I’ve been tracking Google Chrome’s market share. This is important because as web developers we get clients wanting to support the top ranked browsers. Normally clients want just IE, FF and Safari supported  Sometimes this includes list Opera.

At its peak Google Chrome was a fraction over 3%

In the last 12 hours its dropped down to just under 2.5%

http://getclicky.com/global-marketshare-statistics

So obviously of people who have tried GC, some have stuck with it and others have abandoned it.

I’m expecting his downward trend to cease and see some bounce as the GC as primary browser uptake slowly crawls upward.  I’m using GC as my primary browser and I know a few others who are was well. I’ve always used IE as my primary and FF as my dev browser. GC has managed to move me.

The big question that Web Developers want answered is, “Is this going to mean more effort to support the most popular web browsers?”. If after the bounce back GC was to overtake Opera, that’s kind of interesting because it could mean that Opera is not the 4th browser. As GC is based on WebKit, this means our job may be a little easier as HTML/CSS for Safari should work for GC so the incremental effort required to support that 4th browser gets buffered by its similarity with Safari.

Wether or not GC ends up above or below Safari in the rankings is probably not a great technical concern, assuming that there is not a huge difference between their CSS and JavaScript behaviors. I’m very happy that even such fiendishly devious JavaScript as my JavaScript Macro Recorder works under GC – so I’m hoping the JavaScript quirks are going to be minimal.

I’ll be keeping an eye on these rankings over the next few weeks – its an interesting race.

I’m predicting that Chrome will take a large bite out of Safari after the OSX version is released, assuming that it performs faster and renders better than Safari. The FF users will much harder to move. FF users will stick to FF because of the plug-ins that they can not live without. Eg. Dev tools such as firebug and ad blockers.

Interesting times.

Update – 8 hours later…

24 Hours later..