Siu Lun

With the release of Google Chrome beta for Windows and the planned beta soon after for Mac and Linux. It is obvious that a major player in the internet field has finally extended it’s claws into the browser.

Google Chrome, based on webkit, has essentially made it’s rendering speed and features the same as Safari. A lot of people are hailing about it, even newspapers for the ordinary folks.

According to techCrunch, some people thinks it can catch up to firefox’s 20% market share in 2 year time.

I’m not so sure about that. Don’t get me wrong, Google is certainly strong however, with no development tool comparable to Firebug and I certainly can’t see any easy module installation functionality at this moment.

Google Chrome will not be as successful as Firefox, Google Chrome will only be categorised the same as Opera and Safari.

The 20% marketshare that Firefox enjoys today at the end of the day is due to the developer community spreading it like fire whenever they have the chance to do so on their relative’s machines and at their workplace.

The ability to have completely customisable addons is what made Firefox. Unless other browsers do the same, they’ll always be “consumer” oriented browsers that will require enormous amount of public advertising to get any market shares.

So. I don’t doubt Google Chrome as a browser that we developers will need to add it onto our list of “supported browsers” in a year or two. But gaining the marketshare of Firefox? Maybe in 5 years time.