I'm not sure you're counting "users" the same way we are. Otherwise, I would have expected to see Firefox grow share in the last 8 weeks on the order of Chrome's share; the public stat-counting companies don't show anywhere near that kind of growth. Given how many ways of counting users there are (downloads, installs, 1-day actives, 7-day actives, 30-day actives, update pings, etc.) I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that that "by comparison" number isn't really an apt comparison.

BTW, I'm glad you were a bit less snarky here on your blog than in the TechCrunch comments. I'm not sure there's a need for any of us developers to go sarcastically sniping at each other. We're all trying to make life better for users, after all.

Pete, how we count users is well documented and has nothing to do with downloads or installs. We've added 30 million monthly users in the last 8 weeks. As I'm sure you're aware, 30 million mainstream _users_ will not have the same volume of _usage_ as 30 million highly active early adopters. As it turns out, "regular people" don't surf the Web as much as those of us in the geek elite, early adopter crowd.

If you all manage to reach the mainstream, you'll see the kind of slow decline in usage:users over time that we have over the last 4 years or so since we broke out of the less than 5% club. It gets harder and harder, not easier and easier, to get _usage_.

As for snarky, a blog post describing multi-million dollar bonuses for the Chrome team's 30 million users seems prime pickins' for some snark.

Oh, and can you maybe help convince someone at Google to re-open the browser stats? That sure would be helpful. Usage and users (if you all can get users, I'm sure you can find a way) would be AWESOME. I'd switch to Chrome for a month!!

- A

LMAO at the tweet! Wait, wait, (still laughing). Ok, whew.

Asa, how do you (or do you at all) deal with conflicts between being a loyal Google supporter and product user, and having Chrome wanting to overtake Firefox from a competition stand point? I'm sure that neither Google nor Mozilla wants to see the other fail (competition is good for the Web, innovation, etc, etc) but surely neither company/organization is cheering for their competitor's browser either.

I love Google, most people do (unless you work for MS) but Chrome is competition and I can't imagine Google just giving up on it saying, well, we gave it a shot let's move on. No, we know that won't happen, they'll be persistent and come up with ways to increase adoption of Chrome.

I don't fear (and never have) that Chrome will be the end of Firefox as predicted even when there is good and consistent add-on support, but they will find a way to make Chrome more successful and cut into Firefox's market share. It will probably have to be something really revolutionary but I believe that they'll find a way.

Not to take away anything at all from Firefox itself but Mozilla (and you with SFx in particular) were largely successful with Firefox by energizing people who were mostly in desperate need of something other than IE. Google doesn't have that. There is no NEED for Chrome, there was a need for Firefox. Now I believe that Firefox's adoption continues to grow on its own merits, reputation, and by personal recommendations.

With all of that said, I don't understand why Chrome isn't doing better considering Google's reach and resources. It could be that it isn't Firefox, or that it just doesn't feel right, or that more people are personally recommending Firefox more than other browsers. Or it could be that it jus' ain't no good. :) I personally don't care for it.

Something to consider and think about is Chrome's user base must consist of mostly geeks and technically advanced users the same that it was for Firefox in its early days and so its probably safe to assume that they are all slowly promoting Chrome to more mainstream users and it's just taking a lot longer for them to make any real significant dent (plus they don't have a movement or cause) but I imagine that they will.

Wherever I go, especially if there's a PC visible, I ask the person if they use Firefox (if not, bring on the sales pitch) and I've yet to hear someone say that they haven't at least heard of it and if they are using it I ask how they discovered it and it's always because a friend recommended that they use it. Most recently, I asked the assistant branch manger of my bank how she discovered it and she said that the Comcast tech that was at her house recommended it.
I image this is now happening with Chrome users as well.

So with all of my ramblings here, what is Google doing, or what have they done wrong so far that has kept Chrome's numbers much much lower than expected? If you feel that giving your opinion on that will benefit Chrome more than me, than of course don't say anything.
And finally, how do I maintain a love-hate relationship with Google. :|

Ken, I welcome competitors. I'm bothered by people who think that it's "easy" to do what Mozilla's done over the last 11 years (half of those in the Firefox era).

When Google launched Chrome 14 months ago, many in the tech punditry said that the game was over and Google would squash Firefox because they're, well, because they're Google and they can do anything.

And no, I don't think either company is cheering for the others defeat. But I do think that Mozilla and Google have very different views of the Web and those views not only inform, they very much determine what their respective browsers bring to the table. I, obviously, believe in Mozilla's mission and how and why we make Firefox is why it is the browser it is. Google has a different vision of the Web that puts them at the center of everything and owning large swaths of the information, personal and otherwise, that flows around the Web. That's just not the future I want so I hope they never come to dominate the browser landscape.

At the same time, i don't think that either Mozilla or Google will ever dominate the landscape. In our best regions, Firefox is around 50% of usage. That's a pretty strong place to be but it's not "dominance" the way IE defined dominance in 2001 or 2002.

As for what Google is doing wrong, I don't think there's anything they're doing wrong. They're using ALL of the tools available to such a powerful company (9 months of a banner ad on the Google front page!!!) and it turns out that getting people to understand the Web and make an informed browser choice is just not a simple task.

We've been at this for 11 years, with some solid successes at all steps of that process -- from the early Tech Evangelism efforts in 2000 that got top sites like ESPN to rebuild entirely on then current web standards, to the Mozilla 1.0 launch that got a couple percent of the global market engaged and demanding further website compatibility, to millions of lines of code to get compatibility with IE only Web sites, to the years of resisting calls to implement ActiveX or other "must have" features, to the amazing success of Firefox -- the Mozilla community has just outworked everyone.

No amount of money -- even the hundreds of millions that Microsoft, Google, and Apple have put into browser development in the last decade, can top the sheer volume of work that the tens of thousands of Mozilla contributors have devoted over the last 11 years.

Google's done a fine job with Chrome over the last three years or so (they were obviously working on it at least a year or two before they launched) but three years is 8 years less than Mozilla's put into the browser game.

That being said, they came into the market when things were relatively easy. Web sites that matter in all but one or two countries do a great job supporting Firefox (and Safari thanks to its "like Gecko" user agent) and so Google could build a browser and not have to worry much at all about years of compatibility work. They didn't have to worry about convincing early adopter types that alternative browsers can and do work. They didn't have to worry about slow connections and long download times like we did many years ago because broadband is pretty much ubiquitous now. They didn't have to worry about educating the tech press that a browser can make a very real difference. They didn't have to worry about Windows 95 and Windows 98 and Mac OS 9 and all the other ancient OSes that were still prevalent in the first half of this decade. They didn't have to worry about most computers running with Pentium II processors and 64 MB RAM. All of the challenges we faced we either knocked down or they faded away and by 2008, pretty much anyone could make a browser based on Trident, Gecko, or Webkit that would "just work".

OK. I've gone on more than long enough for a blog comment :D

- A

If any Google people are reading this, it's a great browser, and I'd love to use it, but the update method is an obstacle. It's not nice to leave a program running constantly on someone's computer. It's also not nice to install unwanted plugins without permission. There's too much junk on our computers, and the rule here is, if a program does either one of those, it gets uninstalled.

Asking the obvious question so that we can compare apples to apples: How long did it take Firefox to get its first 30 million users?

@Dan I think you are asking the wrong question, the number of people on the web now is much more then it was when Mozilla started it's work. Maybe this article gives a better idea:

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2009/09/google_chrome_target.html

And this comment:

Ken, this chart is of usage, so it assumes 100% is the whole pie. That pie is definitely growing, it's doubled since we started the Firefox project. Given that all new computers (probably at least 99%) ship with IE or Safari, any gains that Firefox, Opera, and Chrome make are that much more exceptional.

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2009/09/google_chrome_target.html#comment-2654415

I switched from Firefox to Chrome back in about March or April...when my FF stopped saving my cookies. I have nothing against FF, just that it stopped working right for me & I needed something that was NOT IE.