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Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

arstechnica.com

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Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

#12
I'm curious how this graph would look if you compared only Linux users (obviously IE and Edge would drop off). It didn't strike me how important Firefox is to the FOSS world until I started experimenting with Linux distros and found that it was consistently pre-installed on flavors of Ubuntu/Debian/Mint/Fedora/FreeBSD. It becomes even more valuable on distros that refuse to pre-load any proprietary software.

Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

#13

Wow. I remember watching these stats, waiting for Firefox to edge past IE in the 2000s. Chrome really took the ball and ran with it. They had the advantage of seeing things that FF did that really worked (tabs, extensions, find-as-you-type) and the intelligence to iterate on that (multi-process support, a world-class debugger) and a really solid foundation in WebKit (née KHTML). In a way Chrome was in the right place…

> Chrome really took the ball and ran with it

I'm still kind of bitter with the way they did that. A lot of windows installers, which usually installed you toolbars if you forgot to uncheck a box, started installing chrome as your default browser if you forgot to uncheck a box.

I've seen a lot of non-technical people using chrome who have no idea what chrome is or remembering giving consent to installing chrome.

Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

#14
post #13

Wow. I remember watching these stats, waiting for Firefox to edge past IE in the 2000s. Chrome really took the ball and ran with it. They had the advantage of seeing things that FF did that really worked (tabs, extensions, find-as-you-type) and the intelligence to iterate on that (multi-process support, a world-class debugger) and a really solid foundation in WebKit (née KHTML). In a way Chrome was in the right place…

> Chrome really took the ball and ran with it I'm still kind of bitter with the way they did that. A lot of windows installers, which usually installed you toolbars if you forgot to uncheck a box, started installing chrome as your default browser if you forgot to uncheck a box. I've seen a lot of non-technical people using chrome who have no idea what chrome is or remembering giving consent to installing chrome.

Interesting. I didn't see that - I assumed it was just a result of advertising it to everyone who searched on Google.

Do you have any specific examples?

Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

#16
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chrome really took the ball and ran with it I'm still kind of bitter with the way they did that. A lot of windows installers, which usually installed you toolbars if you forgot to uncheck a box, started installing chrome as your default browser if you forgot to uncheck a box. I've seen a lot of non-technical people using chrome who have no idea what chrome is or remembering giving consent to installing chrome.

Interesting. I didn't see that - I assumed it was just a result of advertising it to everyone who searched on Google. Do you have any specific examples?

Adobe is guilty of this. If you download Flash Player from their site, the "Optional offers" are to also install Chrome and Google Toolbar. Both of which are checked by default.

Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

#17
post #2

Firefox also sends enormous amounts of metadata about your browsing to the cloud and it's very difficult for non-savvy users to turn this off. They call it telemetry and 'safe browsing', but users overlook that every URL is checked against a database of URLs already in Google's 'safe browsing' repository. Firefox is not actually private and their business model can't allow for privacy, because they're in bed with Goo…

There was a talk[0] which included some info about this recently at !!con[1]. The safe browsing dataset is compressed and stored as a bloom filter so that the check for a safe site can be performed locally.

0: http://bangbangcon.com/speakers.html#adam-marcus

1: https://youtu.be/C3ox1zQcV_I?t=16259 (timestamp is right at the beginning of the bloom filter details)

Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

#19
post #2

Firefox also sends enormous amounts of metadata about your browsing to the cloud and it's very difficult for non-savvy users to turn this off. They call it telemetry and 'safe browsing', but users overlook that every URL is checked against a database of URLs already in Google's 'safe browsing' repository. Firefox is not actually private and their business model can't allow for privacy, because they're in bed with Goo…

if you really want to talk about lack of privacy you should go after Chrome...
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