Web browser war hots up with release of Chrome

How many of you downloaded and installed Google’s new web browser Chrome? For the first time I now have four web browsers on my desktop and to be honest it makes a neat change to have the option when loading up for some web searching. The five way battle for web browsers provides a useful mini case study in the essence of contestable markets.

I find that Firefox works better when building the open-source Moodle course for my students, for some reason (and despite several installations of the latest version of Moodle), IE doesn’t allow me to use the full formatting functions in Moodle - Firefox copes without a care in the world.

Google Chrome
Mozilla Firefox
Internet Explorer
Safari

Chrome is incredibly quick to download and runs really quickly. Web users seemed prepared to make a move on it last week according to new figures from a leading Web metrics seller. Chrome accounted for 0.7% of all browsers used last week on average and the market share of Firefox, Safari and Opera also nudged higher leaving Internet Explorer with a 71 per cent market share - the lowest it has been for a fair while. Firefox now accounts for nearly 20% of the web browsing traffic.

This Guardian article provides some good background on the motives and strategies behind the launch of Chrome. The author suggests that the open-platform Chrome is a defensive play for Google.

“Google has already been hedging its bets. It has a deal with the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit-making organisation that funds the development of Firefox, the web’s second most popular browser, to have its search box within the browser itself. Just last month Google extended that deal — which has recently generated more than three quarters of Mozilla’s revenues — until 2011. Google’s toolbar is already standard on Apple’s Safari browser and can also be downloaded and installed on Internet Explorer.”

Guardian