King's Crown to be Made of Chrome?

• 6%
• 25%
• 27%
• 35%

• Safari
• Firefox
• Chrome
• IE

• 100
• 75
• 50
• 25
• 0

Browser Market Share
©2012 bar graphs by cssbakery.com

Could Google Chrome overtake Microsoft's Internet Explorer in the browser wars? That's what people are asking after StatCounter reported that Chrome has just bypassed Firefox in browser market share. Firefox and Chrome, long favored by developers, have steadily gone up in number of downloads over the years. Internet Explorer is still the leader but everybody, including Microsoft, is happy IE6 share is down to less than 1%. Not unlike those scenes in the movies when no matter what you do, you just can't kill the scary beast, there's a reason why IE6 has staying power.

Some corporations and government entities are still using IE6 because they have a suite of applications developed and tested on that particular browser. Moving to a new browser means they have to re-test all those applications and fix the ones that are broken, all of which costs them money. Of course, they should realize that there is also a large cost for staying on IE6, including extra effort for new applications and the potential cost of security breaches caused by the use of a 10 year old browser.

Here's a set of earlier CSSBakery posts on Google Chrome. The bar graph with the emblem was made using CSS classes that we developed here. For the markup and watermark css, look here.

Google Chrome is written in C++. I'm including a sample of the source code.