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posted by martyb on Tuesday August 04 2020, @01:35AM   Printer-friendly
from the I-use-Lynx,-you-insensitive-clod! dept.

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:


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2020, @03:23AM (14 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2020, @03:23AM (#1031100)

    I personally stopped on the FF-52-ESR branch and have yet to need to update. Everything I need still works on it, just by spoofing a newer user-agent version (Which by the way uMatrix 1.1.4 supports, while later webextension versions don't!)

    Quite frankly ever new version of firefox hogs ever more memory, and despite their claims to be fixing all these problems in later editions, they don't seem to be getting any better. Furthermore, leaving javascript disabled and not creating too many windows seems to keep memory fragmentation down which keeps from hitting the virtual memory limit (the normal cause of crashes on 32bit firefox, and if you left it running for long enough, on 64 bit firefox as well!)

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  • (Score: 2) by driverless on Tuesday August 04 2020, @06:25AM (12 children)

    by driverless (4770) on Tuesday August 04 2020, @06:25AM (#1031150)

    What pisses me off about Firefox is that playing Youtube videos on it will eventually lock up the system it's running on, requiring a hard reset. Had that with Dell, Lenovo, and Samsung laptops, so it's not a system-specific issue. How the fsck can you hard-lock a system just by playing videos on it?

    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2020, @06:39AM (9 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2020, @06:39AM (#1031152)

      Google did that one on purpose. There are even articles about it and other techniques Google does to sabotage other browsers. The particular workaround for that one is to refresh the window every so often so that way the browser starts from the fresh DOM, rather than all the javascripty manipulations piled on top of each other that bloat the node count and rearrange trees.

      • (Score: 2) by driverless on Tuesday August 04 2020, @06:53AM (8 children)

        by driverless (4770) on Tuesday August 04 2020, @06:53AM (#1031154)

        Ah, thanks for the info, will give that a go. I know that sometimes I have to do a refresh/reload when the system runs out of memory while playing videos, so I'll give that a go.

        It also seems to be caused by the VP9/AVC1 that YT forces onto you, I've tried blocking them to force H.264 use which has never caused any problems but they've been getting better and better at blocking the blocking over time.

        • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday August 04 2020, @11:14AM (6 children)

          by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday August 04 2020, @11:14AM (#1031193) Journal

          Been getting warnings from Youtube for months "We will soon discontinue support for your browser." Recently, sound has been degrading badly. I was actually looking at hardware!!

          Same videos that sound like crap on any flavor of Firefox, sound great on Chromium. I suppose I'll have to change my browser usage, or stop using Youtube.

          • (Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday August 04 2020, @03:31PM (2 children)

            by Freeman (732) on Tuesday August 04 2020, @03:31PM (#1031258) Journal

            While YouTube has some useful/interesting things. It's not going to be the reason why I choose a different browser. I might use YouTube on a special browser that I use for nothing else, though. Prerequisite would be that browser having an adblocker, because I do not surf the web / visit sites without it. I get enough junk I have to filter out every day, without needing to filter out the random advertisements thrown into everything.

            --
            Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
            • (Score: 3, Interesting) by tangomargarine on Tuesday August 04 2020, @09:14PM (1 child)

              by tangomargarine (667) on Tuesday August 04 2020, @09:14PM (#1031418)

              Considering how hard a lot of website fight against adblockers, I'm a bit surprised YouTube hasn't figured it out over the years. I still get surprised when I'm periodically on some other device and "oh right, they have ads on YouTube. This must be what non-adblocking people see."

              --
              "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 Freeman on Tuesday August 04 2020, @09:27PM

                by Freeman (732) on Tuesday August 04 2020, @09:27PM (#1031428) Journal

                YouTube isn't fun to watch, with advertisements.

                --
                Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
          • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2020, @05:03PM (1 child)

            by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2020, @05:03PM (#1031292)

            Re YT Videos,
            If I manage to find one that has something of interest, or someone sends me a link I'll point youtube-dl at it, watch the downloaded copy with the video player of *my* choice, not some braindead browser thing then delete/keep, depending on usefulness.

            Granted, it's not what Google/YT want or how they expect people to 'interface' with their site and it's content, nor, I suspect, would the 'content creators' like this as they probably get hee fucking haw in their wallets for it, but I find it preferable to do it this way than deal with the vagaries of their site and associated browser/OS fuckwittery...and I can also do this from termux running on my android phones if I'm out and about..

            • (Score: 3, Interesting) by tangomargarine on Tuesday August 04 2020, @09:11PM

              by tangomargarine (667) on Tuesday August 04 2020, @09:11PM (#1031417)

              If I manage to find one that has something of interest, or someone sends me a link I'll point youtube-dl at it, watch the downloaded copy with the video player of *my* choice, not some braindead browser thing then delete/keep, depending on usefulness.

              I've been in the habit of doing this for years, partly after that first time you go back to watch a video and find out it's been taken down so you start hoarding everything, and partly for other reasons. The next-highest priority for awhile was downloading Zero Punctuation videos so I could watch them in VLC at .85x speed to actually catch everything he was saying, but I guess over time my brain has gotten used to 1x.

              With my current desktop there seems to be something in the YouTube player logic that uses up enough system resources on my Linux install that it kicks the fan into higher gear, too, which gets a bit annoying. Not so with VLC.

              --
              "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
          • (Score: 1) by MIRV888 on Thursday August 13 2020, @09:25AM

            by MIRV888 (11376) on Thursday August 13 2020, @09:25AM (#1036069)

            Just host your own media server. Then it can sound how you like. No advertising is even better.
            They are selling 12 & 16 Tb usb Hds. All you need is the library.
            it's like Buttah

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2020, @06:53AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2020, @06:53AM (#1031607)

          Maybe try: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/h264ify/ [mozilla.org]

          Seems highly recommended but I can't vouch for it personally.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2020, @08:39PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2020, @08:39PM (#1031940)

      What pisses me off about Firefox is that playing Youtube videos on it will eventually lock up the system it's running on, requiring a hard reset. Had that with Dell, Lenovo, and Samsung laptops, so it's not a system-specific issue. How the fsck can you hard-lock a system just by playing videos on it?

      Actually it does not. The "hard lockup" could be your system running out of memory but other than that, I never had that happen to me.

    • (Score: 1) by MIRV888 on Thursday August 13 2020, @09:41AM

      by MIRV888 (11376) on Thursday August 13 2020, @09:41AM (#1036075)

      Never been an issue, but I am using a plugin to just pull the d@mn video as an mp4.
      Once it's on the media server it's mine.
      It's like Buttah.
      I know it seems absurd, but this has always been how I have handled my media.
      No advertising was always my primary motivation, but that's just me.

  • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday August 04 2020, @09:04PM

    by tangomargarine (667) on Tuesday August 04 2020, @09:04PM (#1031414)

    Yeah, I should look to see what version of Firefox I'm running. It's not my main browser anymore, but it finally prompted me to figure out how to go into the package manager settings and tell it "stop asking me to update this fucking thing constantly, because it only ever breaks things and gets rid of features I like." I think I did because if I had dist-upgraded it would've bumped me up something like 14 FF versions and broken all my extensions.

    For a number of years I used Pale Moon,* which I still do when I need my extensions, but now my day-to-day browser is Chromium. They changed something, either in Pale Moon or this one online game I play daily, that ended up somehow breaking the latter with how it uses iframes, so I sort of wound up in Chromium by default because it worked over there.

    I miss classic 3.6-era Firefox back before the rapid release, when extensions worked and everything was in about:config.

    *even PM isn't untainted by idiocy, though...I remember there was drama when the main guy who maintains it got butthurt about NoScript for some reason and made you jump through hoops to turn off his "I don't like this, don't use it" enabled-by-default deterrents in the addons system. Because who would ever want to use NoScript, in a fork of Firefox, specifically for technical/extension users? Can't think of anybody. /s

    --
    "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"