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from the approved-using-a-Pale-Moon-browser dept.
Netmarketshare reports that Mozilla Firefox's share of the desktop and notebook computer web browser market has fallen below ten percent.
Firefox had a market share of 12.63% in June 2017 according to Netmarketshare and even managed to rise above the 13% mark in 2017 before its share fell to 9.92% in May 2018.
Google Chrome, Firefox's biggest rival in the browser world, managed to increase its massive lead from 60.08% in June 2017 to 62.85% in May 2018.
Microsoft's Internet Explorer dropped a percent point to 11.82% in May 2018 and Microsoft's Edge browser gained less than 0.50% to 4.26% over the year.
[...] Netmarketshare collects usage stats and does not get "real" numbers from companies like Mozilla, Google or Microsoft. The company monitors the use of browsers on a subset of Internet sites and creates the market share reports using the data it collects.
While that is certainly good enough for trends if the number of monitored user interactions is high enough, it is not completely accurate and real-world values can be different based on a number of factors. While it is unlikely that they differ a lot, it is certainly possible that the share is different to the one reported by the company.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @10:09AM (8 children)
All that mozule has done over the past couple of years was imitate chrome, there's no competition or rivalry there to speak of, just a cargo cult.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Tuesday June 05 2018, @11:53AM (3 children)
That was what I found most fascinating about this news, how someone below 10% could consider someone else at almost 63% their biggest rival. They are not rivals, they are not even in the same ballpark. They are not in competition with each other when one of them is borderline insignificant and at risk of becoming totally irrelevant.
That said I'm unsure about their data gathering, I know something like Palemoon might not be the most popular browser around but I would like to think it has more then a 0% user base, or at least be mentioned in the data -- or is it considered to be Firefox? There seems to be a lot of totally unknown browsers at about 0% that I never even heard off. If EDGE is only just above 4% doesn't shipping of Windows 10 suck since it comes pre-installed? Sure they might install and run something else but still, like most people would even bother or know how to.
Also it might have been interesting to see actual frequency numbers instead of just percentage, after all they might also be holding their ground as far as user-base is going in actual numbers but still becoming smaller due to the Google Chrome juggernaut just gaining more and more installations.
If one looks at other "markets"
Handheld; Safari has 95.55%, Chrome has 2.99%
Mobile; Chrome 62,65%, Safari, 27,29%
Tablet; Safari 50,66%, Chrome 40,55%
Is Chrome a rival to Safari on the handheld market? By their definitions, whatever they might be, they should be. But in this case it would be as silly as in the desktop case. I guess the tablet market is still up for grabs and at least somewhat even.
Moving on and having a look at their methodology page, and also their page where they talk about invalid traffic.
Might their data be completely skewed from reality? Who in their right mind doesn't block that and also spoof their user-agent? So what they get is then 100 million valid sessions per month -- note the word sessions, not actual users.
Spoofing makes your data invalid, a proxy server does the same thing. Good to know.
Can one assume here that this is also true for desktop users? If you block javascript then you don't count?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Pino P on Tuesday June 05 2018, @12:13PM (1 child)
Which is better and why?
A. Allowing documents in domains on your whitelist [mozilla.org] to run JavaScript in Firefox
B. Blocking JavaScript in Firefox, and instead of running web applications, running each site's native application that was made with Microsoft Electron (a copy of Chromium hardcoded to one website)
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Wednesday June 06 2018, @09:56PM
There was a story on SoylentNews last month about how Electron is bad cyber. How the cyber security is bad in that one. And in the Electron apps too!
(Score: 2) by driverless on Tuesday June 05 2018, @01:03PM
I was also surprised at how high they rated Chromefox, I thought it had been sub-5% market share for some time now. I guess you'd need to publish all browser usage figures with error bars so you can see the variance based on who's reporting it.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @01:43PM (2 children)
That's not true.
The current square tabs are copied from Edge.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @02:03PM
Edge is another chrome facsimile. This only makes mozule's output an imitation of an imitation.
(Score: 2) by suburbanitemediocrity on Wednesday June 06 2018, @12:31AM
What's a square tab?
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Tuesday June 05 2018, @09:07PM
All that Mozilla has done over the last decade is imitate Yahoo. Take an industry leading product, become concerned when a rival starts to make inroads on their market share, then start making a continuing series of bad and worse decisions every step of the way until market share is gone.