Is the honeymoon over for Google Chrome users as market share plummets?

By Davey Winder
Wednesday, 24 September 2008 15:33

Open Source

Within 48 hours of launching at the start of September, the Google Chrome browser managed to carve itself a pretty impressive one percent share of the global web browser market. That honeymoon period would appear to be over as we approach the end of the month and the market share starts to plummet...

Despite all the totally understandable media hype about Chrome entering the market, the Google open source web browser was never going to make a truly huge dent in the market immediately.

Even that initial one percent share pales into insignificance against the 22 percent enjoyed by Firefox at the time, or even the 6.5 percent Safari share. And let's not forget that Internet Explorer was sitting happily on 70 percent.

However, there can be no denying that grabbing one percent so quickly was impressive, and some even went as far as to say phenomenal. Yet Google was soon to have some of the shine taken off of Chrome.

First iTWire reported how Chrome was not faster, safer or smaller as claimed. Then there was the hugely embarrassing end user license fiasco which saw Google try to grab legal ownership of everything displayed by the Chrome browser.

Within a week of launch there was a patch after a serious security vulnerability was revealed, but some suggested it did not plug all the security holes even then.

Chrome had, very quickly, become tarnished. Yes but, said the Chrome supporters, it is a Beta application so what do you expect? And they might have had a point were it not for the fact that all Google applications are called Betas and remain as such often for years to come.

But now, it would appear, the honeymoon is over for Chrome as far as ordinary Joe-on-the-street users are concerned. Those who initially abandoned Internet Explorer and Firefox for the Google new guy are drifting back in droves.

According to monitoring and measuring outfit Net Applications the global market share for Chrome has hit a downwards slide.

Tracking some 40,000 websites, Net Applications reveals that last week the Chrome share had dropped to 0.85 percent, and this week that number fell further to just 0.77 percent. Firefox gained 0.06 percent and Internet Explorer gained 0.24 percent, but Safari did best by gaining 0.45 percent.

Vince Vizzaccaro, Net Applications' executive vice president of marketing wonders if marketing could play a role in the declining numbers, commenting "The only marketing effort I've seen from Google is in sponsored links on search results. On Google, Chrome is naturally the top sponsored link. On Yahoo, it was second. And on Windows Live, I couldn't even find it in the first five pages."