I'm honestly quite amazed. When Chrome first came out, I remember asking my teammates why we were wasting money on developing a browser, thinking it would never be more than a niche product. Another reason why I'm not Google's CEO, apparently.
>From the statistics below (collected from W3Schools' log-files over a period of ten years), you can read the long term trends of browser usage.
These are the browsers that hit W3Schools, a site for people that need quick reference when making webpages, not across the internet.
Javascript performance was pretty dismal until Chrome came around, and then everyone had to up their game. Until Android, mobile platforms were tightly controlled walled gardens (although Windows Mobile was amongst the least worse). Now everyone wants Google Mail, Maps and Search on their mobile devices.
Google ultimately makes money through usage and the platform + apps/browser don't matter that much financially. Without Chrome and Android, there is a strong possibility of being cut out completely.
Yes it does matter, at least some. No one even knows what the bar is if no one is using it.
Someone could put together a wickedly fast browser with fantastic privacy controls, release it tomorrow, but if no one used it, it wouldn't have any effect on major browser makers.
JS performance went up in other browsers due to Chrome only because Chrome was gaining users (even if the base was small at first), mostly because they were able to push Chrome from Google.com itself.
As a web developer I hope the trend does not continue.
While MSIE may be 'good' browser (tastes may vary, I find the UI horrible) it's damaging to the web ecosystem to have MSIE leading the marketshare. It's advantageous for Microsoft to limit new features and keep interoperability between browsers low. As a result the entire web using public loses out on having new features and having a broader choice.
Chrome and Firefox are built on open source software, so when an issue occurs you can participate in the process of it being fixed.
Chrome and Firefox are awesome though.
Netmarketshare attempts to measure the latter and shows IE on top.
http://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qpri...
So it depends on what your definition of "popular browser" is. Is it the browser that's used by most people? That would be IE. Is it the browser that most browsing happens? That would be Chrome. Of course, this is ignoring the fact that both Statcounter and Netmarketshare are not perfect and don't cover all or even most sites' logs.
As others have noted, W3schools only measures hits to the W3Schools site, which is not even close to be being representative of the web.
BTW, I personally think the browsing-time metric is better than unique-users, because applying the latter metric to music would have had Rebecca Black as the most popular artist of 2011. Which conclusion, though true under some definitions, might not be quite as useful as other possible conclusions.