Last fall, Google released a new Web browser called Chrome that is speedy, elegant, and reliable. Just ask the 1.42 percent of people who use it.
Chrome has simply failed to catch on in its eight months of existence. To remedy the problem, the search company will start airing a television ad for Chrome in the United States. The ad—the first TV spot Google has ever run—is a twee, low-fi affair with a film-school-demo-reel aesthetic. It begins with a shot of wooden toy blocks in a tray. As arcade music plays, one of these blocks—the Chrome logo—begins caroming around the tray, vaporizing or transforming the other blocks until the setup looks like a browser window. At the end, an exhortation appears: “Install Google Chrome.”
I appreciate the company’s instinct here—Chrome is a fine browser, and more people should be using it. But the ad leaves viewers in the dark about what Google is selling. Sometimes it can make sense to hawk a mysterious product in the hopes that viewers will go online to find out what it is. For that strategy to work, however, the product has to be relatively simple to understand, and its benefits have to be obvious. That doesn’t apply in the market for Web browsers. Getting people to switch is extremely difficult: According to the measurement firm Net Applications, about two-thirds of the world’s Web surfers use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer to go online, and they do so for one main reason—that’s the browser that comes baked into Windows. Not all of these people are Luddites who don’t realize their browser and the Internet are two different things. Many are simply unaware that there are any alternatives to Internet Explorer. Even if they have heard of Firefox or another alternative, they might not use the Web enough to see any compelling reason to switch to another browser. IE works fine for them. An ad aimed at convincing these users to switch to Chrome would need to be instructive rather than adorable. Perhaps it might show a side-by-side comparison of Chrome loading up popular sites faster than IE does or include testimonials from people explaining why using Chrome changed how they work online. Or here’s a better idea—hire the ShamWow guy, and let him guide people through Chrome’s best features. (Some of the online ads Google has posted do attempt to describe Chrome in more detail.)
But even the ShamWow strategy might not work. To a lot of people, the best browser in the world—one that loads every page in a nanosecond—could never be as awesome as a cloth that can suck up 20 times its weight in water. Those are the odds Google faces in its quest to make its browser dominant. What I love about Chrome is that it seems to have been designed specifically for power users—many of its features make life easier for people who spend countless hours online and for whom little shortcuts can be magical. For instance, I love that if I type a few words into its address bar, Chrome will fetch results from Google that I can jump to without having to make a stop at the search engine. But how many people will switch browsers for such a feature? The power-user base is small; most people who use the Web are likely pretty happy if their browser simply doesn’t crash, and Chrome offers them little more incentive to switch.
What’s more, power users already have a default a browser—Firefox, whose share of the market hovers at around 20 percent. (Apple’s Safari has a market share of about 8 percent, with Chrome at less than 1.5 percent.) But Chrome lacks several important features—browser add-ons or the ability to bookmark a full window of tabs into a single folder—that Firefox users will need before considering switching. This is Chrome’s dilemma, then: Its best features don’t turn the heads of ordinary users, but it’s not yet good enough to appeal to the very users who might be most amenable to giving it a look.
Chrome’s problems have been complicated by Microsoft. When Google’s browser made its debut, it was competing against a version of Internet Explorer that hadn’t been given a meaningful update in ages. Earlier this year, Microsoft released IE 8, which is actually a pretty great browser. It’s not as fast as Chrome, but it has pretty much every major feature you’d want in a browser—and even some that Chrome lacks. Internet Explorer, for instance, color codes the tabs you’ve got open, which helps you determine, at a glance, which pages are related to which. IE 8 already has a larger market share than Chrome, and as it begins streaming into new computers, it will surely become the world’s dominant browser. At least the world will be using decent software.
So how do you convince people to use a new Web browser? History suggests an easy answer: You strong-arm them. In the 1990s, Microsoft, desperate to vanquish the threat it saw in Netscape, bundled Internet Explorer into every copy of Windows. Within a few years’ time, IE had become the most common way the world got online, to the point that Microsoft earned itself an antitrust charge in the process. (Netscape’s market share is now 0.82 percent.) Apple does something similar. Safari comes bundled with the Mac OS, and last year the company even tried to use its auto-update program to surreptitiously feed Windows users a copy of Safari. As a result, Safari now enjoys a nearly double-digit share of the browser market.
Google doesn’t make a desktop operating system with which to bundle its browser, so it can’t easily force people to use Chrome. Instead, the search company will have to emulate Firefox’s marketing strategy. Of all the major browsers, only Firefox’s growth has come without monopolistic leverage. Over the last few years, the open-source browser has sailed the viral currents of the Web, finding adherents one user at a time. Its growth has been remarkable, and it shows no sign of slowing, either. Perhaps Google can find some solace in this; Firefox didn’t need snappy TV ads to win its fan base. It just needed snappy code and a plucky image. Firefox did well not just because it offered a better browser but because it seemed to offer a reprieve from Microsoft’s hegemonic complacency. Many who switched to Firefox were glad that someone was working to build innovation back into the Web.
But that audience is still there. And if they’re like me, they’re disaffected—I switched to Firefox early this decade, and I’m ready to change to something else. As even many of its fans admit, Firefox has grown lethargic as it ages; it’s slow, prone to crashing, and doesn’t seem to add new features as fast as its rivals do. Here’s your target, Google: If you want Chrome to hit it big, aim to get Firefox fanatics on your side.
