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) by etherscythe on Friday July 31 2015, @05:36PM
I don't know that people are really that upset with Mozilla, numbers wise. However, Microsoft being Microsoft is old news, whereas Mozilla's troubles are of more recent origin. I'm still mad that my Nexus 7 cannot play Flash video because some bozo dev thought he was going to disable it to improve my browsing experience. Most places have changed to Youtube, but a few places still use Flash, and I'm still holding onto an older Pale Moon build because of it.
Run that one again for a second: they disabled Flash video on my (good at the time of release) Tegra 2 hardware with, as far as I can tell, no manual override whatsoever. Yes, it lagged a little if I switch to full-screen, but last I checked I paid money for the thing and that makes it mine, to run however I wish.
To say nothing of the loss of Status Bar and other functionality they killed after v3.6. Mozilla was popular because it solved the problems Microsoft introduced. Mozilla stepped up and contributed to bringing around Internet standards and open formats. Firefox was the people's champion, but they've sold out and become part of the problem, and I bet to a lot of geeks that feels a lot more like treachery than Microsoft being true to its own nature from the beginning. And so the uber-geeks find new browsers to recommend to their less-clued friends, relatives, and clients.
"Fake News: anything reported outside of my own personally chosen echo chamber"
(Score: 2, Interesting) by NickFortune on Tuesday August 11 2015, @12:49PM
I don't know. According to some estimates of Firefox' best usage, they've managed to drop from 45% market share to below 15%. I'd call that a fairly significant number.
Granted, it's hard to know what proportion of that number were angry at Moz' design decisions. I'm guessing MozCorp estimate the proportion as being really, really low. On the other hand, MozCorp's attempts to staunch the flow of departing users haven't exactly been overwhelmingly successful, so they may be misreading the situation.