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Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

netmarketshare.com

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Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#411

Post by LandR »

watt wrote: post #356
sveme wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a setting in both browsers. Default is "Start with Startpage or empty page" in both browsers as well. You can always select "Restore last session" in both browsers.

The problem is that if Firefox is getting this default wrong, what else are they getting wrong? And it should realize user state is sacred, I would even expect if I quit browser with something written in the address bar (or search bar, etc), when it starts up again, it should be able to preserve this half-entered user input!

> when it starts up again, it should be able to preserve this half-entered user input!

I wouldn't expect this at all!

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#412

Post by krageon »

botverse wrote: post #408
karmakaze wrote: post #403

There's a very interesting pattern in the data if you look back from 2016-05 to 2018-04 (chart has 24 month limit). Each April and October shows an appreciable drop in Firefox market share. This tells me that the Firefox desktop/laptop we are losing are on Linux and decide to switch to another browser when they upgrade their (probably Ubuntu based) disto. I myself run Firefox on Xubuntu but stick to the LTS releaaes.…

> One day I just did it and the change wasn't as big a deal as I thought it to be. This is so true, if everybody here thinks that should change but worried about this. It takes just a few hours, almos all features have an equivalent if not exactly the same and in the same place.

Except FF's tools are slower and the experience is overall worse. A lot has improved about firefox (including my old main complaint, that the renderer was slow) but saying the dev tools are at all acceptable when you're used to Chrome's is sadly still a stretch.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#413

Post by netcan »

It's hard, being FF.

Before chrome, FF outcompeted IE & safari on features. FF's features against OS makers moats like making their browser default and unlimited finances.

Once mobile got added to the mix, default, preinstalled browsers had even more advantage.

The feature/quality gap just isn't enough anymore. When FF gained all that market share 10-15 yrs ago, it had tabs years before the competition. It had add-ons before the competition. You could have IE6 or you could have FF with firebug, "tabbed browsing," as blocking, and cool web 2.0 stuff like social bookmarks and whatnot.

It was a massive feature gap. That's no longer the case. Hard times.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#414

Post by mad182 »

StillBored wrote: post #235

The problem is that firefox is only getting faster if you happen to have a half dozen 4+Ghz cores to burn. If you run it on low end hardware all these rewrites in rust/etc to improve parallelism seem to actually be slowing it down and apparently increasing its overall resource consumption. Older versions would run up against a gig and a half or so, and start garbage collecting. Now, its not unusual for me to see 5+GB…

Pretty much my experience. From time to time I see some article claiming how Firefox is getting faster and more awesome, but when I try it out I never see any improvements on my modest hardware.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#415

Post by krageon »

michaelmrose wrote: post #340
morpheuskafka wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish Mozilla would stop doing so much non-development stuff. Now that Thunderbird is moving on its own, FFox is their only product and yet they waste a lot of time sending out emails about various petitions and similar. They should definitely support pro-Internet petitions as a company (as does Google and others), but IDK why they are now running essentially a mailing list infrastructure for them.

Do you mean is you disagree with what they do politically and so you are going to sit here and pretend you wish they didn't waste resources on non technical issues. This isn't terribly charitable.

Even though I broadly agree with them politically, I still think companies should be apolitical. All these politics involved in things that aren't inherently political are tiring.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#416

Post by downer56 »

totfz wrote: post #398
feanaro wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think modern Firefox is a much better browser than Chrome though, but Mozilla certainly lost the PR war and to no fault but their own, because Firefox sure sucked for a long while. This gets said often, but I've been using Firefox continually since 2003 and I've never noticed it sucking.

If you haven't used Chrome, no wonder you haven't noticed Firefox sucking. But a side-to-side speed and responsiveness comparison of Chrome and Firefox is unfair even today.

I have used Chrome and Firefox side-by-side, consistently since Chrome's original release. I have used Netscape and Internet Explorer since before both existed. I have performance gaming rigs of all generations, and I develop software. I have multiple generations of Apple machines as well. I run Windows and Linux.

Firefox doesn't suck, and matches Chrome. But there's no accounting for user behavior. I have seen user behavior that is mind-blowingly stupid, and subcultures of user activity and tendencies trace well with product loyalty trends.

Some user subcultures are retardedly dependent on browser extensions, never clear their cache, retain cookies for the lifetime of their laptop battery, and seemingly need hundreds of tabs open. And none of this shit makes sense to me.

These are likely the same people who carry around phones on the brink of overheating while locked, and in their pocket, because they have to have a thousand apps installed, in order to feel like they're getting the $1,000 phone they paid for, I guess. Their emails are constantly peppered with "sent from [app|device|service]" signatures, and they claim microphone permissions are why ads target them.

Honestly, if you've been blaming the browser, it's more likely that you're the one being your own worst enemy.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#417

Post by krageon »

flavor8 wrote: post #125
craftyguy wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since I refuse to install apps on my phone for services I use that have websites, I'm a fairly heavy phone browser user.. so being able to adblock, block arbitrary JS (noscript), and kill tracking cookies is wonderful. > And Firefox for Android is pretty bad otherwise, unfortunately I disagree. Why do you think it is "pretty bad"?

> so being able to adblock Firefox Focus is my go to browser on Android, and it has ad blocking built in (as well as cookie / history erasure). That said, have you tried installing Blokada from FDroid? It sets up a local VPN on your phone and routes all network traffic through it, blocking all ads in all apps. It's astonishing how many ads and trackers your phone would otherwise download in a week.

Having a VPN for ad blocking is unfortunately a really bad option, as you should already have a VPN to prevent your "open WiFi" and LTE provider spying on you.

Re: Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

#420

Post by mda »

feanaro wrote: post #320
eksemplar wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Firefox for development, but I use safari (privately) and edge (professionally) for browsing, and see no real advantages to using either Firefox or Chrome for that. I think modern Firefox is a much better browser than Chrome though, but Mozilla certainly lost the PR war and to no fault but their own, because Firefox sure sucked for a long while.

> I think modern Firefox is a much better browser than Chrome though, but Mozilla certainly lost the PR war and to no fault but their own, because Firefox sure sucked for a long while. This gets said often, but I've been using Firefox continually since 2003 and I've never noticed it sucking.

I used Chrome since its early alpha versions on Linux, and I have to disagree. Even in its first days Chrome was a far superior browser speed, responsiveness and security wise. Firefo caught on some of these nowadays, but not nearly e ough for me to switch back.
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