The decline of IE or the Rise of Firefox, Chrome, and Safari

In December, many Web sites saw visitors coming from Apple's Safari, Mozilla's Firefox, and Google's Crome instead of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, according to Web analytics company Net Applications. Internet Explorer was used by 68.15 percent of Web surfers monitored in December, down from 69.77 percent in November and 71.27 percent in October, according to preliminary figures published by Net Applications on its Hitslink Web site Friday. IE's share has slipped from around 75 percent since the start of 2008. Safari, Firefox and Chrome all profited from the slide in IE's popularity. Firefox's share rose to 21.34 percent, from 20.78 percent in November and 19.97 percent in October, while Safari's climbed to 7.93 percent, from 7.13 percent in November and 6.57 percent in October. Google's Chrome browser topped the 1 percent mark in Net Applications' survey for the first time, with a share of 1.04 percent, up from 0.83 percent in November and 0.74 percent in October. Opera's share remained steady at 0.71 percent.

Net Applications warned that decreased workplace use of the Internet in December may have biased its results. "The December holiday season strongly favored residential over business usage. This in turn increases the relative usage share of Mac, Firefox, Safari and other products that have relatively high residential usage," it said. However, Internet Explorer's market share actually declined more slowly in December than it had done in November, according to the company's figures. Operating system statistics provided by Net Applications suggest that Macintosh owners are more faithful to the browser provided by their operating system manufacturer than are Windows users. Mac OS market share increased slightly in December to 9.63 percent, from 8.87 percent in November, mirroring the rise in Safari usage. while desktop Linux usage by Web surfers remained steady at 0.85 percent, compared with 0.83 percent in November. Windows usage dipped to 88.68 percent from 89.62 percent in November, a smaller decline than that in IE usage. Net Applications tracks browsers visiting sites that use its traffic monitoring service, compiling data on around 160 million visitors per month, according to its site.

Why is Chrome better than Firefox?

Why is Chrome better than Firefox?

It is not because Chrome is powered by Google technology, but the reasons are quite solid. The main reason being Chrome starts way faster than Firefox. Web pages load faster when one types in an address or clicks a link. Google Chrome's combination of location bar and search box-- gets you at the right place with the least number of keystrokes, provided you are not worried about sending Web navigation and search data to Google.

This will not matter if you spend just a few minutes on the internet, but for the generation that lives over the internet this matter much. Individually, it is just about saving a few tenths of a second here or there. If you spend hours over the internet, these small intervals of time add up fast and you can see the difference.

Web now-a-days doesn't just involves browsing, but it also includes e-mailing, reading RSS feeds, uploading photos, editing documents online, and posting comments, issuing instructions to your bank, etc. The web is getting complicated as well as annoying day by day. Google chrome makes it way easier. It makes you look at the web in a brand new perspective. It makes everything accessible with your browser so easily that you won’t even sense how much complicated task you have just performed!

In simple words, Google Chrome can be seen as a faster-stripped down Mozilla Firefox. So, Chrome is a step above Firefox. After Chrome was released for the public, Mozilla came out with their Firefox 3.1 beta 1, which was claimed to be lighter, faster and easier to use than the previous installations of the Firefox. With the Firefox 3.1 beta 1, the Firefox has sped up things a bit, but when you compare it to Google Chrome, Firefox still lags a mile behind.

Firefox 3.1 has a serious drawback - The absence of tab-switching. In Firefox 3.1, when you use Ctrl-Tab, it does not cycle through the tabs but rather shows you previously visited tab. It is a major drawback in Firefox 3.1. This makes you use the mouse for changing tabs. Thereby, considerably slowing down the work that you are doing. You can however, revert back to tab-switching feature by adjusting Firefox's configuration "First, type "about:config" into the address bar, then move past the warning message, then type "ctrlTab" into the "Filter" box, then double-click first on browser.ctrlTab.mostRecentlyUsed and then on browser.ctrlTab.smoothScroll to set them to "false," then restart the browser."

Meanwhile, Chrome cycles the tabs in a cyclic manner, thus enabling a smoother and better way to switch tabs with keyboard. It opens new tabs immediately to the right of the page you are on when you middle-click (or ctrl click) to open a page in a new tab. Google chrome also conveniently groups related tasks together.

Chrome is also not a perfect browser. There are some issues that can annoy one:

• There's no plug-in mechanism.

• Bad support for RSS subscription feeds. In Firefox, a site with an RSS feed gets an icon in the address bar, and clicking it signs one up for the subscription. In Chrome, you have to do it manually by clicking the RSS link.

• When you launch a new window, Chrome never starts it maximized, even if the last window was. On a related note, Chrome also doesn't have a maximized mode (F11).

These are just some of the problems with Chrome and there might be many more. Even with these drawbacks, Chrome still scores much above Firefox, if you are a hardcore web user.