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Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

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Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multi-process is being tested in Firefox Beta right now, according to https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Schedule .

While some progress is being made, it worries me that it's taking so long to get this functionality into the release versions. I'm not suggesting it should be rushed out, of course. But the Electrolysis efforts date back to 2009, if not earlier. That's a long time to make users wait!

Electrolysis breaks extensions that use low-level APIs designed in the single-process era [1]. This breakage drew the ire of a vocal minority of Firefox users enamored of such extensions, and AFAICT that's the major reason why e10s has taken such a long time to get enabled in release.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/Working_with_mul...

Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

#102
post #66

This isn't entirely surprising to me. For one, Edge only runs on Windows. Windows is losing market share to Mac OS, iOS and Android (Firefox is on all three as well as Windows). For two, I personally use Safari, Firefox, Chrome, and Chrome Canary on my box, each for their own purpose, but I have yet to find a need for Edge. There is no site that I go to that works best in Edge.

I won't care about Edge until they've open-sourced it and made it cross platform.

Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

#103
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.

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

And still does! It's obnoxious that Google shows more ads to non-Chrome browsers.

Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

#104
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of the Microsoft OEM deals and IE. Shows just how much like their opponent Google really is. :)

Microsoft's only interest in IE was to protect the Windows monopoly by suffocating Netscape and its Java Applets. And they told OEMs they wouldn't sell them Windows at all if they preinstalled Netscape or uninstalled IE. Which is why they got sued by the government and lost the trial. Kind of different if you ask me.

Much worse version of monopolistic tactics I agree.

Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

#105
About a month ago I saw a news story that said Chrome finally passed IE, based on some other browser usage tracker. Each website that tracks this can have some huge bias, so making a general claim about a browser passing another doesn't really mean much.

Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

#106
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

anywhere i go without an adblocker begs me to install chrome and stop using whatever horrible outdated browser im using (according to the google ad), and how youtube, etc work best with chrome anyway thats quite a lot of powerful advertisement, on the sites people browse every day. its not too different than being part of the default install IMO ;-) and of course - chrome is a pretty good browser (though edge is actu…

And the thing is it's sadly not a lie. YouTube and such do work best with Chrome. Google's effective web vertical integration means they control every stage of the pipeline. They control the sites and the browser. They can deploy experimental tech in Chrome which nobody knows about and which only Google sites use. It's terrifying.

At some point, YouTube worked better with Safari than with Chrome or Firefox. YouTube would serve VP9 to browsers that supported it, but it was not hardware accelerated, so it used much more CPU.

Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

#107
post #98

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.

I tryied chrome on Ubuntu. It is so slow it is almost unusable, so I switched to firefox (that I feel less user friendly). That may be the reason why it is preinstalled on linux distos.

It has worked just fine for me on Ubuntu (and other distros built on Ubuntu) as well as on Arch Linux.

I still use Firefox though. Extensions are better.

Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multi-process is being tested in Firefox Beta right now, according to https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Schedule .

While some progress is being made, it worries me that it's taking so long to get this functionality into the release versions. I'm not suggesting it should be rushed out, of course. But the Electrolysis efforts date back to 2009, if not earlier. That's a long time to make users wait!

While the original Electrolysis work dates back to 2009, the project was put on hold for a couple years in the middle. Development resumed in mid-2013, as the archive of meeting notes shows:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/Meetings

Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

#109
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Growth hacking at large. Impressive :)

No, it's not impressive. It's deceptive and a dark pattern.

Oh don't get me wrong, I don't think this is good.

I'm a developer and growth hacking is a mystery to me, I'm always impressed to see which "moves" are able to increase the user-base.

Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

#110
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most users Let's not get out of hand here. That may be true of "some users," or most users that you have come in contact with in your travels.

You think more than 50% of the people using Chrome deliberately sought it out and installed it after making an informed decision? Not because it was pushed via bundlware or a Google-owned property?

You think more than 50% of the people using Firefox or (especially) Internet Explorer deliberately sought it out and installed it after making an informed decision?
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