The rise of Chrome
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- World Wide Web and Web Science, Software Engineering
- Keywords
- Web browser, Market share, Benchmark results, Google Chrome, Feature selection
- Copyright
- © 2015 Tamary et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2015. The rise of Chrome. PeerJ PrePrints 3:e966v2 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.966v2
Abstract
Since Chrome's initial release in 2008 it has grown in market share, and now controls roughly half of the desktop browsers market. In contrast with Internet Explorer, the previous dominant browser, this was not achieved by marketing practices such as bundling the browser with a pre-loaded operating system. This raises the question of how Chrome achieved this remarkable feat, while other browsers such as Firefox and Opera were left behind. We show that both the performance of Chrome and its conformance with relevant standards are typically better than those of the two main contending browsers, Internet Explorer and Firefox. In addition, based on a survey of the importance of 25 major features, Chrome product managers seem to have made somewhat better decisions in selecting where to put effort. Thus the rise of Chrome is consistent with technical superiority over the competition.
Author Comment
This version has expanded descriptions of experimental procedures and especially of the statistical analysis used in the feature importance survey.