You know, if you’re one of those developers that strive to support the latest web browsers and also the not-so-latest, one thing that’s really irritating is how it takes a year for people to switch from one Firefox version to another and a decade to do the same with IE.
It’s bad enough that you have to support Firefox 3.0 almost a year after the release of 3.5 while that itself isn’t event the latest version, 20% of users are still on IE 6!
Face it, IE 6 is a web browser released in summer 2001 that’s getting really old. 9 years is a lot in computer technology. Firefox didn’t even exist at the time and multi-core processors were still years away.
Conversely, Google decided that there was a need for people to update their software, which is crucial not only to performance and feature improvements but especially to fixing security issues. So, since before Chrome was even revealed to the public, Google’s products have been using the silently background-running Google Updater which gets installed with whatever Google product you use.
While you might not like background services to run on your computer without your knowledge, the truth is you probably never will notice it ever does something, and magically, just like that, every Google Chrome browser on earth simultaneously gets updated practically the day a new version comes out.
On charts, it’s quite impressive; all you can see is Chrome 3.0 dropping to near 0% market share in a month while in the same time-span the version 4.0 gets all the new market-share and a bit more.
From a developer’s standpoint, Google Chrome really makes web browser support easy. All you have to do is support the latest version and you’ll be guaranteed that your users will be able to see your web site.
Frankly, while it saddens me to see even Firefox lose market share to Google Chrome, it also makes me a fundamentally happier person.
