Google Chrome One Month Later: Too Early To Judge

Exactly one month ago Google launched a browser of its own - Chrome. Blogosphere was abuzz for a couple of weeks and the interest still seems to be here to a certain extent (though much less than initially) so I wanted to share with you some results from the first month of operation of Google’s very own browser.

Given the entire buzz that surrounded Google’s browser launch, it is no wonder that everyone was immediately excited about the browser and its performance - especially since the speed we saw was definitely remarkable. Unfortunately, after the initial excitement subsided people started to notice various problems in the shiny and new Chrome - like repeated crashes of the browser for numerous reasons (take a look at the comments on this post and you will see that the reasons are really numerous).

But as soon as Chrome started to appear in Google Analytics as a browser used by visitors, we immediately started to share our amazing Chrome usage statistics. It was quite predictable that technology blogs that featured tons of content about Chrome (as everyone thought it was something of a duty to publish at least a couple of posts per day about various Chrome aspects - with some blogs reaching 10 Chrome-related posts on some days) received enormous search traffic of visitors on Chrome itself - those users that installed Chrome and wanted to know some additional details about this browser. At the time I also reported a record 18% of visitors on Chrome as I had a few posts about Chrome that received tons of visitors and comments as well. But quite understandably later on this share of Chrome-powered visitors in our audience diminished and the average September figure on Profy is 8% while the beginning of October shows about 5%. Yet this number still seems to be quite high for such a new browser, obviously.

Such rosy stats that we saw in our Google Analytics accounts immediately made some of us predict that Chrome would very soon beat one of the big two browsers - either Firefox or Internet Explorer (different bloggers suggested different growth scenarios). So I decided to track Chrome market share for a month using a couple of different statistic tools - Clicky and Net Applications - to be able to see how the browser really performs in the end of the month and if we would really witness amazing growth we were promised to see.

Here are the results of me tracking the statistics for Google Chrome market share for the last month using two statistics products. Information from both analytics services varies a lot because Clicky mainly tracks more tech-savvy audience (since the stats is only based on visitors to 50 thousand  sites that use Clicky as a stats tool - and those are often technology oriented) while Net Applications demonstrates a more objective picture for a mainstream audience.

Google Chrome Statistics from Clicky

You can see that the market share of Google Chrome started at almost 3 per cent one month ago and quickly dropped to fluctuate at around 1.6%-1.8% until now. And we have to keep in mind that it is for quite a geeky audience that was supposed to quickly adopt the new browser and hopefully stick to it.

Google Chrome Statistics from Net Applications

Net Applications shows an even less rosy picture with the first few days seeing the share at over 1 per cent and then quickly diminishing to stay in the range from 0.8% to 1% until the end of the month.

One thing is quite obvious from the graphs - we don’t see any particularly impressive growth rates that could make us believe Chrome will actually compete with the big browsers - at least not until Google actually decides Chrome is more or less ready for it and starts promoting it heavily.

For now Google is not even particularly active in promoting the newly launched browser. Actually in the beginning Google seemed to be quite enthusiastic and determined to push the browser to as many users as possible. For example, all the visitors of the Google search homepage saw a link suggesting everyone to try Google Chrome right below the Search button. I also saw a pretty funny block of Google Adsense shown to me on one of the posts about Chrome:

As you can see, the first link offers to try Google Chrome while the next two links suggest to fix Internet Explorer - thus implying the Microsoft’s browser is far from perfect. That must mean that Google also employed its own advertising network to steal some users from Internet Explorer.

But it looks like Google quickly realized that the browser was far from ready for primetime performance and simply removed the Chrome download link from the homepage so it can only be accessed via the dedicated Chrome website now. In the meanwhile the team in Google responsible for Chrome seems to be quietly focused on fixing the bugs in the browser and rolling out updates to the users (you can track such updates on a dedicated blog). But given the fact that Google chose to make a very early appearance for Chrome, it is understandable that it will take some time for Google to introduce a really stable and reliable version of the browser - the one that the internet giant will be able to promote without fear of being held reliable for any malware that could be distributed using security vulnerabilities of the new browser. I myself like some things about Chrome but for now I have decided to stay away from it and stick to Firefox only (though the combination of the two where each of them handled different tasks worked quite nice for a few days) until I am 100% sure that I will be safe using Google’s browser for work.

As a summary I would like to point out is that for such a large-scale product one month does not seem to be a long enough time and we need to keep in mind that Chrome is a rare Google product where “beta” actually means work in progress - and this is how we should try to think about Chrome for now.

I have already seen a blog post titled 3 Reasons Why Chrome is Dying (pretty controversial) but we have to understand that Chrome is not even fully born yet - it is just the very beginning of what will probably be a lengthy road for Google in browsing technologies. And judging Chrome performance, bugs or market share for now is probably way too early - we will need to see a more or less stable version that will at least allow us to use the browser without any risk to security. And we will need to wait and see Google actually promoting its new product at full speed to jump to conclusions. Maybe in a few more months?