5 days after the beta release of the Google Chrome web browser for Mac & Linux, the (anonymous) Chrome user contacted me about this site:

"Would be nice if your website worked reliably in other browsers than just IE, Firefox for example it's buggy on 1st load and Chrome it's ... buggered."

I agree, it would be nice, and it is! The site looks and works reliably in Safari and Opera, which do qualify as "other browsers". :) I thought that this was a friend pulling my leg. Let's explore this a little further...

Google released Chrome for Windows back in September 2008, and pushed it out of beta later that year in December. Back then I thought "a new browser on the market is surely going to have to support Mac & Linux to have a chance of becoming a serious contender that developers will need to exclusively check their sites in". I didn't even concern myself with using it. My Windows system is just for browser testing and in fact, I even uninstalled it.

Sounds good no? That how I was rationalizing the thought of adding Chrome to the other browsers, and even versions within a browser that needs to be tested for. (i.e. IE 6, 7, 8)

It's been a long time since I've looked at google analytics, so for the sake of this post, let's take a look at the top 7 browsers used to view this site with:

Well I'll be damned. For the last month, this site gets more Chrome visits than IE. 10% (chrome) vs 9% IE. Firefox came in at a resilient 65%. This is a site that primarily has a developer audience, so let's take a look at the top 7 browsers for another site which gets more traffic and who's target audience is not strictly developers (or even remotely).

That's a little more like it, but I was still surprised to see Chrome coming in at #4 with a little over 3% of the visits.

This post started out a little less serious and to feature what I think is a funny comment considering the guy is going to have a lot of work on his hand if he's browser testing and taking it upon himself to report bugs on random sites, however, I do appreciate the note! It made me take a deeper look and understand that while I knew Chrome is a browser that I'd have to eventually take seriously, now is probably that time.

So with that, Cheers anonymous @ anonymous .com! It's concerning that Chrome is rendering different than FF, IE, Safari, and Opera, but for its sake (and my sanity), I hope it's just more picky about bad HTML and I'm missing a div closure somewhere.