Google Chrome Not Ready For Prime Time Compatibility Testing Yet (Still)

This Just In: CNET reports that Chrome has overtaken Safari in the latest usage stats (Chrome edges out Safari in browser usage). What exactly does this mean to developers and testers?
I think it's an interesting statistic but not significant (yet).  Why? For one thing, Chrome doesn't ship as a standard browser on any system (yet).  And until it does, a browser like Safari, which is the browser of choice for each new Mac user (until their friends somehow con them into using FireFox), will remain one of the two browsers (the other being Firefox) you must test on for the Mac OS.  For a second reason, read the article below we posted last week.

December 9, 2009 8:00 AM PST
Even though Chrome has gained a 3.93% market share (as compared to Safari at 4.36%, IE at 63.62% and Firefox at 24.72%), it's not ready to be added to compatibility testing matrices yet. There are two reasons for this (besides still being in beta):

• It doesn't run on Mac OS 10.4.x (only on Leopard)
• Features are not equally supported on all platforms, in particular there's a lack of support for extensions on the Mac

So what's the big deal here? Well for starters, by not supporting the next-to-the-next-to-the-last version of Mac OS X (as opposed to support for the 7+ year old Windows XP) , the adoption by Mac users will be limited to those that don't like Safari and Firefox on their Leopard machines, which might as well be no adoption at all.

Furthermore, because extensions are not supported on the Mac (and Linux) versions of Chrome, testing on Chrome is only worthwhile on Windows. That makes Chrome a single-platform browser bet when it comes to compatibility testing.

With such limited prospects for use on the Mac platform, it's not worth QA testing Chrome on the Mac, and making a case for testing it on Windows alone will be hard to make given the bigger numbers for IE and Firefox.

Chrome doesn't warrant a line on the browser compatibility testing matrix yet.