Digital Media

If you've been following the headlines of late you'll find that StatCounter's research arm, a Web tracking service most Webheads are familiar with, has gone from afterthought to player in just a few short months.

Credit a few handy Bing-happy press releases and handy browser market share stats.

There's a good bit of hubbub about IE market share, which has dropped off since March (Techmeme). The big question is whether we should believe the numbers (below is the year over year trends).

(Credit: StatCounter)

Let's look at the methodology and history of StatCounter's research effort. StatCounter launched its Global Stats service in March. The service primarily measures search, browsers and operating systems.

Here's how StatCounter compiles its states. It tracks its 2 million members globally with 40 percent of that total in the U.S. and 25 percent in Europe. Overall, StatCounter analyzes about 4 billion page loads a month.

The sample certainly sounds large enough to be valid. However, Net Applications, which has been a go-to browser market share tracker, has said it its analyzing "some significant variations in browser and operating system statistics" for June. It remains to be seen whether Net Applications will verify what StatCounter is claiming for IE market share.

Net Applications has this to say about its methodology:

We use a unique methodology for collecting this data. We collect data from the browsers of site visitors to our exclusive on-demand network of live stats customers. The data is compiled from approximately 160 million visitors per month. The information published is an aggregate of the data from this network of hosted website statistics. The site unique visitor and referral information is summarized on a monthly, weekly, daily and hourly basis.

Meanwhile, a statement from Net Applications gives another reason to be mildly skeptical about writing that obit for IE market share. Apparently, IE 8's compatibility mode with IE 7 has lead to some underreporting of IE 8 market share. This wrinkle basically means IE 7 historically got more market share.

Simply put, there enough wrinkles out there to have some healthy skepticism for now about rapid fire market share claims. For instance, StatCounter was claiming Bing made market share gains in its early days. The rub: Bing's market share success will be measured in months and years not days. In the meantime, StatCounter is happy to detail Bing's loss of momentum too.

Perhaps IE's market share has collapsed, but a cross section of data from multiple sources--including panel approaches from comScore and Nielsen--would be helpful.

Update at 8:50 a.m. PDT: The video has now disappeared from the ad agency's site as well.

Earlier this week, we were all rather intrigued by the appearance of a Microsoft ad, in which a wife borrows her husband's laptop and suffers a technicolor nightmare when she espies a site that he has been, um, enjoying.

By Wednesday night, however, Microsoft had second thoughts about the pulling power of puke.

The ad has been pulled from the IE8videos channel on YouTube. It's also has been removed from the BrowsefortheBetter.com site, which is part of the ad campaign. The vomit ad's slot has been replaced by a tag that says "coming soon."

This could have meant that a new ad is coming soon, or that the upchuck was uploaded too soon.

The truth is that Microsoft wasn't 100 percent happy with vom-com.

"We make a point of listening to our customers," a Microsoft representative said in an e-mail Thursday morning. "We created the OMGIGP video as a tongue-in-cheek look at the InPrivate Browsing feature of Internet Explorer 8, using the same irreverent humor that our customers told us they liked about other components of the Internet Explorer 8 marketing campaign. While much of the feedback to this particular piece of creative was positive, some of our customers found it offensive, so we have removed it."

Although many CNET commenters on Wednesday thought that the ad was funny, some criticized the piece as condoning surfing for porn (shame, shame, shame), as well as the generally less than perfect taste associated with yellow stuff exploding from a nice-looking lady's mouth.

However, Bradley and Montgomery, the agency responsible for the whole campaign--which features Superman actor Dean Cain--still proudly displayed the ad on its own site as of early Thursday morning.

And so it should. The ad has already created exactly the aftereffect for which the agency likely hoped.

But, as so rarely happens, I spoke too soon. Here we are at 8:50 a.m. PDT Thursday, and the ad has now been removed even from the Bradley and Montgomery site.

Even though the wife in the ad might, one feels, stand by her man, it appears the agency has decided not to stand by its ad.

Alternative browsers such as Mozilla Firefox and may be aimed at toppling Microsoft's reign, but analysts say Internet Explorer's "overwhelming dominance" in the workplace will be difficult to defeat.

The main reason for the Microsoft browser's seemingly stranglehold position is the near ubiquity of Microsoft products used in enterprises today.

Ray Valdes, Gartner's research vice president, said in an interview with ZDNet Asia: "Due to longstanding accumulations of dependencies, most enterprises will find it difficult or unfeasible to switch from Internet Explorer to an alternative browser, such as Firefox, Opera, or Safari."

Valdes said it would be "difficult, if not impossible" for the average organization to abandon IE in favor of these alternative browsers. He noted that many software systems and applications are dependent on IE's HTML rendering engine embedded into other Microsoft applications, such as e-mail client Microsoft Outlook.

Another driving aspect is IE's administrative functions that allow enterprises to centrally manage and administer the browser, Valdes added. "Unlike Firefox, Microsoft provides mechanisms that meet this requirement, such as group policy objects and the Internet Explorer Administration Kit (IEAK).

"A key enterprise requirement is the ability to centrally manage and administer the browser...As a result, for many organizations, abandoning IE and replacing it with another browser is unrealistic," he said.

Through these management tools, for example, companies can more efficiently control user access and better manage security policies related to Web browsing.

According to IDC, IE's dominance is also perpetuated by the rest of the IT industry, creating a cyclical relationship.

Because IE currently has the dominant market share, makers of Web sites, software applications, and other components that are accessible via a Web browser will place the highest priority on ensuring their products support IE, Mark Levitt, IDC's program vice president for collaboration and enterprise 2.0 strategies, told ZDNet Asia.

While new features offered in Firefox or Chrome could help propel either browser's position, if they showed "sufficient advantages over IE," Levitt said Microsoft would unlikely give the competition enough time to close the gap before it releases similar features for IE.

Victoria Ho of ZDNet Asia reported from Singapore.

It appears that nearly 2 million people in the United States downloaded Google's new Chrome Web browser in its first week of availability, Nielsen Online said Wednesday.

Nielsen, which bases its statistics on the behavior of a panel of Internet users, said that from September 1 to September 7, 1.93 million people visited the Google "Thank You" page associated with the download process.

The online chatter about Google's browser surged to more than half the remarkable level of Apple's iPhone, Nielsen said. This chart shows the percentage of blog postings and other online commentary that mentioned Chrome.

(Credit: Nielsen Online)

That's nearly 1.4 percent of all U.S. Internet users, Nielsen said. That may sound small, but it's a pretty good response for a beta version of a product that most people don't need, since so far, it only refines the familiar activity of using the Web.

Of course, getting people to try Chrome is easier than getting them to switch, but Google appears determined to push the open-source browser as hard as possible. On Tuesday, the company began a program to let people get the latest Chrome updates.

The buzz followed on the heels of the launch, according to Nielsen's measurement of Chrome mentions on blogs, discussion boards, and other online forums.

"The interest in all things Google was apparent in the online discussion surrounding the somewhat-unexpected Chrome launch," said Jon Stewart, research director of technology and search at Nielsen Online. "The browser was mentioned in nearly 1 percent of all online discussions the day after its launch--a respectable slightly-more-than-half of what the highly anticipated iPhone 3G generated when it launched earlier this summer."

There's a lot of action in the browser market these days: Google just launched its Chrome browser, Firefox 3.1 is due in months, Apple hopes Safari will spread across the world of Windows, and Microsoft is touting its second beta of Internet Explorer 8.

But a huge swath of Internet users is still getting by with IE 6, which is no doubt is why Google just released a new version of Gmail for the vintage 2001-era browser.

The update means IE 6 users will get access to colored labels for messages, Gmail Labs features, integration with AOL Instant Messenger, and invisible mode for IM, Google engineer Jon Perlow said on Google's Gmail blog on Friday. The upgrade catches IE 6 users up to features available to users of Firefox 3, IE 7, and Safari 3.

Google said it worked with Microsoft's IE engineers on some of other issues, including memory-related performance issue when running JavaScript programs in the browser, and Google pared back some user interface features that had been causing trouble for IE 6 users.

Forget the Detroit Auto Show. There are plenty of Chrome watchers in Mountain View, Calif.

With Google's on Tuesday, an onslaught of reviews followed. And the results largely point to a speedy machine, but one not without its flaws.

Don Reisinger's blog on TechCrunch not only applauds the speed of the browser, but also its simplicity:

The first thing that will strike you about Chrome is its soft, yet elegant interface. Unlike other browsers, which sport clutter, Chrome doesn't do anything of the sort. Instead, it makes tabs the primary element of the software, which can be dragged around and moved as needed on the fly. You can already do that in Safari, but in Chrome, it's simply much easier.

But closely followed technology reviewer Walt Mossberg of All Things Digital noted that while Chrome beats Microsoft's Internet Explorer on speed, it doesn't do the same when compared with Firefox or Safari on such frequent tasks as launching Web pages.

And Mossberg's takeaway? Here's his 10,000-foot view:

My verdict: Chrome is a smart, innovative browser that, in many common scenarios, will make using the Web faster, easier and less frustrating. But this first version--which is just a beta, or test, release--is rough around the edges and lacks some common browser features Google plans to add later. These omissions include a way to manage bookmarks, a command for e-mailing links and pages directly from the browser, and even a progress bar to show how much of a Web page has loaded.

A similar sentiment was expressed by John Brandon, in his Computerworld blog. The Chrome reviewer had some reservations:

Chrome has not crashed on me at all. What it has done is make me want to switch back to Firefox to do some "real" work. I can't really explain why. I don't like the tabs being above the address bar because it feels like they are floating in space. Little things bug me. I can drag-and-drop a URL onto the "bookmark bar" but I can't click and hold on the Gmail icon and drag it there, like you can with Firefox. The icon for Chrome looks too much like the one for Google Desktop and not that distinct. I like having a separate search box, and having just one for URLs and search is jarring.

And security concerns have arisen in the early review returns. Ryan Naraine and Dancho Danchev made this observation in their Zero Day blog on ZDNet:

Just hours after the release of Google Chrome, researcher Aviv Raff discovered that he could combine two vulnerabilities--a flaw in Apple Safari (WebKit) and a Java bug discussed at this year's Black Hat conference--to trick users into launching executables direct from the new browser.

As a result, some folks may want to wait for the follow-on model...

Google Chrome is a warning shot over the bows of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Opera.

The open-source software project, to be detailed later Tuesday at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., should dispel any lingering thoughts that the browser wars are over. To be sure, it's less cutthroat now than in the 1990s, but one of technology's most powerful companies is now on the battlefield.

So how does Chrome change the competitive landscape?

Google Chrome has many competitors to contend with, according to these August stats.

(Credit: Net Applications)

Initially at least, it's not likely to change the market share rankings. According to Net Applications' browser market share statistics for August, IE has 72 percent share, Firefox 20 percent, Safari 6 percent, and Opera 1 percent.

But even before Google's browser became available for download, its repercussions were traversing the industry. There are plenty of implications from a company as large as Google that builds a browser tuned to advance the company's agenda of Web-based applications.

Here are some possible implications for the four major alternatives to Chrome.

Internet Explorer
IE still claims the dominant share of the browser market, and it still has the hard-to-beat distribution channel of being built into the most widely used operating system.

Firefox has been chipping away at IE's share for years, but the dominance has remained fairly secure, and unless Chrome offers revolutionary new abilities, it's not likely to do more than perhaps increase the chipping rate a bit.

Microsoft has lit a fire under its IE team, and given that Google is such a powerful Microsoft rival, that fire doubtless will burn all the hotter because of Chrome. The forthcoming IE 8, with beta 2 released last week and the final version officially due to ship by the end of January, is a sign of how serious Microsoft is.

Officially, Microsoft welcomes the competition. "The browser landscape is highly competitive, but people will choose Internet Explorer 8 for the way it puts the services they want right at their fingertips, respects their personal choices about how they want to browse and, more than any other browsing technology, puts them in control of their personal data online," Dean Hachamovitch, Internet Explorer general manager, said in a statement.

Vast numbers of people haven't upgraded from IE 6, which is ancient in Internet years. That cuts both ways for Microsoft: it's hard to get people to upgrade to IE 7 much less to IE 8, but those folks aren't moving to the competition either.

Of course, with Google's Web application agenda, the bigger long-term threat is to Microsoft's Office team, not to its IE team.

Firefox
Firefox potentially stands to lose the most from Chrome.

It's the leading alternative to IE and the standard bearer for those who love open-source software and revile Microsoft's technology, its business practices, and its philosophy. If you're hell-bent on taking down Microsoft, you could pick worse allies than Google.

Mozilla has something for the philosophical purists that Google lacks, though: a measure of independence. "Uniquely in this market, we're a public-benefit, nonprofit group, with no other agenda or profit motive at all," Mozilla Corp. Chief Executive John Lilly said in a blog posting Monday.

Survival is a powerful motive even if profit isn't, though, and the Mozilla Foundation, the parent of the Mozilla Corp., relies on Google for tens of millions of dollars each year in exchange for prominent placement of Google in the browser's search. Happily for Mozilla, Google just signed up for three more years of subsidizing Mozilla, so Firefox and other foundation activities should be financially sound at least for the time being.

Firefox has built a massive grassroots fan base, though. And even Google, for all its charisma, money, and power, will have a hard time replicating that.

Finally, though Chrome at first blush is bad news for Firefox, there's a subtler reality at play: IE is the dominant browser, and the greater the number of credible underdogs that exist, the more that dominance can't be taken for granted. Don't be surprised to hear Mozilla and Google present themselves more as allies than foes.

Safari
Apple has expanded its Safari ambitions from Mac OS X to Windows, most notably by letting the browser hitch a ride along with the iTunes update software. However, Safari has yet to become a force to be reckoned with.

But Safari could benefit indirectly from Chrome: both browsers are based on the open-source WebKit rendering engine.

If Google sponsors aggressive Webkit development--and doesn't end up wrestling with Apple for power over the project--both browsers stand to gain. Google's Android browser for mobile phones, it should be noted, also is based on WebKit.

Opera
Opera has a small share of the browser market, so it's the most likely to drop in position if Google Chrome catches on. It already fights for relevance against the bigger players.

But Opera is a scrappy company. Not surprisingly, it prefers to look at its own growth rather than its sliver of share, and CEO Jon Tetzchner points out that its share has grown each time a new browser has emerged as a viable competitor to Internet Explorer.

"Last year, we had more than 50 percent growth in our user base," Tetzchner said. "I think we'll do quite well this year as well. It seems every time there's talk of new browsers, that's been a positive thing for us. It has been good there is focus on browser alternatives."

Click here for full coverage of the Google Chrome launch.

As promised in May, Google has brought the open-source Gears technology to Apple's Safari, augmenting some browser abilities such as using Gears-tailored Web sites while offline.

The company announced a beta version of Gears for Safari (DMG file download link) on the Gears users mailing list Monday.

"We would love for you to install it and test it and file bug reports so we can polish it and find all the corner cases," said Google's Jeremy Moskovich.

Gears extends a browser so, for example, some Google Docs can be edited or viewed while the user isn't connected to a network. It also can speed up use of the WordPress blogging software and some operations at MySpace, and Google is expanding its scope to geolocation services and other areas, too.

The software requires Safari 3.1.1 on Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.11 or Leopard 10.5.3, he said.

Gears already works on Firefox and Internet Explorer; Opera is working on a version for both its desktop and mobile browsers.

(Via Google Operating System.)