How does Google Chrome affect product owners developing web apps?

Question

If my app has been tested in Firefox 3, Safari 3 & IE 7 will it need additional testing for Chrome?

If there are areas that'll need further testing -- then are there any online guides I could share with my designers & developers?

At what point will Chrome be considered to have sufficient market share to be treated as a mainstream browser?

Answer 1

Chrome uses the WebKit rendering engine, which is also used in Safari and some other small browsers. Overall with both Chrome and Safari gaining in market share it is definately a browser to test (you only really need to test one). It's very standards compliant and is constantly having updates to keep up with new CSS drafts.

Webkits main Site - http://webkit.org/

Browser Market Share http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers are good places to look for market share of browsers although they show very different responses on Chrome.

According to Wikipedia roughly 7.96% of poeple are using WebKit based browsers however W3C shows that in November only 5.8% did.

Answer 2

If it's working fine on Safari, it will probably work on Chrome as well. The only difference is the JavaScript engine, but I've yet to see a real world example of some legitim JavaScript code not working on Chrome.

Personally I test my stuff with Chrome because I use Chrome intensively for development. It is good practice to test your pages with at least one WebKit (or KHTML) based browser though.