In a little more than a year, Google Chrome, the search company's speedy and innovative Web browser, has managed to win over about 3 percent of Internet surfers. Is that good or bad? It's certainly not a blockbuster, but consider the hurdles Google faces. Unlike Internet Explorer or Safari, Chrome doesn't come pre-installed on any computers. True, Mozilla Firefox faces the same problem—but Firefox, which now has about 23 percent of the market, has been around since 2004. You might also argue that Firefox captured an easy market—people who were sick of IE and wanted something better. Chrome can't do the same; everyone who wanted to leave IE has done so already, and the only folks left to convert are those who don't know any better.
I'm not saying that these IE holdouts are merely ignorant about the alternatives. The problem goes deeper than that: They don't even know they're using IE. They don't know they're using anything in particular — many people think that when they click on the blue IE icon, they're clicking on "the Internet." As Brian Rakowski, director of product management for Chrome, puts it, "People just don't know what a browser is."
There are no hard numbers on this, but Rakowski's not kidding. Ask your tech-unsavvy friends or your parents which browser they use, and chances are you'll get a quizzical look and an answer like, "I use Yahoo—or is that not a browser?" That's what one woman told a Google rep who was stopping people in Times Square this spring to ask a simple question: "What is a browser?"
Many people gave answers like, "It's what I search through—like, to find things." Or, "A browser is when you know what you're looking for, and a search engine is when you're searching for something." Only 8 percent of people in the admittedly unscientific survey could answer the question correctly.
You don't have to try to follow the healthcare, climate change or Gitmo legislation to know that the world is full of and run by idiots.
