After Chrome exits beta in January, Google is planning to begin an aggressive push to boost the browser's market share.
Sundar Pichai, a Google vice president, told The Times Online that the company will explore ways to make Chrome more ubiquitous and "probably do distribution deals" with OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) to get the browser onto new PCs.
Currently, Internet Explorer commands more than 70 percent of browser market share. Open source Firefox captures roughly 20 percent, with the rest going to others such as Safari, Chrome, and Opera.
OEM relationships will certainly help Chrome adoption, but it's hard to see how IE gets completely displaced due to the fact that it's is embedded in Windows.
Looking back, it was clear that IE would displace Netscape simply because it came pre-installed with Windows.
It's not clear how Google can make Chrome ubiquitous (at least not yet). There are certainly use cases--Netbooks, etc., where you are using far less Microsoft software (and often Linux instead) where the interaction of the OS and the browser are more clearly delineated.
Pichai added that versions of Chrome should also be available to computers using Macintosh or Linux software in the first half of next year, allowing the browser to be used on almost 99 percent of computers worldwide.
Via Ars Technica.
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