Chrome Grabs 1 Percent of Market in Under 24 Hours

Gregg Keizer, Computerworld Google Inc.'s new Chrome browser grabbed 1 percent of the browser market in its first day out in public, Web metrics providers said today.

Both Net Applications Inc., a U.S.-based tracking company, and Irish vendor StatCounter put Chrome's total market share at around 1 percent less than 24 hours after its launch, passing rivals such as the current Opera and the ancient Netscape in the process.

"This is a phenomenal performance," said CEO Aodhan Cullen in a post to Statcounter's blog on Wednesday. StatCounter, which provides free visitor statistics tools to Web developers, monitors traffic on the sites run by its 1.5 million members.

Net Applications also tracked Chrome's debut, and echoed StatCounter's numbers. "We saw them peak at 1.48 percent last night, and they're hovering around 1 percent currently," said Vince Vizzaccaro, the company's executive vice president of marketing at Net Applications, in an e-mail Wednesday morning.

According to Net Applications, which is tracking Chrome's hourly numbers, Google's browser jumped from zero to 0.4 percent during the hour it was released yesterday. Nine hours later, at midnight EDT, Chrome accounted for 1 percent of the browsers used to visit the 40,000-some sites that the company monitors for clients.

As Vizzaccaro noted, Chrome peaked at 1.48 percent early Wednesday -- 4 a.m. EDT, 1 a.m. PDT -- and as of 11 a.m. EDT, held a 0.98 percent share.

"I'm certain usage will increase at night and on weekends, as companies won't want people testing Chrome at work," Vizzaccaro said.


Net Applications typically sees the same cyclic behavior from Mozilla Corp.'s Firefox, which jumps in share on weekends and during off-work hours.

Vizzaccaro wouldn't speculate on what browsers Google Chrome's users may be leaving. "We won't know that for a couple of weeks, as most people will test it along side of their normal browser for a while," he said.

With 1 percent of the market, Chrome immediately overtakes Opera Software ASA's Opera, which Net Applications pegged with 0.74 percent at the end of August, as well as the moribund Netscape, which the company said accounted for 0.72 percent of all browsers used last month.

AOL LLC, Netscape's owner, killed it last February when it issued the venerable browser's last update and urged users to switch to Firefox or Flock.

Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer held 72.2 percent of the browser share last month, said Net Applications earlier this week, while Mozilla Corp.'s Firefox and Apple's Safari owned 19.2 percent and 6.4 percent, respectively.

Google launched Chrome Tuesday around 3 p.m. EDT. Currently, a version for Windows XP and Vista is the only one available for download. Chrome, which is built on the WebKit rendering engine -- the same open-source code used by Apple Inc.'s Safari -- features a privacy mode, a combination address-and-search bar, and runs each tab as a separate process to prevent a single site from crashing the entire browser.



source:pcworld.com

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Google Chrome vs. Internet Explorer 8

Randall C. Kennedy, InfoWorld

Vs.

They're back! Just when you thought the "browser wars" were over, with the two camps -- Microsoft and Mozilla.org -- settling in for a kind of intransigent détente, along comes Google to stir things up all over again. Clearly Google is unhappy with the current state of browser geopolitics and feels it needs to roll its own in order to ensure a robust base for its myriad hosted applications (e.g. Gmail, Google Docs, etc.)

To that end, Google has designed an almost completely new Web browser. In fact, other than the core rendering engine -- which is based on the open-source WebKit standard of Safari fame -- everything in Google Chrome constitutes a rethinking of how you engineer a browser application. For example, with the current versions of Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer, individual Web page tabs are hosted in a single process -- a model that is efficient (in terms of memory and resource consumption) but also prone to catastrophic failures: A single crashed tab can easily take down the entire browser application.

Chrome seeks to eliminate this problem by isolating each tab within its own application process and then leveraging the built in memory protection capabilities of modern, preemptively multitasking operating systems to keep code and data in a failing tab from stomping on other processes. So now, when that buggy Flash applet on your favorite humor site goes belly up, it won't necessarily take down the entire browser -- the processes running in other tabs will keep chugging along.

This is a big deal for Google, which is banking on wider adoption of its hosted application offerings and battling the perception that browsers are unreliable, especially when you start running multiple Web applications in a tabbed format. Nobody wants to trust their line-of-business applications to an unstable environment, so Google hopes that Chrome will provide the kind of robustness that can assuage customers' fears.


Double Stuff Browsers

Of course, few technology ideas are truly original, and the case of the multi-process, tabbed browser is no exception. In fact, Google can't even claim to be the first to market with this model -- Microsoft beat them to the punch by a week when it released its own take on multi-process browsing in the form of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2.

Like Chrome, IE 8 uses multiple, discrete processes to isolate and protect each tab's contents. However, while Chrome takes a purist approach and literally launches a new process with each opened tab, IE 8 uses more of a hybrid model: It creates multiple instances of the iexplore.exe process but doesn't specifically assign each tab to its own instance. Thus a look at Task Manager under Windows will show an equal or greater number of Chrome instances than running tabs, whereas IE 8 will generate a fewer number of instances -- for example, six copies of iexplore.exe to support 10 discrete tabs -- and share them among the running tabs.

How these two variations on a theme will hold-up in the real world remains to be seen. My take is that Google's purist approach will ultimately prove more robust, but at a cost in terms of resource consumption. In fact, both Chrome and IE 8 stretch the limits of current PC hardware by gobbling up enormous amounts of RAM while saturating the system with lots of concurrent execution threads.

This new development -- browsers chewing-up more memory than their host OS -- is something I documented in my Enterprise Desktop blog earlier this week. At the time, I was shocked by how bloated IE 8 had become, consuming 332MB of RAM to render a simple 10-site/10-tab browsing scenario. Then I evaluated Google's Chrome and my expectations were reset yet again. Not only did the "fresh start" Chrome use nearly as much RAM (324MB) as the legacy-burdened IE 8 during peak browsing loads, it actually "out-bloated" IE 8 over the duration of the test, consuming an average of 267MB versus. IE 8's 211MB (you can read more about these test scenarios at the blog).

Clearly, these are products targeted at the next generation of PC hardware. With nearly 20 percent of a 2GB PC's memory consumed by Web browsing, and with IE 8 spinning more than 170 execution threads on Vista to complete the same aforementioned 10-site scenario (Chrome spins a much more conservative 48 threads), we'll need to rethink our ideas of acceptable minimum system requirements. At the very least, you're going to need multiple processing cores and many gigabytes of RAM to support this new, more demanding take on Web-centric computing.

To be fair, I must mention that both IE 8 and Google Chrome are still in the Beta stages of development. Chrome, in particular, is in its first public test release cycle, while IE 8 is only now being made available in a "feature complete" form (previous IE Betas were notably short on innovation). And it's also important to consider all of the non-architectural changes that these browsers bring to the table -- most notably, enhanced rendering performance and usability.



source:pcworld.com

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Microsoft's IE Market Share Drops Again

Gregg Keizer, Computerworld


Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer (IE) lost nearly a full percentage point in market share during August, the browser's biggest drop in three months, a Web metrics firm said today.

IE's rivals -- Mozilla Corp.'s Firefox, Apple Inc.'s Safari and Opera Software ASA's Opera -- all extended their shares at IE's expense last month.

But all those browsers, Microsoft's included, now face competition from Google Inc., which yesterday launched a new browser, dubbed "Chrome," that immediately grabbed 1% of the market, Net Applications Inc. said today

According to California company, IE accounted for 72.2% of the browsers used in August to access the 40,000-plus sites Net Applications monitors. That was a drop of about 0.9 percentage points from July, and a departure from the month before, when IE maintained its share for just the third time in the past year.

IE's August drop was the second-largest for the year, lower only than May's 1.1-percentage point fall.

"I can't really explain what happened," admitted Vince Vizzaccaro, Net Applications' executive vice president of marketing. "Perhaps there was some relationship with the launch of IE8 Beta 2. If users are looking at IE8, maybe they're looking at other browsers at the same time, trying to decide which one to use."

Meanwhile, Firefox increased its share by about half a percentage point, climbing from 19.2% in July to end August at 19.7%. Other browsers also boosted their shares: Apple's Safari went from 6.1% to 6.4%, while Opera's share hit 0.74%, up slightly from July's 0.69%.

Within IE's and Firefox's totals, however, there were shifts from one version to another.

As Vizzaccaro hinted, Microsoft's share for its IE8 browser -- still in beta -- leaped by almost 500% in just a few days. Before the Aug. 27 launch of IE8 Beta 2, the browser accounted for only 0.04% of all browsers connecting to Net Applications-monitored sites. By Tuesday, IE8's share had climbed to 0.22%.


The number of users running Firefox 3.0, the latest version of Mozilla's open-source browser, also jumped last month, moving from 5.7% in July to 7.7% by the end of August.

Mozilla started offering Firefox 2.0 users an update to Firefox 3.0 last week. Not surprisingly, Firefox's month-to-month gain came in increases to Firefox 3.0's portion of the browser's share.

IE7, officially released in October 2006, slid slightly in August, falling from July's 47.1% to 46.8%. It was only the second time that IE7 lost market share in the last 24 months, according to Net Applications.

The even-older IE6 continued to lose share in August, ending the month at 25.2%, off from July's 25.7%.

Google Chrome, which debuted Tuesday around 3 p.m. Eastern, accounted for 1.04% of all browsers as of 1 p.m. Eastern today, said Vizzaccaro.

"But their numbers will be a lot easier to grow quickly," he said, "than, say, Safari or even Firefox did." Vizzaccaro cited Google's name recognition and dominance in the search field as two reasons why it would be able to show rapid uptake for Chrome.



source:pcworld.com


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Sony Recalls 73,000 Vaio Laptops Due to Burn Hazard

Sony is recalling 73,000 Vaio TZ laptops because of a possible manufacturing defect that may cause them to overheat, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission said Thursday.

The recall relates to a problem with wiring near the computer's hinge, which could short-circuit and overheat in certain circumstances, perhaps burning the user.

One person has suffered a minor burn as a result of the latest defect, and Sony has received 15 other reports of overheating computers, according to the Commission.

The affected models are the VGN-TZ100, VGN-TZ200, VGN-TZ300 and VGN-TZ2000 -- although not all laptops in these series are affected. Sony suggests users contact the company to see whether their computer is part of the recall, and if so to stop using it immediately.

The overheating could be caused by misplaced wiring near the hinge, or if a screw in the hinge falls out and short-circuits the wires.

Sony isn't the only PC maker that has had to deal with battery problems. Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Acer have all recalled laptop batteries in the recent past.

In 2006, Sony was forced to recall millions of laptop batteries used in its own and other manufacturers' laptops because they presented a fire hazard, causing some computers to burst into flames.


Further battery problems prompted Sony, Dell and Hewlett-Packard to issue another recall in August last year, with Acer following suit in April this year with a recall of 27,000 laptops batteries containing Sony-made cells.

The Commission has published one other laptop safety recall this year: In May, Dell recalled almost one million notebook electrical adapters because of a risk of fire and electric shock.



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