Browsing the web has become part of our lives. Everything favoring this activity has improved: computers, internet, number of websites, features of websites (from animated GIFs to petabytes of HD video), online services and applications, etc. Needless to say the market of webbrowsers is an interesting one to be in, to such an extend that browsers are offered for free.
This has resulted in 'browser wars' ever since Microsoft's Internet Explorer pushed away Netscape (remember all the fuzz when MS integrated IE in Windows XP). Nowadays, war continues, but new parties have entered the battlefield. The user benefits but developers are left in a forest of different standards (or different interpretations of the same standards, which to me seems as an contradictio in terminis).
Reality doesn't always make sense
It's not necessarily browser speed, user friendliness or aesthetics that determines market shares. Currently there's a bunch of browsers (versions) lagging behind that are still being used quite frequently, and there's browsers that are quite up to par but not equally popular.
Chrome
Chrome was developed by Google (based on existing stuff) and is aiming at speed, realizing browsers have to act more and more as 'platforms' for quite sophisticated software (Chrome OS even aims at a computer solely based on a webbrowser). This has urged other vendors to do the same (optimize the hell out of their JS engine). Opera is doing well, Firefox is catching up, Safari is as well and Internet Explorer... well IE itself might be catching up, but the users are much less so because they are not always installing the new browsers. This will become even worse now IE9 will not even be available for Windows XP or Vista, while especially XP will be around for quite some time (is my guess, especially in less developed countries).
Chrome
Looking at usage, Chrome is the one in the rise (see picture). Its growth curve even seems exponential. Internet Explorer on the other hand, is going down down down. That's reality and it seems to make sense this time. Opera on the other hand has less market share than it deserves based on the specs.
Versioning
One problem for web developers, apart from browser vendors, is browser versions. The rendering of a page might differ between versions from the same vendor just as much as between two versions from different vendors. Chrome, however, has a very sophisticated update system. Small patches (containing only the differences between the old and new version, taking into account that it are binary files containing executable or library code) are pushed to the client as they come out. When I looked at my website stats I first didn't believe this, because I saw multiple Chrome versions with high usage percentages pop up. But when I took into account the release dates of these versions, it turned out that almost all Chrome users use the 'current' version.
Google Chrome Frame (IE Plugin)
Google came up with something brave, clever and slightly backstabberish: the Google Chrome Frame, "[..] an open source plug-in that seamlessly brings Google Chrome's open web technologies and speedy JavaScript engine to Internet Explorer". From the developer perspective, it works like flash: if the user has it installed it works transparently, otherwise the user is directed to a download page through which he/she download the plugin very easily.
Conclusions
If you are still using IE and you are not using Windows 7: go Chrome! In other cases: at least consider Chrome! It's available for Windows, Mac and Linux (32 and 64 bit). Those who want to be exclusive: consider Opera.
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