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Firefox Browser Use Drops As Mozilla's Worst Microsoft Edge Fears Come True
Back in April, we reported that the Edge browser is quickly gaining market share now that Microsoft has transitioned from the EdgeHTML engine to the more widely used Chromium engine (which also underpins Google's Chrome browser). At the time, Edge slipped into the second-place slot for desktop web browsers, with a 7.59 percent share of the market. This dropped Mozilla's Firefox – which has long been the second-place browser behind Chrome – into third place.
Now, at the start of August, we're getting some fresh numbers in for the desktop browser market, and things aren't looking good for Mozilla. Microsoft increased its share of the browser market from 8.07 percent in June to 8.46 percent in July. Likewise, Firefox fell from 7.58 percent to 7.27 percent according to NetMarketShare.
[...] As for Mozilla, the company wasn't too happy when Microsoft first announced that it was going to use Chromium for Edge way back in December 2018. Mozilla's Chris Beard at the time accused Microsoft of "giving up" by abandoning EdgeHTML in favor of Chromium. "Microsoft's decision gives Google more ability to single-handedly decide what possibilities are available to each one of us," said Beard at the time. "We compete with Google because the health of the internet and online life depend on competition and choice."
[...] Microsoft developer Kenneth Auchenberg fought back the following January, writing, "Thought: It's time for Mozilla to get down from their philosophical ivory tower. The web is dominated by Chromium, if they really *cared* about the web they would be contributing instead of building a parallel universe that's used by less than 5 percent."
Is the browser monoculture inevitable or will Firefox hang in there?
Previously:
Mozilla Teases Chromium-Based Firefox, Then Pulls Back
Firefox Tops Microsoft Browser Market Share for First Time
Netmarketshare Claims Mozilla Firefox Usage Drops Below Ten Percent
Microsoft Intercepting Firefox, Chrome Installation on Windows 10 Insider Build
Microsoft Reportedly Building a Chromium-Based Web Browser to Replace Edge, and "Windows Lite" OS
Mozilla CEO Warns Microsoft's Switch to Chromium Will Give More Control of the Web to Google
Microsoft Employee Sparks Outrage by Suggesting Firefox Switch Browser Engine to Chromium
Mozilla Was "Outfoxed" by Google
Microsoft Edge Shares Privacy-Busting Telemetry, Research Alleges
(Score: 5, Insightful) by MIRV888 on Tuesday August 04 2020, @01:45AM (34 children)
The less people that use it the better. I'll just hang back with my adblock & noscript and do my thing.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by kreuzfeld on Tuesday August 04 2020, @01:52AM (6 children)
Same here (though not old yet!). But in all honesty: what is the appeal of Chrome & Chromium-derived browsers over Firefox (my default browser of choice when I'm not in Icecat). Is there some underlying benefit to these other browsers that eludes me?
(Score: 5, Informative) by TheRaven on Tuesday August 04 2020, @10:22AM (1 child)
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2020, @01:50PM
firefox was single thread, but long ago switch to have now different threads, that was one of the main reasons to drop the old add-ons, they enforced the "one process" (some could be turn to multi-process, but not all and that and the security problem made the old api go away).
Now you have several threads for rendering, gui, add-ons, javascript.
Firefox share those threads between several tabs(where they apply of course, there is only one GUI), so save memory (and this is one of the reason too for firefox using much less ram than chrome), but those threads also have several layers of isolation. Chrome have several threads for EACH tab, that may increase the security, but also waste lot more resources and turn chrome very heavy if you use many tabs. People that only use a few tabs do not notice that problem, but everyone that have many open tabs already noticed that chrome eats all he machine resources.
Mozilla is increasing the threads isolation and get more process to multi-thread (via mostly rust) to increase performance and security. This is a slow migration process, unlike khtml (WebKit base code forked from kde) the that was build around being multi-thread
(Score: 1) by zion-fueled on Tuesday August 04 2020, @02:10PM
The appeal is the ability to use hardware decoding on linux. After 10 years mozilla is finally addressing it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2020, @04:32PM
What's the appeal?, you ask...you've got the wrong end of the stick for a lot of us here, it's a case of expediency..
Just like 'back in the day' a subset of sites 'broke' if you didn't use IE (hello, my bank of old..) you now get the same (hello, my bank of the now...) if you don't use a browser which identifies as Chrome(ish).
Ok, so you change/spoof the UA string, and somewhere in the wankload of obfuscated javascript that lurks menacingly on their pages, something horribly chromeish breaks..
I'm typing this in a Chrome tab, running on the Slackware install on my primary laptop, not because I'm particularly taken with Chrome, but it's the path of least resistance as I'm currently logged into an industrial auction site which does not really do Firefox well, it's expediency and less 'resource intensive' on the ageing hardware (4Gig ram,Celeron T3500@2.10GHz) than spinning up a copy of Firefox/whatever..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2020, @06:50PM (1 child)
Supposedly, browsing without adblock and also running any javascript a remote site throws your way, chrome/chromium-based browsers are faster. But, if you are browsing the web without adblock, and allowing all random remote code you stumble upon to run on your computer, I would say that you are doing it wrong. And, with ublock origin and umatrix, firefox is very fast.
I use firefox for almost everything, but keep chromium installed for broken sites that only work with chrome. For me, this is mostly airline sites. So, I guess another "benefit" is that chrome/chromium browsers work with broken ie8^H^H^H chrome-only websites. I expect this issue to get worse now that ms is just re-badging chrome.
(Score: 3, Touché) by tangomargarine on Tuesday August 04 2020, @09:21PM
Why would you do that? They have uBlock Origin and whatnot for Chrome. I know because I run it.
If Chrome is fast without an adblocker, just imagine how much faster it'll be *with* one!
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday August 04 2020, @02:28AM (20 children)
Less users, less developers, more security flaws, but maybe less interest in exploiting those flaws? Google should just bankroll the discovery of more zero-days in Firefox.
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(Score: 4, Insightful) by barbara hudson on Tuesday August 04 2020, @02:51AM (19 children)
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2020, @03:04AM (1 child)
Stick with Safari then.
iOS is a crippled web browser experience in that Apple have been reticent about adding new PWA features that Chromium and Gecko have. All in the name of their app monetization - half the apps on my phone have desktop web page equivalents.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2020, @12:31PM
I don't care what Apples reasoning is as long their actions align with my pov that; "enough is enough, we have an operating system already and I'm not executing your random remote code". I don't use Apple though, I cripple a Firefox browser instead.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday August 04 2020, @03:39AM (9 children)
Not for me. The pre-html5 days were a bleak time of Flash and Real Player, and other hideous creatures of the night.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2020, @09:52AM
VLC
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2020, @12:59PM (2 children)
You can't blame HTML4.1 for shitty plugins. However I do agree parsing a shitty JS/HTML5 page with JSON apis is way easier than it was trying to parse a website made entirely with Flash. The good thing about this modern web from my perspective, is that websites resemble an online database if I ignore the actual HTML. It is trivial to create tools to extract the information I want in a nicely formatted JSON format.
I very much prefer HTML4.1 where the webmaster know that going beyond the standard with plugins is non-standard. At that time before XHR, JS couldn't do things behind your back. It was confined to process the document it came with. Now shitty webmasters can build crappy webapps that toast bread using usb and bluetooth and have a clear conscience that they followed the "standard".
It baffles me how anyone can hear the term "living standard" and not start the ROFLCOPTER. It's as much of a paradox as "alternative facts".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2020, @08:34PM (1 child)
It was also as reactive as a pedal powered moped
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/db/Honda_Hobbit.jpg [wikimedia.org]
The days of server-side graph creation and related horse crap are long gone and relegated to 1990s and good riddance. What is crap is DL JS from 50 different domains but that is problem not with JS but the actual shitty websites.
So yeah, you can have websites without CSS and JavaScript but in that case you may as well just stick with a text/plain. It works just fine for news content though, not so much for real applications. Even this site is using CSS and JavaScript.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 06 2020, @01:37PM
..and that's the real issue here we disagree about. Should the browser be a webapp bazaar or present hypertext? I would be very happy if we had a clear seperation of the two. A browser and a search engine for websites and one for the webapp bazaar.
btw this site runs fine without JS. It's the primary reason I'm here.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by epitaxial on Tuesday August 04 2020, @01:24PM (3 children)
At least you could easily block flash back then. Today it's nearly impossible to block some auto playing videos on news sites. Yeah I can disable javascript and use all the html5 autoplay blocks but they still play.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday August 04 2020, @01:51PM (1 child)
I recall the initial versions of Firefox having a straight up option to just block JavaScript in normal menus. Probably one for HTML5 <video> too when support was first added (blocking all video, not just autoplay).
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(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday August 04 2020, @09:18PM
I'm pretty sure they still had that as of 4.0. They probably ditched it along the way somewhere between 12 and 30 when they decided nobody cared anymore.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Tuesday August 04 2020, @04:14PM
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2020, @01:54PM
Flashblock, and similar for real player. Or just don't install the plug-ins. I really didn't notice those two technologies - just some websites that were broken and which I didn't return to as a result. Nothing bleak in my experience.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2020, @01:27PM
> No effing emojis
So, no proper Unicode support then. Awesome. Not.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday August 04 2020, @01:40PM (5 children)
Well, emoji's aren't a problem, though displaying them may be. If you want to get rid of CSS, you need to go back to HTML2 or some such. About javascript, though, I agree. That's designed to allow software written by people you never heard of to run on your computer doing things you don't expect.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Informative) by barbara hudson on Tuesday August 04 2020, @04:09PM (4 children)
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday August 05 2020, @01:44PM (3 children)
Well, I didn't use most of the versions, but these days you can't even underline text without CSS.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Wednesday August 05 2020, @03:47PM (2 children)
The <u> tag for underlined text has been around since the Stone Age, and still works just fine. The idiots in charge tried to depreciate it and had to backtrack. Soylentnews doesn't allow it for $REASON or I'd show you.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday August 05 2020, @07:47PM (1 child)
OK, I didn't know they'd backtracked. I don't use html on newsgroups, so Soylent News policy wasn't the reason. I just had to build a bunch of pages about a year ago, and was told that the underscore tag had been removed, and to code it in CSS. There are a couple of other formatting tags that I also had to use CSS for, though I don't remember which. Underscore is the one that sticks in my memory as "really absurd". There was something about positioning a framed hunk of text next to a paragraph that turned out to be trickier than it used to be.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Wednesday August 05 2020, @08:55PM
If you want a blast from the past, the <marquee > tag, which was never standard, still works (at least in Firefox and Opera ). <blink> doesn't.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by driverless on Tuesday August 04 2020, @06:20AM (5 children)
It's Mozilla that's pushed Firefox into irrelevancy. Google and Microsoft just sat back and toasted marshmellows in the dumpster fire.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday August 04 2020, @07:15AM (4 children)
This, but, remember Google as the main financer of Mozilla when somebody decided that upping version number and removing extensions and changing UI and kicking Eich out was a good idea. We are not evil, LOL.
Speaking about Eich, the chrome derived brave browser ain't bad at all.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2020, @09:45AM (1 child)
Nice ad, bot, not we won't buy it.
(Score: 1) by MIRV888 on Thursday August 13 2020, @09:22AM
They are all out to get you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2020, @09:58PM (1 child)
Hahahha, brave has had numerous problems and is a libertarian backed nightmare.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2020, @06:39AM
I was so hopeful for Brave doing something, even if it was just kicking Firefox back into gear. But then they had to ruin it with all those monetization controversies.