Google’s Chrome declining in popularity

A post on Slashdot states that Google Chrome is losing users. It started with a 4% market share and is now just above 1.5%.

Seems logical to me. The browser was announced with a lot of attention by the media (it was even on the Belgian VRT news), so everyone goes out and tries it.
After a day, you notice that it’s fast and sleek, but that it feels like a beta (because it is a beta). I’m still using it at work (Windows environment), but when I need to set a bookmark I fire up Mozilla Firefox because of the superb add-on Foxmarks.
Foxmarks is not the only add-on I miss when using Chrome. What about Adblock Plus, Firebug, Web Developer extension, IE Tab and ChatZilla?
Chrome has a basic DOM inspector, but it lacks a lot of stuff that Firebug has to offer us.
Besides that, I notice a lot of stuttering when using the Flash player on e.g. GarageTV (which I have to use daily for professional reasons).
And last but not least (I think) is the fact that it is mostly a Windows-only browser. The codebase (Chromium) is available for download, but builds for Linux and Mac OS X aren’t very stable.

The things I really like about Chrome (and what most of the user probably will): speed, clean interface and the startup tab with screenshots of most visited websites.

I honestly have to say that I didn’t try out a lot of Chrome add-ons yet. You’ll find some on:

  1. GoogleChromeWidgets
  2. Google Chrome Widgets

So, let’s give Google some time to improve Chrome and it might become my standard browser.

Chromium on Linux/Mac OS X using Wine: This entry was posted in Linux, Software, The Web and tagged , , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

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