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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: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2020, @12:04PM (6 children)
It's easy to sit here and say, "Mozilla should have kept their UI and Firefox add-ons the same way they were in 2006, and worked solely on performance and standards compliance since." I'm sure that was their original plan, and then they watched Chrome eat their share of the browser market by millions of users per month for years at a time. They had to try something different, and maybe they botched but I understand why they couldn't just continue what they were doing previously.
I'm still using Firefox with a few add-ons and I don't have any issues.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2020, @02:31PM (4 children)
No, the users didn't jump the ship because firefox was stale. There a small period of time when firefox would hang on too many tabs and Google spent all their marketing on "yeah our browser sucks but at least each our tab is a new process so it won't hang". Mozilla did what Nokia did. They hired a mole who purposefully broke Firefox to make sure people jumped the ship. Every single person I know, when the technically incompetent - especially the technically incompetent ones - preferred firefox over chrome. "Different processes" is not a marketable thing. Google had to do what it did - pumped money into corrupt management of Firefox while fucking around on Javascript so that it only functions on Chrome. I mean, they created their own consortium to validate html.
It is called embrace, extend, extinguish. That's what Google did.
The reality is that death of firefox is another sign of consolidation of the web into a the hands of few mega corps.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2020, @08:05PM (2 children)
I forgot to add one crucial thing - mobile. Google spent inordinate amount of money in developing Android and its reliance of Chrome to get anything done. It spent inordinate amount of time in developing mobile-friendly JavaScript frameworks like AJAX and bootstrap, and its backend NodeJS. It had the money, and they had the reason to spend a large amount of it as soon as possible because they couldn't lose their edge to competition. Google couldn't wait for "standardization", it pushed for mandatory HTTPS and HTML 3.0 (or whatever that is). End result was that it Google took lead in mobile space and used to punch a hole in web. Firefox tried to do OS, same like Samsung, but they cannot compete when their largest funding comes from Google! They were left to squander resources and play catch-up game. And why?
This is the context where Microsoft's statement should be read. It is a philosophical debate to make sure a parallel system stays there to compete with Chrome's monopoly. And Microsoft doesn't want to play catch-up, it wants to dominate like Google does. It is purely a strategic step that you don't play the game when the board is set up by your opponent. And I am actually surprised because (and I know a lot of Americans hate Satya for being an Indian who stole their jerbs) it is actually a very smart move.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2020, @06:56AM
Very smart? To be a software company and give up on your own product? What the hell is MS going to learn from downloading and running the other guys' code? Where I work (a uni) some guys do that - basically download other people's stuff without putting in the effort to do it themself. It's a death spiral. What else will you not do? Eventually everything.
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Wednesday August 05 2020, @03:24PM
I think you mean HTML5 and CSS3. When faced between an open standard to play videos over the web (even if controlled by a mega-corp) or propriety executable to play videos (flash), I would opt for the open standard. Did Google abuse its market position? Probably. Will the DoJ prosecute? Not for cause--but for political punishment. Here's my predictions: If Biden wins in November and Trump administration doesn't start a prosecution before January then probably not. If Trump wins, 100% after 2024 by the new Democratic administration; otherwise, possibly before 2024 if Google doesn't fluff Trump's ego the correct way (which I believe varies depending on his mood, day of the week, and who he has heard speaking in the last 20 minutes).
I think you're correct on the Microsoft analysis. They saw big businesses and government outsourcing their data centers and correctly pivoted to keep that market segment in their pocketbook. What revenue was lost in new license sales was gained by new subscription sales. I would not be surprised if MS pivots on the desktop replacing the Windows kernel with WSL/Linux kernel if they could make a better emulator than Wine for legacy custom business software. That would unload MS resources developing kernel and drivers to the Linux Foundation and they could focus on the UI, Windows Store, and services like Azure and Office365 to generate revenue all the while maintaining OEM contracts for desktop OSes. Even if MS decides to forgo providing an emulator, looking at Apple as an example, I think MS would see success and business will have to pay developers to port their custom software to the new platform. If Microsoft won't compete in the browser space, why should they compete in the kernel space. Let open source developers write the kernel and then bolt on a proprietary userland/desktop kludge that vendors need to sell laptops.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2020, @04:02PM
You and I were talking about two different things. You explained what Google was doing to make Chrome eat Firefox's market share. I agree with everything you wrote. But my post was about what Mozilla was doing in a desperate and doomed attempt to fight back.
I really believe the Microsoft engineers and managers satisfied with the move from their own rendering engine to Blink think they're doing the right thing. It's absurd, they are letting Google succeed at controlling web standards in a way that Microsoft tried with Internet Explorer and failed.
I hate the bloated web. The task managers built into Chrome and Firefox desktop routinely show javascript-heavy websites I use consuming 200-800 MB of RAM for a single browser tab. The few JS-free sites I use, like sourcehut.org, consume less than 2MB of RAM per tab. However, offline-first Progressive Web Applications (PWAs), in some cases with WebAssembly, seem to be the only chance the world has of breaking free of proprietary software control. If you can do everything on your device that you care about in a browser, then you can jump between MacOS, iOS, Windows, Chrome OS, Android, desktop Linux, desktop *BSD, and so forth with no effort. I don't see any other practical way to protect users from platform lock-in. Microsoft seemed to be actually contributing to this kind of independence for a few years, but I think they've just ceded all of their power to Google.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 06 2020, @01:36PM
It boils down to hypocrisy. They claim privacy is integral to the design, but any programmer who looks at the way the application is designed can tell you... That is just B.S.
Of course that is all legacy, going all the way back to Netscape. But still, they don't do what they say. I'm pretty sure they integrate institutional backdoors as well. And teaming up with Comcast just proved the point. Firefox needs to cut loose and be the browser they say it is, not the browser it is.
There are other forks and other browsers. Firefox is probably the second most maintained open source browser out there. The other forks of the old netscape code are so exploitable, that they really are a public hazard. But that describes the web in general. The WWW architecture has devolved into a game of "the most busted wins" in terms of how pages are renderend, and the number of formats processed. It is just implausible that this much code can be reasonably maintained in a secure way.
Which is why search engines should start fracking out MIME types on the query page. Really if somebody implemented TTF fonts in HTML 1.1 and added inline video support, and a office suite style database UI builder, you could trash 90% of the code that makes up modern web browsers. Doing everything over HTTP was ALWAYS a bad idea. That is what has facilitated control grabs by a small number of companies. Or at least partly.