WELCOME

The most telling shift that comes after Chrome was first

Aug. 14, 2017 by Paul Fletcher

The most telling shift that comes after Chrome was first adopted to the mobile market is that Chrome now has the highest penetration of Firefox, with about 1.5 million users per month. Chrome's Web rendering engine is largely the same as Chrome's web browser, but it still uses a lot of JavaScript, and it works even at low resolutions. That has the effect of leaving users exposed to "fast" web rendering speeds, like on-demand video or text, that don't require Web hardware.

What Google's move has done is bring Chrome closer to Firefox's desktop-browser dominance, which is why it has come so close to Chrome on the desktop side. The move also gives Firefox a shot at having its own Web rendering engine in 2014, and it should make the switch better than Chrome did.

The biggest problem for the Chrome team is that it's making a major effort now to make Chrome more popular. The change is a big one, and it's not just a matter of having more desktop- and cloud-based browsers, but also a whole bunch of third-party platforms, as I pointed out during our report. It's about making Chrome a better choice than Safari, and it's about making Chrome a better choice than the competition.

The most recent development in that regard comes from the development of Chromium.

The company launched the Chromium engine with Chrome in early 2013, and in April, Google gave it a beta version to test. Developers who liked the project were able to run tests in browser and desktop environments, but the team soon had two more beta releases running in the cloud, and the final version of Chromium, which was available only in Chrome and Firefox, was ready to go as of this writing.

Chromium will also be free to all users, but it's limited to developers who have built a prototype of the engine. It's being developed on Github, and the build will be available on the Android and iOS versions of Chrome and Firefox. Google's decision comes as the company is facing mounting competition from Google's cloud-based offerings.