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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

#121

Post by scholia »

eunoia wrote: post #113
sqeaky wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the Chrome team really care? Ads in Firefox provide the same revenue as ads in Chrome. What does Google gain by monopolizing? I think they care more about internet explorer, they don't want it dead specifically, but if it sticks around they want it reliable. Using ie used to be a giant pain and nothing worked right, people would use it to accomplish their goal and be done. Now using any of the three is fairly pl…

> What does Google gain by monopolizing? I would guess control. Owning the dominant web browser allows them to: * Softly guide front end web tech in a direction of their choosing * Ensure the supremacy of Google the search engine. Also if things ever really come to head between ad-blockers and ad-providers owning the dominant platform the former runs on would be very beneficial to the latter.

> I would guess control.

Most big companies want to control their own technology stack and optimize for their own products.

So Google wants people using Android phones and Chromebooks (ideally, fed by Google Fiber), with Google Chrome browsers feeding traffic to Google Search, Google Docs (with all your files in Gdrive), Gmail, YouTube etc.

This provides the maximum surveillance capacity for maximum tracking and thus the most efficient delivery of advertising. At least to the people who don't use ad-blockers and anti-tracking systems ;-)

"The result is a world where our most intimate personal details are collected and stored. I used to say that Google has a more intimate picture of what I'm thinking of than my wife does. But that's not far enough: Google has a more intimate picture than I do. The company knows exactly what I am thinking about, how much I am thinking about it, and when I stop thinking about it: all from my Google searches. And it remembers all of that forever." https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/11/surveillance_...

Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

#122

Post by scholia »

partiallypro wrote: post #72

I prefer Firefox to Chrome, Edge is still unstable but I do like some of the direction they are going in. The lack of extensions I think killed it out of the gate. It's also odd to me that Edge doesn't update through the Windows Store, and instead is updated through Windows Update...doesn't that defeat the purpose of it being a UWA? I actually find what Opera is doing a lot nicer than any other others are the moment…

> The lack of extensions I think killed it out of the gate.

True, but the extensions are coming.

> I actually find what Opera is doing a lot nicer than any other others are the moment though, find myself using it more and more.

I use Firefox and Opera, mainly, but I'm increasingly using Vivaldi. It's Chromium based and from the guy who originally founded Opera, but didn't like the way it was going.

It's extremely configurable. If you have any nostalgic feelings for Opera 12, it's worth a go....

Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

#123

Post by DarkLinkXXXX »

ahochhaus wrote: post #87
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One example of "google only APIs" that I ran into recently is the chrome extension browserAction.openPopup API. This API is whitelisted (in stable) for use by the Google Cast extension. Extensions authored outside of Google cannot use it. This is creates an uneven playing field. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=436489

It seems it's not necessarily malicious. From https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=399859:

"The popup is anchored to the extension icon, which might be in overflow or not even exist, in which case it is anchored to the Wrench menu. That kind of anchoring would make the message in the popup to appear to be from the Chrome browser (since it points to the chrome UI) and would present a vector for tricking users into thinking the message is from a trusted source.

Since this is not safe to allow all extensions to do we'd need a lot better reasoning than "I'd like to use this in my extension" before allowing widespread use of this API."

Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

#124

Post by yuhong »

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.

I wonder what web designers who dealt with IE thought of that.

Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

#125

Post by sp332 »

endemic wrote: post #91
Aldo_MX wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Firefox does have global freezes That's precisely the issue, it doesn't matter if Firefox just freezes for 250ms, it's enough to be perceptible and annoy me.

I had the same problem, and it was annoying as heck. Try running a multi-process build (Nightly/Aurora/Beta) and see if your experience gets any better.

For some reason the freezes are much worse in multi-process. Certain sites freeze it up consistently; newegg.com for example I just measured 67 seconds the whole window was completely unresponsive. If I disable e10s it runs fine.

Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

#126

Post by c_c_c »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #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.

I have no metrics but Android (Linux) and Chromebooks (Linux) would heavily skew the graph. If you ignore mobile you would probably see something similar.

Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

#127

Post by icebraining »

tdkl wrote: post #67
xaqfox wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does Chrome sync offer that Firefox sync lacks? FF syncs to the mobile version quite reliably for me (though, it does not sync to mobile Chrome if that is the feature that's lacking).

I've been syncing basically the same profile for 6 years now. FF lacked that at the beginning. The Android FF app is also unusable since it doesn't support bookmark folders when using sync, which I don't even want to know what would do to my bookmarks across devices.

I've been syncing basically the same profile for 6 years now. FF lacked that at the beginning.

Firefox Sync (formerly "Weave") has actually existed since 2007, it just was delivered as an extension instead of being built-in.

Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

#128

Post by ordinary »

schwap wrote: post #115
ordinary wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

IE definitely not. Firefox? yes. I've never seen any instance of Mozilla trying to trick anyone into installing FF.

I'm not even talking about tricks. IE comes pre-installed on all PCs, obviously, except for Europeans, and that only for a few years. But users generally do not bother performing in-depth research on the software they install, be it a browser some other piece of software. They use what that one technical friend keeps blabbering on about, or what their sysadmin installs on their work PC, or whatever comes up as #1 Google result when they search for 'open PDF file'. They intentionally install Firefox, true, but I am not convinced that decision is informed.

Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

#129

Post by BenElgar »

bobajeff wrote: post #102
jedberg wrote: 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.

Does that same logic apply to Safari?

Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

#130

Post by cmdrfred »

DarkLinkXXXX wrote: post #123
ahochhaus wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One example of "google only APIs" that I ran into recently is the chrome extension browserAction.openPopup API. This API is whitelisted (in stable) for use by the Google Cast extension. Extensions authored outside of Google cannot use it. This is creates an uneven playing field. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=436489

It seems it's not necessarily malicious. From https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=399859 : "The popup is anchored to the extension icon, which might be in overflow or not even exist, in which case it is anchored to the Wrench menu. That kind of anchoring would make the message in the popup to appear to be from the Chrome browser (since it points to the chrome UI) and would present a vector for trick…

I agree, I would guess extensions also probably don't have access to chrome's password store. Trusted code can be handled differently.
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