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https://amosbbatto.wordpress.com/2017/11/21/mozilla-market-share/
When Firefox was introduced in 2004, it was designed to be a lean and optimized web browser, based on the bloated code from the Mozilla Suite. Between 2004 and 2009, many considered Firefox to be the best web browser, since it was faster, more secure, offered tabbed browsing and was more customizable through extensions than Microsoft's Internet Explorer. When Chrome was introduced in 2008, it took many of Firefox's best ideas and improved on them. Since 2010, Chrome has eaten away at Firefox's market share, relegating Firefox to a tiny niche of free software enthusiasts and tinkerers who like the customization of its XUL extensions.
According to StatCounter, Firefox's market share of web browsers has fallen from 31.8% in December 2009 to just 6.1% today. Firefox can take comfort in the fact that it is now virtually tied with its former arch-nemesis, Internet Explorer and its variants. All of Microsoft's browsers only account for 6.2% of current web browsing according to StatCounter. Microsoft has largely been replaced by Google, whose web browsers now controls 56.5% of the market. Even worse, is the fact that the WebKit engine used by Google now represents over 83% of web browsing, so web sites are increasingly focusing on compatibility with just one web engine. While Google and Apple are more supportive of W3C and open standards than Microsoft was in the late 90s, the web is increasingly being monopolized by one web engine and two companies, whose business models are not always based on the best interests of users or their rights.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 26 2017, @07:01AM (6 children)
>For an average user there is no reason to make the effort to switch back.
You're probably right: the average person doesn't care about privacy, and both browsers phone home to the same mothership.
For myself, I learned how to disable that behavior in Firefox. I don't know how to do so in Chrome.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Sunday November 26 2017, @07:19AM (2 children)
Get Yee to the church of Inox.
But you have to also be prepared to forgo the best search engine, the best maps, the best street view, the most spam free email, the best online translation engine.
And the thing is, Google already knows everything about you anyway.
I never use Gmail or Google drive for anything important. But I use them a lot.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Sunday November 26 2017, @02:27PM (1 child)
I do not understand what this means. I did already do some rudimentary research, which told me some interesting things that ultimately did not really help:
Go worship stainless steel?
Congregate thyself with others in a theater in Mumbai?
Join a bicycling club?
None of the possible explanations seems to fit.
(Score: 2) by jimshatt on Sunday November 26 2017, @06:09PM
That, or it is a clever reference to the transformation of Firefox to the Rust programming language. A project called oxidization.
(Score: 2) by stretch611 on Sunday November 26 2017, @07:26AM (2 children)
To stop Chrome from phoning home, get Iron [srware.net]. Its cross platform and what I use as a primary browser.
From their website:
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 26 2017, @07:59AM (1 child)
Thank you for the suggestion. I looked into SRWare Iron before, but it appeared to be closed-source, which I didn't like.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Sunday November 26 2017, @02:08PM
At this point in time, Iron seems to be nominally BSD licensed, but good luck exercising your rights under that license.
SRWare do not appear to place much faith and emphasis on licensing as do free software activists; on their web site [srware.net] I could only find a nonspecific mention that "Iron is free and OpenSource."
If you install the thing and do something like "Help → About", maybe it will tell you how it's licensed?
Their .deb files don't provide licensing information (or indeed anything at all) under /usr/share/doc/*, but I downloaded the "Iron Portable" and found a license.txt inside the .zip file declaring that "SRWare Iron is based on the Soucecode of Chromium. It is licensed under the BSD-license."
Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] confidently agrees that Iron is released under the "BSD license". The problem, stemming from that don't-care attitude towards licensing, wikipedia states as follows:
It seems they have a pretty good grasp of what the BSD license entitles *them* to do with the Chromium source code, but almost no concept of what licensing their *own* work under BSD licensing entails. They also seem to struggle with versioning; their downloadables in particular, despite a bewildering array of download options, don't feature version numbers in the filenames, resulting in things like an "iron.deb" Debian package, "srware_iron.exe" for their Windows installer, and "src.7z" and "src1.7z" for their "Sourcecode (for Coder)". $DIETY alone knows what version of anything any of those would be.
tldr: Iron is BSD licensed free software, but its developers evidently don't understand what that means, and suck at providing source code and licensing information.