Why Chrome?

Internet Explorer's market share has dropped continuously over the last few years. First people were migrating over to Firefox, now they're making the switch to Chrome.

Since Chrome's release, Firefox's market share has stayed fairly stable. The raw interpretation of the numbers would suggest that people are still moving away from Internet Explorer, but now they're not moving to Firefox any more.

The real picture is almost certainly more complicated than that, but let's take a look at some data.

The data in this chart comes from 25 Google Analytics accounts covering a spread of e-commerce, B2B, charity and informational sites. Each of these may contain several profiles for several different websites.

We have looked at the proportional use (relative to each other) of IE, Firefox and Chrome since the start of 2009. What we expected to see was a slow increase in the Chrome figures, with decreases in Firefox and IE accordingly. Firefox users have already proven they are happy to switch away from IE, and are likely to be lured by Google's promises of security and speed.

It wasn't what we expected.

What looks like it has happened instead is that Chrome has taken users away from IE. Firefox has kept market share, but hasn't apparently gained anything off IE in some time.

But has nobody left Firefox for Chrome? Given the tech-centric user base of Firefox that seems unlikely. Much more likely is that Firefox has retained some of it's IE-alternative cachet, but has been leaking users to Chrome at the same rate.

What's next?

It looks like IE is on a serious decline. Some people like it, some people have to use it (i.e. corporate or government users), some people don't know any better. Each of these will maintain the market share of IE to some extent. IE9's imminent release should help too - it seems to address a lot of IE's relative weaknesses against Chrome and Firefox.

Will Chrome keep growing? Eventually it can't, but the speed of new feature releases continually makes the other major browsers look behind the times, so it will always appeal to the techy user base.

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