Has Chrome's growth come at the expense of Firefox?

Would those people leaving Internet Explorer have switched to Mozilla's browser or did they choose Chrome because it's Google?

By Amy Vernon on Tue, 06/29/10 - 12:07am.

Firefox has long been the darling of the open source community - an excellent browser that's more than a match for Internet Explorer.

It's eaten away at IE's market share, in fact, over the past few years. When Google released Chrome, another open-source web browser, it seemed the two combined might be able to bring down Microsoft's beheamoth once and for all.

In fact, if you look at the year-over-year data, they seem to be doing just that.

year over year

Even drilling down to just this past month, the data shows similar dips and rises for all the browsers. But make no mistake, IE's going down.

It made me wonder, though, if Chrome were responsible, or if those IE users would have made the switch to another browser - to Firefox - if Chrome were not available?

Full disclosure: I've used Firefox for three or four years now, gladly giving up Explorer and Safari - at my old job, we worked on Macs and I've had Macs at home and I had switched to Safari long before Microsoft stopped supporting IE on Macs.

It was a no-brainer to switch to Firefox, as more sites were optimized for it and I love the ability to customize it with scripts, plug-ins and skins. Tree-style tab - how do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

But a lot of friends have talked about Chrome's lightning speed, so I wanted to give it a try. I really didn't want to give up all my customization - I'd really gotten Firefox to the point where it did exactly what I wanted and gave me all the information I needed about any given page.

Still, when the stable versions for Mac and Linux were released last month, I figured that was as good a time as any to give Chrome a try. It's not so customizable - yet (the lack of tree-style tab is the biggest impediment, so far as I'm concerned, to fully switching over), but it's rather zippy and I admit I've rather cluttered up my Firefox with unnecessary tchotchkes over the months.

So which browser do you use? As you're reading this blog, I'm figuring you're most likely using Firefox, Chrome. I'd love to hear what browser you're using, why you're using it and your favorite plugin/script/addon/whatever.