Chicago (IL) - Judging by the 1.0 release of Chrome in November and two minor updates that followed, uptake of Google's browser appears to have lost steam. It's as if Google lost its edge in the innovation arena. Despite a cosmetic removal of the "beta" label that was deemed purely a marketing move, Chrome remains rough around the edges and still lacks sophisticated features like the extension mechanism to add third-party functionality or more robust plugin support. With this slowed pace of innovation comes also a slowdown in web usage share growth. Basically, Chrome hovered slightly above the 1% mark throughout the past three months. And what's worse, no feature-rich update is planned until at least the end of February.
 

Late yesterday, Google posted Chrome version 1.0.154.46 for download. It's a maintenance release solving issues with Yahoo and Hotmail webmail, in addition it has two security updates and several fixes for known issues. The Yahoo! Mail issue which prevented users from sending email in the web interface is now resolved. Hotmail should also now work in Chrome. Microsoft's webmail previously refused to run, reporting that Chrome is not one of the supported browsers.

Google noted their team is working with the Hotmail team for "a proper fix." In the meantime, the company deployed a simple workaround that changes the user agent string that Chrome sends when requesting Hotmail URLs that end with mail.live.com, effectively fooling Hotmail into returning data for one of the supported browsers. Power users employing the application shortcut's "--user-agent" switch, which forces Hotmail to run in Chrome, can now safely remove the switch with this release.

Besides Javascript and Adobe Reader plugin security updates marked with "high" severity, this release also includes several fixes for known issues (described in more details in Chrome's release notes).

Since Chrome's auto-update feature automatically downloads and installs the most recent stable release (even if the browser is not running), most users should already have version 1.0.154.46 installed. You can also install it manually by clicking the wrench menu, choosing About Google Chrome, and from there click Install Now to install the latest update.

Lack of new features in Chrome slows growth to a halt

According to Net Applications' web usage share data for January (obtained by monitoring browsers versions and operating systems used to visit 40,000 participating sites in the U.S.), Chrome has been hovering around the 1.1 percent web usage mark throughout the month with spikes above 1.2 percent during weekends (possibly when users spend time trying out the new browser, while still relying on their old standby for daily use). This is pretty much consistent with an average 1.04 percent web usage that Chrome showed throughout December and most parts of November. For comparison, all versions of Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer recorded 7.93%, 21.34% and 68.15% web usage share in December respectively, as shown in TG Daily's in-dept December browser analysis.

CHROME: FLAT GROWTH IN DECEMBER 2008
Throughout December 2008, Chrome essentially remained slightly above 1% web usage mark, as throughout January 2009. Seemingly flat growth has been contributed to the lack of major Chrome updates with a much-needed new feature set.

Chrome's almost flat growth in past three months is in sharp contrast with the surge early in November when Chrome zoomed past 1% web usage share following several new features deployed to the then beta version. Prior to this feature-rich beta release, previous beta versions of Chrome kept the browser hovering between 0.7% and 0.8% for most of October and November of last year. Although Google tried a few not-so-fair tactics to push Chrome onto more computers, nothing has worked except for one thing: new features that users have been craving.

Continued on next page: Futile marketing tactics with 1.0 version, Three separate versions of Chrome...