding cf: in front of any url typed into Internet Explorer.

As for developers they only need to place a html tag into their application:

<meta http-equiv=“X-UA-Compatible” content=“chrome=1″>

This will force IE to use the Webkit based Google Chrome rendering engine from the Google Chrome Frame. This way developers are fully in control to force IE to use or not to use the rendering engine so existing websites won’t break on this. Other browsers will simply disregard this tag and render the page as normal.

This is a really smart move from Google. They don’t ignore IE because they can’t do that, and they can’t do anything to force Microsoft to move on this matter because Microsoft prefers it this way. Except they did the only thing that will force Microsoft to react. They started to improve Internet Explorer.

Related posts:

1. Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate 1 released
2. Popup management in the new Google Chrome
3. New Google Chrome Beta

Now you can synchronize your bookmarks across multiple Chrome installations (multiple computers). To activate bookmark synchronization, start Chrome with the “–enable-sync” flag. After you fill in your Google Account data, Chrome will upload and store your bookmarks.  Now when you add or modify a bookmark, the changes will be sent to the cloud and immediately broadcast to all other computers for which you’ve activated bookmark sync (using the same XMPP technology as Google Talk).

Read the announcement and enjoy this new feature from Google Chrome.

Related posts:

1. New Google Chrome Beta
2. Google Chrome crashes all tabs
3. Popup management in the new Google Chrome