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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

#151

Post by asimuvPR »

Aldo_MX wrote: post #45
distances wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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'm a hardcore Firefox user. Its been my browser of choice since it came out. I'm a true Mozillian to the heart. But it kills me that I can mostly keep one window open with less than 15 tabs on a Macbook that has 16GB of ram and a fast SSD. I currently have 9 tabs/1 window and its using up 3.13GB of memory. None of the tabs have heavy Javascript processes.

Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

#152

Post by EdSharkey »

sangnoir wrote: post #99
EdSharkey wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Chrome is the current 800lbs gorilla, and they continue to grow. I am still operating under a browser wars mentality where Netscape/Mozilla's marketshare completely collapsed and they slowly recovered over time. I'm just impressed that Firefox is in double digits in terms of marketshare given that they don't have a huge marketing engine driving them (Okay, I guess Yahoo is pretty decent as engines go.) I remembe…

> Largely hitting pause on FirefoxOS and Thunderbird and everything else not Firefox is also the right, if painful, thing to do. Unfortunately, that's not what they are doing. They are going full throttle on the nebulous "IoT" on an equal footing with Firefox (VP & all). Mozilla seems to have abandoned it's mission statement: email is still an important part of the internet and it is far from solved. Yet they killed…

Can you share some links or blogs or whatever to reinforce what you're saying here? I am not seeing IoT at all on the mozilla website or press releases. Perhaps Firefox itself is integral to the IoT?

I was under the impression that FirefoxOS was on the backburner, not necessarily cancelled. FirefoxOS is a great idea, it's Mozilla's version of Android or WebOS. The fact that they didn't have a runaway success doesn't make mobile a fad for Mozilla - Mozilla has an existential problem if they do not have a strong mobile presence. Mozilla only has a toehold in mobile right now with Firefox iOS/Android, and I expect they will have to circle back to FirefoxOS at some point if they want to increase their marketshare.

But regarding the attempt at building FirefoxOS, I wonder what else would you expected for Mozilla to do given their position? Are you grumpy that they failed at something big? I have it on good authority that Mozilla isn't staffed by super-intelligent brain aliens with infinite time/budgets on their hands. :D

They're trying to divest themselves of Thunderbird entirely, as far as I can tell. Too bad, so sad. The community needs to organize, step up, butch up, and run with it or it will die.

Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

#153

Post by tarblog »

Rudism wrote: post #74
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.

Google was paying out $1 per Chrome install for a long time, which is why you saw it being heavily distributed through all sorts of shady channels like monetized installers. For context, a payout of $0.10 for a bundled install would have been considered really good back then; a payout 10x that amount meant you'd pull every dirty trick in the book to get as many installs as possible.

Do you have a source on this? Even one about the market in general? I wasn't aware of this practice before now.

Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

#154

Post by EdSharkey »

pessimizer wrote: post #139
EdSharkey wrote: post #71

This has to be worrisome to the Chrome team. I take this to mean that Firefox is getting faster and less janky with recent releases. Enough Windows users who are in the know and who occasionally kick the Firefox tires are finally settling on it. I don't view this as a knock on the quality of Microsoft products as much as an overall improvement in Firefox. I'm on Mac, and I believe Chrome software quality has slipped…

Firefox was never janky, or slow. It's just both 1) not pushed on users of the products of the two biggest tech companies we have, and 2) not distinguishable from the other options.

It was for me, on every OS I ever ran it. I say that as a dedicated Firefox user.

Right now, today, Firefox is generally responsive for me but not faster to render or process than Chrome for most workloads. I still see plenty of jank when framerates matter like when scrolling a busy page.

That said, when pages leverage Firefox's special performance features, like ASM.js, I've seen it vastly outperform Chrome, many times faster.

Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

#155

Post by fabrice_d »

asimuvPR wrote: post #151
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'm a hardcore Firefox user. Its been my browser of choice since it came out. I'm a true Mozillian to the heart. But it kills me that I can mostly keep one window open with less than 15 tabs on a Macbook that has 16GB of ram and a fast SSD. I currently have 9 tabs/1 window and its using up 3.13GB of memory. None of the tabs have heavy Javascript processes.

Do you have add-ons installed? You should really not get this memory usage on a clean installation.

One way to see what's going on is to open a tab to `about:memory` and take a measure?

Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

#157

Post by toomanythings2 »

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 don't remember any such thing and I started using Chrome from day one.

Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

#158

Post by toomanythings2 »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #23
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.

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

IE and Edge have the advantage of being advertised on nearly every PC in the universe.

Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

#159

Post by hobs »

Razengan wrote: post #116
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

So when are they going to get hit by lawsuits like the ones Microsoft got in the '90s?

As already stated, they were already happening, and Alphabet is in large part an initiative to head that off.

Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time

#160

Post by toomanythings2 »

neves wrote: post #61
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It was the only browser that I ever saw an ad in TV prime time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFE4rkSaKOY
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