Google Chrome Continues Its Steady Climb Towards Dominance in June

Hardly surprising, but Google Chrome has continued its steady, though recently somewhat slower, rise, gaining even more users, while Firefox and Internet Explorer's market share slips away slowly. Granted, it's going to be a while before Chrome becomes a threat to Firefox, depending on who's numbers you rely on, but the steady growth seem unstoppable. Google Chrome was used by 13.11 percent of users in June 2011, 0.6 percent points more than in the previous month, according to data from Net Applications. That may not seem like much of a rise, but getting half of a percent point per month quickly ads up.

Considering that Chrome has been doing this since it launched, practically, without falter, and that there are no signs or foreseeable factors that would greatly diminish or reverse Chrome's rise, everyone else is just heading towards the inevitable conclusion.

Firefox was used by 21.67 percent of internet users, slightly down from the 21.71 percent in May. Firefox has been hovering around the 21 percent mark since the start of the year and around the 22 percent mark for more than a year now.

While Firefox's market share doesn't seem to be diminishing, just staying put is not going to cut it.

Internet Explorer, of course, is the big loser once again, though, as is almost always the case, the drop is small. The number of people using Internet Explorer, regardless of the version, dropped from 54.27 percent in May to just 53.68 percent in the last month.

IE had 56 percent of the market at the beginning of the year. At that time, Firefox had 22.74 percent and Google Chrome 10.70 percent.

Elsewhere in the market, Apple's Safari is also making some headway, as has been the case recently, and has reached 7.48 percent market share. Meanwhile Opera sees one of the biggest drops in recent months and hits 1.73 percent market share.

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Google Instant Pages Loads Pages Before You Click on the Links in Chrome

Google is obsessed with speed, this is pretty much a given and the company is the first to admit it. It spends plenty of time optimizing its websites and services, but it's also working on speeding up the web in general.

Now, it's launching a new feature for its search engine which loads the websites in the results that the user is most likely to go to in the background, as long as you're using Google Chrome.

"With Instant Pages in Chrome, you can skip the extra seconds waiting for a page to load and get to the answers you’re looking for faster with webpages that load instantly," Google explained.

"For searches when we can predict with reasonable confidence that you’ll click on the first result, Instant Pages technology will begin loading that webpage early so that by the time you click on the result, the entire webpage appears fully loaded instantly," it added.

Basically, if Google is pretty sure you're going to click on the first result in a search, it will tell Chrome to start loading that web page immediately.

By the time you realize that this was indeed the page you wanted and click on the result, the page may have already loaded in the background, meaning that it will be displayed instantly.

For the user, the process is seamless but the effects are visible, when everything falls into place, pages you go to from Google Search will load significantly faster.

Since this relies on a bit of guess work from Google, the feature doesn't trigger unless the search engine is very confident in its prediction of what you're going to click.

This is because, if the user doesn't click on the page Google thinks it will, it creates an unnecessary for websites which have to pay for the extra traffic without any benefits, since the user didn't actually visit the site.

Instant Pages only works in the dev channel version of Google Chrome 13, which will be graduating to the beta channel this week, for now, so there is still time for Google to tweak the feature and for webmasters to provide feedback.

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