Chrome Takes Lead in Browser Wars

Google's Chrome 15 has moved to the front in browser competition, overtaking Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 (IE 8). While earlier versions of Internet Explorer still give Redmond the overall lead, the writing is on the wall in regards to its dominance. Does it matter, particularly for IT professionals at small and midsize businesses (SMBs)? Yes, because in this increasingly cloud-oriented era, the browser is arguably the single most important application on your computer. It does much of what the operating system once did. And the browser will remain important even in the age of mobile apps.

Rise to the Top

The word that Chrome has made it to the lead position comes via Athima Chansanchai at Technolog. An analytics study by Irish firm StatCounter finds that Chrome overtook IE 8 at the end of November. At that point, the Google-sponsored browser commanded 23.6 percent of the global market, compared to 23.5 percent for Microsoft's browser.

This news does come with two important provisos. The first is that different analytics sources may yield different specific metrics. Many agree on the trend, however, and the trend has been favoring Chrome. The second proviso is that older versions of Microsoft's browser remain in wide use. Thus, considering all versions taken together, Internet Explorer remains the most widely used browser. Talk of its "free fall" or "downward spiral" is thus premature, but its era of dominance is winding down.

Meanwhile, Chrome has already pushed past Mozilla Firefox, which had long been the leading competitor to Internet Explorer in the world browser market. Mozilla's hopes of taking the lead in the browser wars have thus far been nixed. The "browser wars" competition does not draw the level of attention it did a decade or so ago. (Remember Netscape Navigator?) At that time, the battle was not just over browsers, but over whether Microsoft would rule the world.

Browsers, however, still matter. You could argue that they matter more than ever in the cloud era. As software moves online, the browser more than the operating system it runs on literally shapes your experience with the cloud applications you access through it. And, for all the talk of mobile devices and an "app-ified" future, enterprise-grade tools still need the roominess and interactive options of a real computer, which for practical purposes means a device that supports a full-function browser.

Thus for business computing, browsers will remain the primary access to the cloud. And Google's Chrome 15 and successor releases, will increasingly be business users' access platform of choice.