Standings in the Browser Race

The otherwise mostly link bait suggestion from Matt Asay that Apple and Google should drop their browsers in favour of FireFox triggered an interesting reaction for me. The argument goes along the lines that IE is dominating the browser landscape and FireFox is clearly the second place runner, so everyone who wants to bring down IE should just pool resources behind FireFox. My immediate reaction was to wonder why people saw FireFox as the best horse to back.

Judging by market share, there’s really no doubt about it – FireFox on many sites is actually in the number one spot and the more stats I see the less I’m inclined to believe in the dominating lead that IE supposedly has. I suspect we’ve reached a point where the winner would change or go very close to it if the system of measurement were even quite reasonably different.

However, judging by that ever subjective buzz-factor, I think there’s a very strong competition for first place and despite a much improved effort with IE 8, it’s really between FireFox and WebKit. There’s a few reasons I think WebKit is enjoying a strong buzz-factor rating right now:

• Compared to FireFox it’s a much newer open source project and is still in a fairly rapid phase of adding committers. That’s not to say FireFox is dying or even slowing down – newer projects are much more inclined to actively work to bring in new contributors. As such they make a bigger deal about it so it seems like the growth rate is faster, even if it’s not.
• iPhone. WebKit rules the roost as the most used mobile browser and by a long, long way. It’s probably not the most common as there are plenty of copies of Opera mobile and Windows CE devices out there, not to mention whatever browser is on the BlackBerry, but Mobile Safari really seriously gets used.
• WebKit is more than one browser. Both Chrome and Safari are quite popular browsers. Gecko is actually used by a number of browsers as well – some doing respectably well, but none popular enough to get bloggers to routinely say Gecko instead of FireFox. Interestingly, Gecko-based browsers used to be a much more common term around the time that Camino and other variants was going strong. FireFox seems to have won the battle against it’s Gecko competition which is probably good for it’s market share, but bad for it’s buzz-rating.

So, having written all that – let’s go looking for some facts to back it up. First, and only, stop, Google Trends:

That would be webkit in blue, safari in red, chrome in yellow and firefox in the green. So, um, yeah… So much for that theory.