Google Chrome – Do we need another browser?

I am looking forward to the release of Google’s new Chrome browser tomorrow, we don’t get shiny new toys to play with every day.

I had a read of their comic today and I like the sound of what they are doing with Chrome.  They appear to have started from scratch with a standards compliant browser, one that doesn’t have all the baggage of older browsers.  The way they have separated tabs into different processes and the use of virtual machines should make it the safest browser yet.  And hopefully the fastest too.

They are using the Webkit rendering engine which is the same one that Apple use for Safari so support for web standards and things like SVG (scalable vector graphics) should be pretty good.  And of course Google products are usually pretty good so I have high expectations for Chrome.

But, all these good thing aside; my heart sank slightly when I first read about Chrome.

More testing

First; as a webdesigner I thought – oh no; another browser to test every webpage I design against!  I currently test everything against IE7, IE6 (and IE8 is on the horizon) Firefox, Opera, Safari and Konqueror and of course on several different machines running Windows ME, XP, Vista and Ubuntu (I haven’t got a Mac yet – maybe when I get a bigger office), another browser just adds more work.

Because Chrome uses the Webkit engine and because it should be pretty good about standards compliance I don’t expect it to be a real problem to program for, but every page will still have to be tested and that is tiresome.

But what about Firefox?

My second thought was; where does this leave Firefox?  I use Firefox as my main browser and am very fond of it, particularly with all the extensions for web developers.  Opera is very good too but I haven’t quite got used to it in the same way as I have Firefox.

Firefox in particular has been making very good progress in the popularity stakes so it is now a real force in the browser market.  Looking at the most recent month’s statistics for www.stowonthewold.info , I can see that about 81% of people are using IE (about 67% of those IE7, 32% IE6) and about 12% are using Firefox (about half 3.x and about half 2.x), Safari is 3rd with about 6% and then there is a tail of other browsers making up the other 1%.

Interestingly if I look at this website I see quite a different picture with 46% for Firefox, 42% for IE, 10% for Opera, 2% for Safari, with the tail making up less than 1%. I guess this shows the different readership for the two websites, us geeks like Firefox and Opera.

I think Chrome will be successful, partly because it looks very good (in principal at least, I will try it out later this week, if the servers can stand the strain) and partly because it is a Google product and so will get lots of publicity (I first saw mention of it on the main BBC news website, not in the technology section).  This is obviously a good thing and more competition will drive improvement in other browsers too.

But my worry is that Chrome will steal market share from Firefox rather than Internet Explorer, the sort of people who will try a new browser are the sort of people who have already moved to Firefox, not the sort of people who use the browser that came with their PC.  I want to see good browsers spread across the user base of the web.  The day when I can stop using IE6 as the lowest common denominator for my web design work will be a day I jump for joy.

Standards compliant browsers (which support SVG too) make life a lot easier for us web designers but replacing Firefox with Chrome isn’t going to help at all.  What we need (and perhaps Google has a cunning plan) is to replace the non-compliant browsers, then we can all move forward.  If Chrome can take market share from Internet Explorer instead of Firefox then I will be very happy.

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