November 28, 2008 by Jay Smith
Anyone looking for a reason why Google are considering offering money to computer makers to pre-install Chrome need only look at the market share statistics for net browsers – Chrome enjoys only 0.74% of market share. They are ahead of Netscape Navigator who have 0.45%, but considering AOL have now officially given up on that, the search advertising giant will take little comfort from that fact.
Chrome is still in its beta stage though the stats are still disappointing. The belief amongst analysts is that a company with the kind of grip on the online world that Google has should be causing more of a stir when it brings out a browser of its own. Currently, even the Opera browser is ahead of them.
To be fair to Google there has not been a huge amount of marketing done. When the beta tag comes off Chrome, the company are expected to promote it heavily, it would be a huge surprise everyone who knows anything about browsers if the market share did not rise dramatically as a result.
The jury is still out however on whether or not the browser can compete with Firefox and IE, even if Google’s big computer deal goes through.
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