Google Chrome Passes Opera For Marketshare By One Account

• Posted: Saturday, September 20, 2008
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• Author: pradhana
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• Filed under: Google's Chrome

By Staci D. Kramer

We’re not going to follow this manically but it’s worth checking in on how much-hyped Google Chrome is doing since its Sept. 2 launch. Net Applications puts use eight days in at roughly 1 percent of surfers, compared with 0.74 percent share for Opera in August, according to NewsFactor.com. Or for another comparison, IE 8 beta 2 had 0.34 percent use on Wednesday. Firefox, which recently upgraded was at 19.73 percent.

What does it mean? Nothing really except that Google with its wide reach can get from zero to 1 percent and higher when it wants. (That reach would be one of the aspects the Department of Justice is exploring now.) Can it keep share and keep building? I stopped my first trial after a few video crashes and will wait a while before giving it another shot. Chrome has a lot of appeal for those who want fast loading and the Google brand. But, as Yahoo’s (NSDQ: YHOO) David Filo mentioned earlier today, Google has had mixed success.

Chrome also comes with a privacy issue users may want to consider. Urs Hölzle, SVP of operations at Google, explained Google Suggest to NewsFactor: “To provide its recommendations, Google Suggest needs to know what you’ve already typed, so these partial queries are sent to Google (NSDQ: GOOG). For 98 percent of these requests, we don’t log any data at all and simply return the suggestions. For the remaining two percent of cases—which we select randomly—we do log data, like IP addresses, in order to monitor and improve the service.” He says that later this month they will start to anonymize the data within about 24 hours.

Have you tried Chrome? How does it compare? [paidContent.org]

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