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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

#21

Post by nathancahill »

kpcyrd wrote: post #13
mmastrac wrote: post #10

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.

Agreed. Similar to how Adobe Reader leveraged itself into computers everywhere with their Get Adobe Reader button beside every .pdf link.

Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

#22

Post by larrik »

SimeVidas wrote: post #15

Mozilla: We are a non-profit and we protect your privacy; we won’t use your data to make money. Most users: Nah, man. We’ll go with the search engine and ad network company.

Every time I try to switch to Firefox, it just doesn't work as well, and I switch back. I'd rather Firefox over Chrome for philosophical reasons, but I feel like Firefox just isn't there technologically. It's getting better, but they really let it stagnate back in the day.

Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

#23

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

kpcyrd wrote: post #13
mmastrac wrote: post #10

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.

Chrome also had the advantage of being advertised on Google.com.

Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

#24

Post by gboss »

gtk40 wrote: post #3
dukenuke wrote: 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…

Is the claim that Firefox/Mozilla is in bed with Google sourced by the use of Google for data about safe browsing? Is there any other reason to think this now that they no longer receive revenue from Google?

Actually Mozilla ditched Google as their search revenue partner and now is partnered with select search engines depending on the market. Yahoo for the US, Yandex for Russia and Baidu for China, for example. Mozilla to my knowledge no longer relies on Google for any revenue.

See how do we generate revenue question: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2014/f...

Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

#25

Post by gcp »

adregan wrote: post #17
dukenuke wrote: 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)

It's Chrome that uses a Bloom Filter.

Firefox uses a compressed Prefix set, which has no false positives (unlike the Bloom filter).

Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

#26

Post by distances »

larrik wrote: post #22
SimeVidas wrote: post #15

Mozilla: We are a non-profit and we protect your privacy; we won’t use your data to make money. Most users: Nah, man. We’ll go with the search engine and ad network company.

Every time I try to switch to Firefox, it just doesn't work as well, and I switch back. I'd rather Firefox over Chrome for philosophical reasons, but I feel like Firefox just isn't there technologically. It's getting better, but they really let it stagnate back in the day.

Can you elaborate on this? I've tried Chromium once and again, but always fall back to Firefox as it feels better to me. Direct reasons are the address bar functionality and better privacy support out of the box, but also some generic feel is somehow just more familiar to me.

Firefox does have global freezes on particularly heavy pages due to the single process model. It's rare enough not to bother me much though.

As a tip, the Firefox Android version allows add-ons -- uBlock most critically. It's just great.

Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

#27

Post by wazoox »

mtgx wrote: post #20
wodenokoto wrote: post #11

Didn't Firefox use to have almost 30% ? Or was that only in select markets?

It did. It dropped off a cliff when Google made Chrome default on Android, though.

BTW I'm using FF on Android too (and it's way better than Chrome, with a true adblocker which is even more important than on the desktop), but since the upgrade to Android 6 applications revert to the stock Android browser without any option to select FF instead, grrrr...

Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

#28

Post by gcp »

dukenuke wrote: 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…

what users overlook that every URL is checked against a database of URLs already in Google's 'safe browsing' repository

...the database of which is downloaded ahead of time and hence not transmitted to Google.

Read this: https://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/posts/how-safe-browsing-works-...

because they're in bed with Google.

It's actually Yahoo, not Google, that funds Firefox.

Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

#29

Post by kristopolous »

wazoox wrote: post #27
mtgx wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It did. It dropped off a cliff when Google made Chrome default on Android, though.

BTW I'm using FF on Android too (and it's way better than Chrome, with a true adblocker which is even more important than on the desktop), but since the upgrade to Android 6 applications revert to the stock Android browser without any option to select FF instead, grrrr...

try turning off JS and just whitelisting sites on mobile - it's in-crea-dible .... content loads, I can navigate through it ... amazing.

Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

#30

Post by JohnTHaller »

mmastrac wrote: post #14
kpcyrd wrote: 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 Flash - When you download and installed Flash for Opera or Firefox, it would trick you into installing Chrome as your default browser unless you noticed and unchecked a box: http://i.imgur.com/Uldw6X3.png

Java - When updating, Java on Windows would often trick you into installing Chrome as your default browser unless you noticed and unchecked a box

Avast, AntiVir, etc - Nearly every free antivirus on Windows was paid by Google to install Chrome. The free antivirus would notify you there was a new version and if you clicked the UPDATE or CONTINUE button without noticing and unchecking the box, you'd wind up with Chrome installed and set as your default browser: http://i.imgur.com/hNZLbmL.jpg

The majority of the non-techies I know and had set up with Firefox have no idea how Chrome got on their machines and became their default browser. I'd wager a lot of Chrome's desktop userbase on Windows is due to shady bundleware arrangements.

Chrome was still engaged in the above behavior the last time I checked.

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