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Upgrades of Windows 10 reset the default browser to Microsoft's new Edge browser, and this has caused Mozilla CEO Chris Beard to issue an open letter to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella:
[T]he update experience appears to have been designed to throw away the choice your customers have made about the Internet experience they want, and replace it with the Internet experience Microsoft wants them to have.
[...] We appreciate that it's still technically possible to preserve people's previous settings and defaults, but the design of the whole upgrade experience and the default settings APIs have been changed to make this less obvious and more difficult. It now takes more than twice the number of mouse clicks, scrolling through content and some technical sophistication for people to reassert the choices they had previously made in earlier versions of Windows. It's confusing, hard to navigate and easy to get lost.
Firefox's market share continues to drop by varying degrees according to analysis by Martin Brinkmann of ghacks.net.
takyon: Microsoft reports that 14 million users took the plunge and installed Windows 10 yesterday. Microsoft has stated it wants Windows 10 on 1 billion devices within the next 3 years.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2015, @12:24PM
The choice is to dump Mozilla for all of the stupid things they have done. A once great browser was turned into a marketing machine, with a lousy interface. I dumped Mozilla, and am not going back.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Friday July 31 2015, @12:40PM
Yes I think lots of people, especially techies, chose Firefox because it wasn't like the other browsers. Then they made it just like the other browsers. Now they wonder why they're losing market share. If a product has little to distinguish itself from the competition, then, given a set of needs, the choice of which product to adopt becomes much less clear cut. In the TFA's case I guess apathy wins out and the default browser is accepted.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by acid andy on Friday July 31 2015, @12:49PM
I just want to add that I think this minimalism and similarity in the look of recent browser versions - the fact that Chrome, IE 10+ and Australis looked very similar, to the point that even their logos were hidden, might be intentional.
Look at how many pieces of software come bundled with a browser. If your average Joe just sees it as THE browser, with no real brand recognition, they might not even notice that it was replaced by a competitor's offering. I think they're trying to make the browser almost invisible so users don't think about it at all. It's just the internet.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Friday July 31 2015, @05:38PM
Look at how many pieces of software come bundled with a browser. If your average Joe just sees it as THE browser, with no real brand recognition, they might not even notice that it was replaced by a competitor's offering. I think they're trying to make the browser almost invisible so users don't think about it at all. It's just the internet.
This is unfortunately the case. At work, IT requested all to switch to Firefox to cut down on malware infections. Getting some users to voluntarily click something besides the blue E was like pulling teeth. That was and had always been the internet for some people and they were not going to change without a struggle. I got the last holdout to switch by eliminating the IE shortcut from his desktop, then using the IE icon for Firefox. It worked, and I never heard a complaint about it. I guess he just thought it was one of those changes that happen occasionally and went with it. Either that or he never noticed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2015, @07:46PM
Just do what I did and set the Firefox shortcut to use the IE icon.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2015, @07:49PM
Man, I should have kept reading before posting that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 01 2015, @06:58AM
A friend of mine had that problem with his stepfather: he wouldn't use Firefox because it was confusing and just didn't work like IE. So my friend broke out paint, turned the Firefox logo blue, and the problems all went away.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2015, @12:45PM
Actually this is technically Microsoft choosing for the users to ditch Firefox.
Not that I'm arguing that there are people ditching Firefox regardless.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Friday July 31 2015, @03:57PM
People are going to be irritated when the number of malware related incidents increase drastically and not realize why.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2015, @01:41PM
To be fair. I upgrade to win 10. I was bored and figured 'what the hell I will break my computer'.
It took it about 3 times for it to finally 'stick' as the default browser. Even though it was the default BEFORE I upgraded....
I dont use my browser for much more than a bit of youtube and some funny pics and the occasional rant. So what it is, does not matter much to me. I could use IE but I like the adblock features in firefox. Which gives you 95% of the speed up you are looking for anyway.