Ever since Chrome joined the browser space, browser wars just got even more interesting. Before Chrome, Internet Explorer (IE) and Mozilla Firefox were the only contenders and despite Firefox’s meteoric growth IE continued to dominate the majority of browser market share.
I personally am a Chrome user and despite Firefox’s super usability have found Chrome just right to continue using it. Interestingly, Chrome does not seem to be eating into the market share of Firefox which I thought it would to a certain extent. It is IE’s share that is being gobbled up by Chrome as well as Firefox.
I pulled the the last one year browser stats for India courtesy Statcounter and the results drive home the fact that Mozilla Firefox is set to become India’s most preferred browser
At the end of 12 month period between 2010-2011, Firefox has managed to gain 32.11% market share. In contrast, IE with 33.15% is only marginally ahead. Chrome use is also rising steadily and going by the pattern, it wont be long if the browser reaches/surpasses both Firefox and IE
More than the percentages, trend lines reveal a better story. Even as Firefox has pretty much maintained its steady growth, the trend lines for IE and Google are almost mirror images of each other. This also justifies that it is Chrome which is eating into IE’s share like crazy. The trend gets even more interesting going back a few years in time.
Web Browser share from 2008 to 2010 shows moderate growth for Chrome and even Firefox. However, IE despite losing market share was a clear leader in India.
Something tells me that the good folks at Microsoft were not able to change the course and have now almost lost the leadership in the web browser segment in India.
IE’s negative growth spiral seems to have no end. IE 9 was launched amidst a lot of fan fare and it was indeed a much improved version as compared to previous IE versions.
However, IE is competing against the likes of Chrome and Firefox and not against itself. On the other hand, Chrome has kicked up things in other gear by taking the print route for advertising Chrome in India.
Firefox on the other hand is hugely popular with the developer community in India. IE has immense advantage in being automatically bundled with the Windows operating system but the internet population in India looks ready to make the effort for a better and efficient browser.
What are your thoughts on the changing dynamics in the web browser usage in India? Do you think IE will be able to reverse the current trend and salvage its market share or will it lose the numero-uno position to Firefox or Chrome in the next few months?
I too love chrome.. It's just awesome. Recent downloads of chrome have some issues post install and shows memory issues and crash on Windows :-(. Hope to see Chrome taking up the No. 1 position rather than FireFox.
Agree with you, love Chrome. The post made me wonder why but not sure as yet. I like Fire Fox too but discourage anybody from using IE. I think had issues with FF due to some plugin issue which recurs all the time.
In my opinion Chrome is the best among all the browsers. It opens web pages very fast in comparison to others.
So funny. i have just read the news that “google chrome has become the second best UK’s web browser “and then i see this ,i haven’t used chrome and firefox for a long time because they take up too much in my PC .But avant doesn’t .wake up
all speed tests done on our hosted data shows that FF is faster than Chrome.
Chrome has been my favorite browser…but over last couple of months, I have been having serious issues with it. It just hangs multiple times a day and it is very frustrating… Firefox is better, but after having experiencing chrome, I feel that's the best browser of all.