It’s a new month, and StatCounter has the data on browser usage statistics for the past month. Not surprisingly, Chrome has gained while Firefox and Internet Explore have slipped, although the change is very slight. Here’s a look at the rankings in graph form. Internet Explorer comes in on top with 49.21%, Firefox in second with 31.24% and Chrome with 12.39%. Last month Chrome was at 11.54%.

Is there any hope for Internet Explorer? It sounds like the new version has not been as popular as Microsoft had hoped. I also wonder how many browser enthusiasts are now switching to Chrome now that it has so many more features than it did just six months ago.

Maybe Windows is horrible, or could just be enough for people to get by. ITPro’s Simon Brew has an article talking about alternatives to using the Windows operating system. Of course, there are open source alternatives in Linux and Chrome OS was brought up, but the main question brought to mind is this: are users actually going to want to switch from Windows?

On example of this is the fact that Microsoft is still trying to get users off of Windows XP, which debuted in 2001. If a user does get off of XP, their alternative now is going to be to start using Windows 7 which to some people may not be any different than the classic XP. It starts to make one wonder how much market share Google can really take from Windows, especially since probably the only ones buying a Chrome OS system will be those who are actually seeking out the device.

So, with that logic, maybe those who actively hate Windows will go out and look for a Google alternative when it arrives, but the fact of the matter is that Microsoft holds a dominating ninety percent share of a profitable market, and they are not going to lose out very quickly to upstart operating systems.

An example of Microsoft’s stronghold is that somehow, Internet Explorer, known to be an inferior browser through technical tests, still commands a sixty percent share across its three versions. Anyone can download one of the better alternatives, but either they don’t know they can or can do what they need to with a Microsoft product. And that’s the problem.

It has been big news recently that Chrome has overtaken Safari as the third most used browser in the U.S. While this statistic is one that’s skewed towards the United States since Chrome and Safari have been neck and neck, the reality is that Chrome took third place worldwide over Safari back in September.

The main reason that America has lagged in this regard is probably the fact that Apple sells so many computers in the United States, coming with the well regarded WebKit-based Safari.

But the point of this post is to understand how Chrome got this far in a period of two years. When I first tried Chrome as an early adopter-type in the beginning of 2009, I liked the design interface and the idea of “sandboxing” where every tab was its own process. The problem with Chrome at that time was one of compatibility: there were sites that did not function correctly with Chrome, a surprise to me because of its WebKit roots.

Over time, which really isn’t long by Google’s measurement, Chrome evolved. Many sites needed to adapt some functionality to Chrome, but for the most part it was the folks at Google working fervently to make the best browser available. Perhaps they knew that they were making the foundations of an operating system at the time, who knows?

Extensions

In December 2009, Google launched the Chrome Extensions web site, an opportunity for the company to better compete with Firefox’s vaunted library of add-ins. Not only did they take an existing idea, they improved on it by putting security limits around extensions at their site, making sure that proper measures are taken to make sure that personal data and important computer processes cannot be compromised through the browser. Clicking around at the Extensions site the other day it appears that there are over five thousand now available.

Translate

In the beginning, Google offered an extension that you could install into Chrome and translate different languages of the web. Then they started adding it into the development Chromium builds, and finally it was released with the launch Chrome 5 to users a few months ago embedded in the browser itself. This feature is so easy to use, and it unlocks the web for everyone to read no matter their language. Google took an existing service they had and put it right into the browser where it’s the most useful.

No Messing With Flash

Maybe Google sees something in Flash that Apple doesn’t, but they decided to take a very different approach to handling Adobe Flash than Cupertino. Instead of eschewing it completely, Google has embraced the technology. Flash is used in YouTube videos, for some streaming music sites and I’ve recently noticed it needs to be installed to use Google Analytics. So, unlike other browsers that require you to install it and then update to newer revisions manually, Google preempts any inconvienence and risk by making it a part of Chrome.

In the End

Relentless innovation has gotten Chrome browser this far. This is due to Chromium as an open source resource as well as the amount of manpower that Google has thrown towards it in anticipation of Chrome OS. I didn’t even get to talk here about interesting features like the omnibox, bookmark sync and geolocation, but they are an aside to these three major developments that are propelling this browser’s growth. How much market share can this browser take from Internet Explorer and Firefox in the months and years to come?

Can Chrome OS succeed without launching a tablet device for the market?

Google released some updates for the Chrome browser today on Mac, Linux and Windows.

A new and improved way that Google does its search indexing, called Caffeine has just been launched today.

Microsoft is working on their Google Docs strategy by offering up the free Office Web Apps, a browser version of Office.

Google Chrome Frame, an extension for Internet Explorer to give it Chrome-like features, is now in beta.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission may be challenging Google’s acquisition of the mobile advertising company AdMob.

Puleen Patel writes about an interesting concept for Chrome as well as the overall web: co-browsing. I think it fits well with collaboration.

An update to Google Wave now allows users to blog live, which may give the workflow service a much-needed social networking component.

The Chromium Notes blog has a post up about a bug fix (and its challenges) that makes some JavaScript in Chrome about 20%  faster.

The Internet Explorer Weblog has a post talking about how HTML5 is the future of the web. IE9 will reportedly support HTML5.

ReadWriteWeb is reporting that the beta of Firefox 3.6.3, dubbed Lorentz, is testing a new feature in the browser where plugins are isolated by tab in the event that it crashes. This allows for a singular unstable tab to crash instead of the whole browser. This may sound familiar to those who use Chrome, and will be a new feature in a future stable release of Firefox.

What’s funny is that rival browsers are making no bones about taking Google’s browser ideas and turning them into their own. Microsoft’s IE8 InPrivate, which is the same thing as Chrome’s Incognito mode, comes to mind. Witness the crash screen in Lorentz compared to Chrome’s:

Heading down this path is great for browsers overall, but it seems funny at times when you see competing browsers copying Chrome’s functions in order to keep up with its frenetic pace of development. Indeed, Chrome has quickly gone from version 1.0 in 2008 to 4.0 stable a few months ago.

One of the reasons for early adoption has been Google’s decision to auto-update Chrome. While initially this was heavily criticized, you can see here how fast Chrome has migrated to newer versions because of this functionality:

While Firefox also pushes updates, users are prompted to install them. This may be less obtrusive in terms of privacy than Chrome, and still allows for a regular schedule of updates to the browser:

Microsoft does not prompt for IE updates leaving some users still stuck on IE6, although that metric is slowly changing:

You can try out the new Firefox Lorentz by downloading it from here. Lorentz only isolates QuickTime, Flash, and Silverlight as their own processes. You can, however, customize it to do so for other plugins such as Adobe Reader through these instructions.

In a video that is meant to show off the security features of Internet Explorer 8, Product Manager Pete LePage takes aim at the Chrome browser, claiming that because IE8 allows users to search in a separate box rather than doing so in an all-in-one inbox box that Google is possibly compromising a user’s security by reporting every term back to Google.

“By keeping these boxes separate, your privacy is better protected and the addresses of the sites you’re visiting aren’t automatically shared with Microsoft, or anyone else,” LePage says in the video.

“As I start to type an address into the address bar, Fiddler [a Web debugging proxy] shows that for nearly every character I type, Chrome sends a request back to Google,” LePage says. “I haven’t even hit enter yet to load the website and Google is already getting information about the domain and sites I’m visiting.”

This only partially true. You are capable of changing your search provider in Chrome, and when you do the information that you search for in the Omnibox will send it back to the engine of your choosing. Just because IE8 has two separate boxes for these functions does not make it safer.

The option for sending information back to Google when you start typing into the Omnibox can be turned off by following these instructions. I know this because I downloaded Fiddler myself and tried it to make sure.

LePage also goes on to promote the virtues of IE8′s InPrivate feature, which allows users to surf the web anonymously. Interestingly, this feature sounds eerily similar to Chrome’s Incognito mode which has been a part of Google’s browser since 2008.

Look, there’s no doubt here that Internet Explorer is facing a decline in market share. A recent graph out by Net Applications shows that Internet Explorer is dropping while Chrome is gaining. At the same time, competitors like Safari (which can be traced to Mac adoption), Firefox and Opera are filling in the space where users once had Internet Explorer as their preferred browser. If Microsoft does not go on the offensive with videos like this they risk losing even more market share.

Expect Microsoft to heavily market IE8 and eventually IE9. They will also do well if they keep copying key elements of other popular browsers if they hope to stay relevant, one of the other “industry standard” practices LePage talks about in the video.

A few months back I did a review of Jolicloud, which is a competing netbook OS that uses the Linux kernel and is made possible by venture capital-backed funding. There was some news related to the newest version of Jolicloud that while the default browser for the OS is still Firefox, webapps for its “cloud” portion of the platform will run with underlying Google Chrome architecture. This will be a change coming in its new beta version that is due out later this month.

As mentioned in my review, Jolicloud is a different animal when compared to Chrome OS. It has a mix of installed applications and webapps that will satisify both early adopters and regular computer users. However, I found that the “connect to the cloud” notifications when I first booted the system up would be confusing for regular users. I will have to take a look at the new version, but in the previous one it seemed to me that they only reason I needed to actually login to Jolicloud’s servers was to download and install new applications – of which I had to make a choice from their app directory.

But I like this concept of Chrome being the underlying engine for running applications that are web based. This shows that Chrome is really more than just a web browser even right now. A great example of this is Chrome Frame which can be paired with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer to run more intensive applications than the standalone IE can handle.

So if you use Windows and you live in Europe, you’re about to make an important choice about which browser you will now use. Because since the European Union finds that Microsoft’s practices are anti-competitive, a Windows update for those with Internet Explorer will soon be deployed and will present users with alternative browser choices for them to install.

This is interesting to note, as someone commented on this blog not too long ago about seeing advertising for the Chrome browser in London. Users are going to be prompted to make a choice on a web browser in the next few weeks, and so now that piece of information comes to mind it doesn’t seem so shocking to me. What Google’s intentions are: they probably knew that Microsoft was going to be forced to push this Windows update and wanted to familiarize the public about the fact that they have their own browser.

And once one uses Chrome, they may realize that they’ve been missing out on something: an experience that is faster and more reliable than Internet Explorer. Of course, that could be said about most browsers other than IE.

As you can see from the screenshot above, the five most popular browsers will be shown in a random order, with other less popular ones being shown on another slide.

Overall, this does not help Microsoft in the browser wars. They are already losing a lot of users to Firefox and Chrome, but now this development is based not on the fact that their product isn’t very good, but because a government entity wants to make sure that people realize that they have a choice to use something that doesn’t automatically come with Windows. And there are several choices for them out there, more so than ever before.

So, have you been prompted with this message? What did you choose to do?

In a comprehensive paper that was recently published, researchers at Berkeley’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science studied the possible security impact that extensions could have on a browsers’ vulnerability to exploit and/or attack a computer. It was found that of twenty-five popular Firefox Extensions, all of them had the highest level of security privileges in the browser. That’s all that would theoretically be needed to attack a machine, which could potentially result in a compromised situation.

The paper also goes on to explain that the majority of extensions don’t need to have these types of privileges in order to execute what a developer  is trying to accoplish, but that the Firefox API as it is currently is built to allow for powerful networked software development – even for extensions.

The group who wrote this paper has even worked with Google in order to better implement their own extensions directory. They proposed to Google a method whereby keys are used to help identify an extension. Developers must sign an agreement with Google to ensure that privileges for an extension do not have capabilites that allow for potential security problems before they can be listed at the official directory.

When installing extensions from the Google directory, which was launched last December, I had noticed a few times that the the URL for the location of the download was a bit unique:

This is by design, however. It’s a public key that has been set that identifies the extension with the website. The best part about this is that for the purposes of version updating, the key is identified with the extension and thus the URL that is located on the Google extension directory. This is in addition to scripts running separately from outside web sources and some other interesting features that offer a robust technical standard for these additional features of Chrome browser that independent developers are working on.

While Firefox offers a rating system that works to protect users, as well as a developmental system called Jetpack that offers narrow interfaces, I really got the impression that there was a lot of thought that was put into the extension system for Chrome. While trying to expose vulnerabilities through extensions doesn’t appear to be something that is deliberate by those who create them, there is potential for there to be problems down the line.

It’s also important to consider that if you plan on using extensions, you should probably use an official directory depending on the browser that you use. That means getting them from Mozilla.org for Firefox or the official Google extensions site for Chrome. I could not find an extension/add-in directory for Internet Explorer from Microsoft.

Firefox, Internet Explorer and Chrome are discussed in the paper in depth. Now that there is so much more that you can do with a browser with the speed of JavaScript performance increasing at such a huge rate over the past few years it has to be considered that browsers need to increasingly become more secure as they become more that just where you surf the web but also where you run applications. So it’s worth a read if you have time, and you can check out the abstract from here.