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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: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @10:33AM (16 children)
and now the users are ignoring Mozilla.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Tuesday June 05 2018, @01:00PM (5 children)
https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=25942&cid=688712 [soylentnews.org]
Firefox does a few things a lot better than Chrome, and closed some gaps in recent major releases like Quantum. Too little, too late though.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Informative) by The Shire on Tuesday June 05 2018, @01:50PM (1 child)
Firefox offers the one thing Chrome users dont seem to care about - privacy. Chrome literally reports your every move back to google, Firefox, not so much. It may even account for the market share discrepency, not only because they're only sampling a few sites for their data (perhaps more heavily used by Chrome users), but Firefox may simply not be divulging it's user data to these 3rd party harvesters. What they can't see, they can't count.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @04:29PM
exactly. chrome popularity just shows how many people are too stupid and whorish to care about their privacy. they are also easier to datamine for bs stats.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @01:51PM
Now that you've found something that Firefox does better than Chrome, those things are going to be removed.
Firefox used to do a lot better than Chrome. There was an extension for everything.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @05:51PM (1 child)
Quantum alienated a large percentage of the old guard by breaking support for XUL extensions.
Yes, Mozilla keep promising to put more APIs in place so that "webextensions" can replace XUL. But release after release said APIs are nowhere to be seen.
At this point one can just as well jump over to Vivaldi or Brave.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday June 05 2018, @06:13PM
Eh, very few extensions are useful, and the ones that are popular were more likely to get updated to the new thing.
Then you have Greasemonkey scripts.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by SomeGuy on Tuesday June 05 2018, @01:03PM (9 children)
This. Due to many of Mozilla's boneheaded decisions I could not even use vanilla Firefox even if I wanted to. I use the New Moon port of Palemoon instead.
So what have they fucked up?
- Speed. Mozilla's speed and responsiveness sucked donkey balls since day one. For a long time they made up for that with better standards and features, but did little to improve speed. Once Chrome came out, many people switched just because it was faster. There has been some recent improvement but it is too little too late.
- Changing the UI around. People including myself got damn tired of Firefox constantly changing the UI around. When one has to re-learn an application they are more likely to try an alternative, especially one that appears more stable.
- Desupporting existing extensions. While I think there was a very valid point for re-doing the extensions APIs, the new stuff should have been phased in over a longer period of time.
- Rapid release. They essentially turned the browsing public in to beta testers. It really sucks having an application that will break and change crap around every couple of months. *I* know about the LTS builds, but most people won't go looking in the locked filing cabinet in the disused lavatory behind the sign "beware of the leopard". And now that is two different versions web developers have to support.
- Dropping older CPU support and XP. One of Mozilla's strong points originally had been how many systems it ran on. Now it is just another big 3 "Windows, Mac, Linux" application. Sure, one has to draw a line somewhere, but they should have gone out kicking and screaming. The New Moon browser works excellently on older Pentium/Athlons with XP, and TenFour Fox browser is still going strong for PPC Mac MacOS 10.4/10.5.
- The entire "mobile" scene is seriously fucked up. One is forbidden to just plop a third party browser on to most mobile devices. Going back to speed, if they had worked harder to make Mozilla fast and efficient then perhaps they could have gotten bundled as some more device's core browser.
Eh, and there is more, but enough for now.
Unfortunately, there are pinhead web developers out there who seriously believe that "less than 10% = not supported!". I've seen it before back in the IE 6 days, so I fully expect some web sites to stop supporting Firefox. Somehow these people would be happy denying 10% access to a brick and mortar store.
(Score: 3, Disagree) by SunTzuWarmaster on Tuesday June 05 2018, @01:14PM (2 children)
Sure, I get that. But imagine that you have a sign that says "No Hawaiian shirts!" and your typical customer walks either a) with a non-Hawaiian, or b) physically carrying multiple shirts. Its not like there are people out there with only Firefox. The people that use Firefox either a) use Windows and have IE, Edge, or both, b) use Apple, and have Safari, c) use Linux and have a variety of custom environments and are used to being kinda screwed in general, or d) use mobile which means Safari/Chrome.
You have to support Safari and Chrome (mobile) and IE (XP, Win10) and probably Edge. You don't really have to support anything else (Dolphin, Firefox), as the people that have those other things also have something from the first categories.
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Tuesday June 05 2018, @01:49PM
And like most web developers, you miss the point that switching to a different web browser is not as trivial as it may seem to YOU. Some people chose to use a specific browser for a reason. You are essentially telling these people "fuck you". Others don't even know what a web browser is, and switching may mean re-learning a lot of crap. And then there still may still be some who truly can not even if they wanted to due policies or configuration on their computer.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @01:55PM
Deh, blacks should simply paint themselves white cuz they have access to the tools to do so.
(Score: 5, Informative) by bobthecimmerian on Tuesday June 05 2018, @02:47PM (2 children)
The speed improvements may be too late, but they're not too little. Firefox seriously holds its own against Chrome now for speed across the board, and wins big in a few benchmarks.
I never cared what either browser did to the UI. I'll start complaining when they ditch the address bar and tabs.
The rapid release was never a problem for me. Chrome releases just as quickly, it's just transparent to users.
I don't see how Mozilla could support XP after Microsoft stopped supporting it. That's an unreasonable expectation.
I do encounter websites that don't work properly for Firefox. Not often, but it happens. Fandango.com ( a movie ticket site ) is one, some Ajax portions of their web pages hang indefinitely on Firefox but pop right up in Chrome.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 06 2018, @01:54AM (1 child)
It's easy to speed things up when you never release any RAM and don't do garbage collection.
(Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Wednesday June 06 2018, @06:45PM
My computer is eight years old with an AMD processor, so by modern standards it's dog slow. But it's got 12GB of RAM, so Firefox memory use doesn't bother me.
Chrome is pretty memory hungry too.
(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @04:32PM
noone running xp should have the computer connected to the internet so lack of browser support is irrelevant.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Tuesday June 05 2018, @08:58PM
I would bet the real reason so many people switched is because it was so easy to install Chrome. Every Google page had an invitation to try Chrome. I remember visiting my cousin and seeing on his daughter's PC three separate installations of Chrome. The same people who give no concern to privacy when browsing are likely the same people who were not using extensions, so there was no reason for them to miss Firefox.
(Score: 2) by corey on Tuesday June 05 2018, @11:47PM
I like Firefox on my android phone. I can have extensions such as Cookie Autodelete, uMatrix but can't with Chrome. It seems fast enough and I have 50 tabs open on my S5. I can go also install apks directly without using Googles Play shit:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/Platforms/Android [mozilla.org]
(I use LineageOS so I don't even have any GApps such as Play installed).
Plus I feel like Google aren't spying on my every move with this.
I think people who dislike Firefox seem to be either politically motivated of nitpicking. It's has some flaws but its a decent browser and I think the Quantum UI is modern and keeps out of your way.