Looks like the honeymoon is already over for Chrome.
After its launch to a frenzy of news coverage Chrome peaked with a 3.1% share of the browser market. Since then it’s been a steady decline, down to just over 1.5%. And it looks like it will stay that way.
Has Google’s browser peaked already? — Short Sharp Science — New Scientist
This isn’t actually all that surprising. It takes a while for something entering a crowded market with well-established players to gain marketshare. The only reason people maybe expected Chrome to do better was because of the behemoth Google name. As the article points out, Internet Explorer’s cut of the pie didn’t budge at all since before Chrome launched.
I tried to like Chrome, I really did. I could live without the extensions, even ad-blocking. But what drove me from it was that in the end it felt like exactly what it was: a beta. A real beta, not like Gmail. Chrome lacks polish, as it were. It locked up on me frequently and tended to get really confused if I had flash animations playing in multiple tabs, which is practically a given when you don’t have ad-blocking.
In the end, though, this might be part of Google’s master plan. They said up front that if Chrome got Firefox and IE to copy its innovations, they’d have done their job. If the web experience overall improved, Google didn’t care if people used Chrome or not. IE8 beta 2 isolated tabs in separate processes. Firefox 3.1 will allow users to drag tabs between browser windows. And both sport upgraded and much faster JavaScript engines. Mission accomplished, Chrome.