For those of us who have been with the internet since the begining, we all remember the most popular browser of the day, Netscape. We also remember 3 million pound behemoth Microsoft’s launch of IE… and how it was basically forced upon the world by brute force. For years now, IE has dominated the web browser market.

Then the Mozilla project by Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross, decided to focus on Firefox and Thunderbird. On November 29th 2005 Firefox 1.5 was launched. Over the last 4 years, Firefox has achieved a impressive 24% market share (hitslink).

On December 11th 2008, Google released the first stable version of Chrome.  In the span of 11 months, it has gained 3.58% market share, putting it just under Safari at 4.42%. (hitslink)  It does not sound like a lot, but such a large change of internet browsers in such a short time is very impressive!

As someone who has been using chrome since its early public beta, I can say in my eyes, people are using it because it is better!  You also have to factor the marketing and outreach power of Google, I mean if you go to Google.com with a browser other than chrome there is a nice big chrome ad there!

So what makes Chrome better?  Well for me, its light weight, it loads faster, crashes less, and is just cleaner and sleeker.

Some of the features that make it stand out:

• They got tabbed browsing RIGHT! You can drag tabs around between windows and drag them out to their own windows, which is pretty cool!
• Faster rendering, faster browsing, faster experience! In most tests I have read (think LifeHackers), Chrome beats all other browsers hands down for speed. I totally agree with this having used all 3.
• Sleek streamlined design, not cluttered with menus, tool bars, and other things you don’t need eating up screen space
• Bookmark sync, really cool introduced in beta 4

Just look at these results from LifeHackers review

All in all, I think Chrome is going to be a changing/disruptive force to the internet, and will promote better, faster, smarter web applications.  I am, overall, very happy with Chrome and look forward to seeing what sort of features the folks at Google have in store for us!

Would love to hear others experience and thoughts on this!

Bill Lincoln is the Director of Network Operations here at Grasshopper