As stated by Rob Young at Search Engine Journal, Google updates Chrome so frequently, that their updates barely grab attention. Despite the browser not even being two and a half years old, it is now on its ninth version.
As highlighted before by us, Chrome users tend to quickly adopt newer versions of their browser. This tendency of Chrome users is highlighted again by the rapid adoption rate of Chrome’s newest release, Chrome 9. To display the recent shift, Chitika took a look at the share that each major Chrome version (1-10) made up of the total Google Chrome traffic originating from the US or Canada from Friday, January 7th and Friday, February 4th:
After just one day following the stable release of Chrome 9, the update already made up over 15.6% of Chrome impressions from the United States and Canada, and made up 3.2% of Chrome impressions while in beta testing, consistent with our previous study of Chrome users. Also of note is that the current beta version of Chrome, Chrome 10, has surpassed the 1% mark of all Chrome browsers already:
With Chrome gaining momentum, from both new users and the eagerness of current users to upgrade their progressive browser, Google seems poised to make a run at making Chrome the second largest browser in the North American market.
I have always been quick to update to new versions for whichever browser I’m using. I do the same with WordPress updates which come along about as often, if not more, than Chrome. The network that really needs to come up with a browser is Facebook. FB is the only site that freezes and crashes Chrome (in my experience). If they are going to make a site and promote apps which are so user unfriendly they really should develop a browser that will work with Flash and the other bloated scripts they run.
Every once in a while my Chrome chokes on Flash and crashes all instances of it, so I feel you on that. Would be interesting to see Facebook jump into the browser market; Google’s made so much headway so fast, they might see an opportunity, and the old “social” browsers (I’m lookin’ at you Flock) don’t seem to be getting any traction.
The only problems I have with Chrome are unstable Java performance and poor pop-up blocking (compared to Firefox).
The browser updates itself by default, requiring virtually no interaction from users except to restart the browser at some point. Considering most users probably close their browser and/or shut down their computer completely every day or two, this makes perfect sense.