StatCounter has been around for a while now, focused on offering in-depth traffic information about your website completely free of charge. Over the years StatCounter has developed quiet the network gathering data from over 2.5 million members with over 50 million page views each month. So naturally they have huge amounts of data about the different technologies used to access their members websites, and right now that data shows Google Chrome as the #1 web browser in popularity.
To be honest – I can’t say I am very surprised. Internet Explorer recently got its fair share of bad press when Homeland Security blatantly stated that right now you shouldn’t be using IE; Safari was never that fast; and really Firefox just feels clunky compared to Google Chrome right now. To boot – Chrome has been hard at work fixing problems and making improvements which you probably didn’t even know needed to be done – until they did them.
For example: you can install and start using Chrome extensions without restarting your browser; Chrome isolates tabs into separate processes so if one tab crashes, your browser stays up; or one of the smallest of my favorites: When I close a tab, the remaining tabs don’t resize until my mouse leaves the tab bar, meaning I don’t have to worry about hitting moving targets.
And lastly – when I use Chrome, it feels faster, and that’s all that matters. So I can see how StatCounter would show such a a tremendous lead for Chrome over the other browsers. Just for comparison purposes I went and checked out the Google Analytics for Rapid Purple and guess what I found:
Google Chrome use greatly surpasses that of any other browser among the Rapid Purple visitor base. This should come as even less of a surprise considering that we’re read primarily by webmasters and developers – and there’s not many of those who still utilize Internet Explorer for any personal use.
So with that said – what is your #1 go-to browser? Have you switched over to Google Chrome as-well? Let me know in the comments below!