http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-3p-Browser-Market-Share
According to Net Applications' Netmarketshare, the Linux market share on the desktop as judged by browser interactions may now be above 3%.
The company is reporting a 3.37% Linux marketshare for August 2017, a rise from 2.53% a month prior and the first time they have reported the Linux desktop marketshare above 3%.
They report Windows meanwhile at 90.7%, macOS at 5.94%, and the other operating systems statistically at zero. Their monthly report can be found here.
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Linux Browser Marketshare Strikes Above 3%
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 48 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
(1)
(1)
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday September 03 2017, @01:38PM (3 children)
There can only be so many cool kids. The rest of you are stuck with stick-in-the-mud Windows. Even the Mac Boys are cooler than you Windows people!
(Score: 5, Informative) by mcgrew on Sunday September 03 2017, @04:29PM (2 children)
You and the article's author seem to forget that these days, most people are on the internet with a phone or tablet, and most of them are Android, which is in fact Linux (and Macs are BSD). My guess is that more than half of all surfing is done on an Android device; computers are mostly in business, and almost all businesses are running Microsoft.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Pslytely Psycho on Monday September 04 2017, @05:10AM (1 child)
"most people are on the internet with a phone or tablet, and most of them are Android, which is in fact Linux"
Considering the amount of malware on Android, is this something to be proudly proclaiming?
It's quickly chasing MS down the infected rabbit hole.
Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 04 2017, @08:01AM
As far as I know, most if not all Android malware is trojans. Trojans is not an OS problem, it's basically the software version of false advertising - and the OS isn't going to prevent that until we have Skynet level AI.
(Score: 4, Funny) by DarkMorph on Sunday September 03 2017, @02:04PM (10 children)
(Score: 5, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Sunday September 03 2017, @02:14PM (7 children)
Also there's those users who simply block any tracking. Those will certainly not show up in any statistics, and it is well possible that this is correlated with the choice of operating system.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Nerdfest on Sunday September 03 2017, @02:19PM (6 children)
This is what I was thinking as well. Pretty much everyone I know who runs Linux blocks pretty much everything. I don't really know of anyone who spoofs agent strings as a matter of practice. If they just use the agent string from a main site as opposed to something done with JavaScript their numbers might be okay.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 03 2017, @04:46PM
I do not send any user agent at all, and things are generally fine. I stopped sending it when sites began to stop working because they didn't like my browser version or platform.
It's none of their fucking business.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Sunday September 03 2017, @07:39PM (4 children)
Exactly.
Your Ublock/Adblock/Noscript usually don't even touch your User Agent String. You have to go out of your way to dick with this, and then suffer all the consequences when your bank refuses to connect or some random site fails. So you then need a fall-back setting just for those sites.
Thought you had that taken care of? Maybe you better check! [whoishostingthis.com]
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 03 2017, @09:13PM
I spoof UA on linux and windows. My fake virus popups tell me my mac is running slow :)
Spoofing UA will lead to sites running the wrong exploits against your device and that is worth it for me.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 04 2017, @03:28AM (2 children)
Me. Apparently I'm running Mozilla on Windows NT 10.
In reality I'm currently running Mageia linux. And yes, it's because some .gov.au sites refuse to even serve content to linux.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 04 2017, @06:00AM (1 child)
Can you sue those fuckers? I mean there probably is some anti-discrimination law or some such.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 04 2017, @01:52PM
Well I suppose you could consider the emotional attachment some people tie to their browser of choice as being a religion, so I guess you could argue they are discriminating on religious belief. Seems like a stretch, though. There did seem to be a jihad against IE for years, though....
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 04 2017, @08:03AM
Oh, that's easy. Just about any UA string claiming to be Mozilla 5.0.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 05 2017, @12:57AM
When I read the summary, I wondered if this is just folks no longer spoofing UA string. It seems like linux on desktops is less common now than even 10 yrs ago (from my circles anyway).
I only recently (last couple years) stopped spoofing my UA. Used Linux as my desktop since '93, but would have been counted as a windows user for most of that time. Only a few broken sites give me that annoying "unsupported browser" message now, and I just don't bother with those sites.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 03 2017, @02:22PM (4 children)
It's the year of the Linux Desktop!
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Sunday September 03 2017, @03:55PM
So now I can be 3%er without all the camo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3_Percenters [wikipedia.org] Cool.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Thexalon on Sunday September 03 2017, @03:58PM (1 child)
Netcraft confirms it: Windows is dying!
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 04 2017, @06:03AM
Actually it's Micro$oft dying https://news.netcraft.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/wpid-wss-active-share.png [netcraft.com]
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Sunday September 03 2017, @04:33PM
Here's [shutterstock.com] your Linux on the desktop--the Android phone.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 5, Funny) by Justin Case on Sunday September 03 2017, @02:57PM (3 children)
Yeah, sorry guys, that "three percent" is all just me. I'm testing my new distributed web indexing algorithm to replace google. It runs on compromised IoT devices.
(Score: 5, Funny) by takyon on Sunday September 03 2017, @04:05PM (2 children)
Wow, 3%? IoT devices are selling like hotcakes! I need to invest in Intel!
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Monday September 04 2017, @11:02AM (1 child)
Wow, 3%? IoT devices are selling like hotcakes! I need to invest in Intel!
Not Intel.
Better make that an investment in Arm Holdings or MIPS Technologies. Just the Raspberry Pi alone sold 10 million units [walesonline.co.uk] as of last year. It, many SBCs, and all your billions of smartphones and tablets are Arm-based. MIPS is more in appliances but is seeing gains in Russia and China. Intel is still around, but dependent on M$ and many want both to go away. Certainly if we get rid of M$ any time soon, it will take Intel with it.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 04 2017, @01:55PM
woosh
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 03 2017, @04:05PM (11 children)
These data aggregation outfits use JavaScript to do the counting. Right?
About 96 percent of Linux users block scripts by default. Right?
I also remember a comment in a thread on a ZD site where the poster noted that he worked for one of these outfit and they would only count as Linux, instances of a few of the big distros; all others became "unknown".
(Ziff-Davis personnel deleted the comment within a few hours, of course.)
Some site devs still deny non-Windoze users access to their sites.
Linux users who want to use those sites will spoof the user agent string (after which, the sites work just fine).
How many lazy users don't bother to make a separate browser profile for that and don't switch the user agent string back after dealing with the bullshit site?
Now, how many of you have gotten tired of dealing with M$-related nonsense and have switched the folks whom you support to Linux so that you won't be getting those weekly calls about somebody's Windoze box getting pwned?
How many have run into boxes that won't run with a currently-supported version of Windoze and have just put Linux on that box?
Mostly, here, it sounds like somebody's method of counting can't even be relied on to give useful results--before we even get into this particular month-to-month aberration.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by jmorris on Sunday September 03 2017, @05:24PM (10 children)
I admin a public library with the lab computers running CentOS. In the dark days we kept Crossover Office + IE installed. But IE quit working on Crossover so we just quit and kept Firefox, Chrome and Konquerer. No complaints. The days of putting an IE only website onto the public Internet had been ended by the iPhone. Not saying the situation is equally rosy worldwide, but speaking as an admin here in the U.S. I can say for the record that hundreds of patrons come in and do all sorts of things daily and the biggest tech support problems I deal with involve printing.
The days of trashing Linux on the desktop on the grounds of being unable to browse are over. Flash is dying so little new content is being created that pushes the current Linux version to breaking, Java in the browser is dead. LibreOffice opens enough Office documents that we don't even worry much about that problem anymore. We do still have some circulating laptops (donated by the State Library) with Win7 + Office that we can offer as a solution the time or two per year somebody gets a 'must have' file we just can't open. And of course we sometimes have to use one of the laptops when we proctor tests since the special lockdown software only runs under Windows. That sort of thing will never run with WINE / CrossOver.
(Score: 2) by fliptop on Sunday September 03 2017, @05:37PM (2 children)
Not true, I can't tell you how many women I provide support for who can't live w/o their daily dose of game playing [pogo.com]. Every time a java vulnerability is exploited they're always the first to get infected.
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jmorris on Sunday September 03 2017, @08:51PM (1 child)
Just went there. Flash. Brave fails (not unexpected) but after lowering the shields a bit Firebox fired up Plants vs zombies there. That is the sort of stuff I see running all day out in the labs, although most seem to get to their games via facebook. :(
No browser ships Java support, Chrome pretty much forbids it, IE is getting there and Firefox soon will, and of course iOS bans it. That is a menace that has passed. May Flash soon join it in the dustbin of history!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 04 2017, @12:06AM
And JavaScript too!
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 03 2017, @08:42PM (2 children)
My bet is school just started. Chrombooks seem to be the teaching fad this year. Would bet cash they identify as a linux box.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 03 2017, @10:32PM (1 child)
...except that these stats are -last- month's numbers, when school was out in the Northern Hemisphere.
...which is not to say that Chromebooks can't accomplish what is required.
...and those do run a Linux kernel.
the teaching fad this year
When the vendors of those start giving away hardware in order to lock in schools to a particular payware software ecosystem, as M$ has done, we'll have a starting point for a discussion.
In the meantime, there's folks doing a cost/value comparison with the Good Enough factor at play.
...and folks have installed GNU/Linux on these things. [google.com]
Would bet cash they identify as a linux box
Why not? Didn't Windoze RT devices identify as Windoze?
...even though none of the "Windoze" software you had paid for[1]/collected for your x86 box would run on the RT device.
[1] I would say "bought", but you never really own closed-soure software.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 04 2017, @08:00PM
There are all sorts of teaching fads. I have seen them come and go. A few years ago it was iPads. Many years before that it was IBM PS/2s (computer fads have been going on for a *long* time). This year it is chromebooks.
except that these stats are -last- month's numbers, when school was out in the Northern Hemisphere.
School starts anywhere from early august to early September. It depends on your district and school.
Why not? Didn't Windoze RT devices identify as Windoze? and we'll have a starting point for a discussion.
Are you 15? Grow up. I did not mention windows at all. Look if you want to bash on windows go right ahead. But you are veering closely to off topic.
I would say "bought", but you never really own closed-soure software.
I would say open source is bringing us even MORE closed ecosystems. With a veneer of 'you can change it'. Yeah if you have 20 years background in reverse engineering and the very specific tool chain they used. Every company I know and have worked for is using the hell out of it with 0 contribute back. They build their closed systems on top of it. From a pure business POV open source has just automated the 'redundant' stuff with low cost. Linux has pretty much dominated everything more than windows ever could dream of. Yet 99% of it is locked in firmware blobs that no one can really get at. It is being used by hit and run companies to create an avalanche of IoT shit that will cripple our internet in a few years. MS is going nowhere yet all the companies that did embedded OS's are.
My point was school recently started. Hence the bump. This is not some magical bump from people 'jumping ship'. It is just a fluke in the stats. You can try to pretend otherwise. But then again... log in. You take the time to sign everything. You can do better.
(Score: 2, Troll) by aristarchus on Monday September 04 2017, @07:55AM
Wholey shit! Do they know their admin is a Nazi? You really need to fess up on this, jmorris, before they find your face on the newsfeed of some white supremacist march somewhere!! Other than that, I agree entirely with your post, and would mod it up as at least "interesting", if not for the fact that I spam modded The Mighty Buzzard, and allegedly some admins that were not him banned me from modding. And here it is, the second time I have had reason to upmod the jmorris, and have had no ability! Oh the hugris! Oh, the Pathos! Oh, the miscegenation!
(Score: 2) by darnkitten on Tuesday September 05 2017, @07:50PM (2 children)
If I may ask (multiple questions), why did y'all choose CentOS, over other available distros? Which desktop environment(s) do you use (and how did you decide which to use)? Do you use a thin client, kiosk, something-like-Deep-Freeze, standalone or other model for your PAC lab?
Do your staff machines run CentOS as well (my library is pretty much locked into Windows, as the ILS on which our consortium runs only works on Windows and Mac)?
Looking at your website, it's obvious that your system is much larger our local network of small independent rural libraries, but any information on what works will help--I've been trying to move away from proprietary to FLOSS, at least in the PAC area, and had some success, at least until smartphones/tablets and Win10 threw everyone into walled gardens.
At least now, the patrons are more comfortable moving between different OS interfaces, so it might be a good time to reintroduce them to the world of Linux...
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Tuesday September 05 2017, @10:21PM (1 child)
CentOS 6 was the natural choice in the progression from RHL 6.0 to various RH derived distros since, including my own WBEL3/4/5. (5 was never completed for a public release but good enough for internal use for a bit.) But CentOS 6.x is the end of that line because beyond that lies Systemd and GNOME3 madness.
We default to GNOME 2 because that is what has been the default for a long time. KDE is installed and we have one staffer who uses it but I don't know if any patrons do. All staff and patron machines run as fat clients imaged from a common master and rsynced from it with a few per host customizations for ssh keys, a couple have local printers, etc. We run two entirely segmented networks, staff and patron with NFS/NIS servers on each. That means patrons do have persistent homes with everything that implies. The UNIX security model has so far been sufficient lockdown and we provide the 'full UNIX experience' including the dev tools.
We have GDM 2 hacked up a bit to cope with guest logins, a special autologin card cat profile, etc. so any replacement really needs to have that available. PCLinuxOS is our current evaluation target for a next gen replacement since it seems to be checking all the boxes so far, just replacing GNOME2 with MATE as the default desktop so nobody will notice anything but the names of things change. Time is ticking since Chrome stopped being updatable. But once we can get PCLinuxOS out we will be able to offer at least Firefox, Brave, SeaMonkey, Chrome, Chromium and Konquerer. Hope to also finally ditch NIS for Kerberos.
Our ILS is Evergreen so we can of course run that on pretty much any client. My ISO 28560-2 RFID add on only works on Linux at present. I think it could be ported to Windows / Mac with medium effort, I just lack the knowledge of those legacy platforms. I'd need a way to identify the right window, focus it, feed it keystrokes and then see if it spawns a child window. Basically a Win/Mac replacement for xdotool. Still the only library system in the area converted to the full ISO standard vs just using the tags as glorified barcode stickers.
Our system isn't that large, anyone can benefit from the penguin. One central library plus four branches with the fifth being replaced because we lost the building and are building a new one. The beauty of Linux is the ease of maintaining things. Even with SSDs, storage is cheap so each machine has a spare copy so if one goes bad anyone can just punch reset and pick "Rebuild" from the GRUB menu. They automagically update themselves nightly and turn off. If a drive dies I stuff a new one in, boot the "magic USB stick" and in a few minutes it comes back to a login prompt or if it is a critical (i.e. checkout or something) station we usually have a cold spare handy and deal with getting the original back up after closing. Network mounted homes means nothing on a workstation matters. The servers are SAS drives in a RAID5 and copied to a machine with big cheap drives nightly (rsnapshot, with daily, weekly, monthly copies of files available) then critical staff files go to a rotation of USB sticks so we can keep a fairly recent copy of things offsite. When your main branch has went through a fire you get paranoid about that sort of thing.
The only Windows in line of business use are some VMs running our accounting system. That pretty much has to be Windows based since the government gave a monopoly on payroll / tax tables to people who only support Windows. There are no viable accounting systems on Linux and anything cloud based would be a nightmare with the privacy laws we have to deal with, plus I simply do not trust the Cloud. Our data stays inside the building. Except the offsite backup and it stays in town.
(Score: 2) by darnkitten on Wednesday September 06 2017, @12:38AM
Thanks for the info--We are a rural, one-room (15-20K volumes), 1 paid staff (me), library with 4 PACs and 2 Staff machines. I maintain the network myself, with the help of a local tech guy who volunteers to work on the machines and network in his spare time--he runs his own growing business, so that time slowly decreases...
Anyway, after seeing some at some larger systems in the state, he's been aching to try out a thin client setup for our PACs, as our current machines are getting to their end-of-practical-life, but all he's looked at are a couple of proprietary packages which, A) are more expensive over the long term than I am comfortable with, and B) are proprietary (and Windows-based).
I think he also wants us to serve as a test bed, to develop a package he can then sell to other small libraries with him as support staff.
OTOH, I'm looking to simplify my life, but at the same time, introduce more people to the penguin--as well as the concept that F/LOSS is available, useable, secure, and a good (or better) alternative to the usual suspects (most of my patrons have now been trained to use Firefox, even on their home machines, though I'm not sure how long that's gonna last with Mozilla constantly changing things). I also want to keep the ability to admin my own network, as at least I know I'm there if something goes wrong.
So--thanks again--you gave me several good ideas I can investigate, especially the one of running the necessary government Windows-requiring crap in a VM.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Sunday September 03 2017, @04:35PM (1 child)
N/C
(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Sunday September 03 2017, @04:42PM
http://currentlydown.com/phoronix.com [currentlydown.com]
http://www.isitdownrightnow.com/phoronix.com.html [isitdownrightnow.com]
Duration doesn't seem right [tuxmachines.org] but whatever.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by looorg on Sunday September 03 2017, @04:46PM (9 children)
Year of the Linux desktop is finally here! A decade or so to late or whatever ...
Overall I find it interesting that Chrome is 2/3 of the entire market for browsers. Still there is very little complaints in that area compared to say when IE pulled the same numbers, then it was all about how Microsoft was killing the market, when Google does it then it's apparently fine cause Google = the Internet or some such explanation.
So what could be behind the data cause I seriously doubt there has been a massive increase in people running Linux as their desktop OS. So is it smartphones or tablets or IoT:devices or are people just faking data and user agent switching?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 03 2017, @05:32PM (1 child)
When Microsoft did it, it was a problem because MS bundled their browser with the OS and forced OEMs to not install an alternative. Nowadays Chrome (at least the Windows version) has its market share because people are actually choosing to use it. Also Chrome is cross platform, whereas IE is/was Windows only.
It is a little concerning that they have so much market share, but there is no sign of the market share being abused to lock-in customers to their platform, so not the same as when Microsoft was in that situation.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 03 2017, @06:27PM
No sign if you follow the example of this story and focus on the desktop, perhaps. Android is dominant on mobiles. I lost the link to the article that explains that, if a manufacturer wants to include one of Google's apps, it must ship them all. Some other concerns over Google's dominance:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/23/how-google-controls-androids-open-source [theguardian.com]
https://www.cheatsheet.com/gear-style/with-android-does-google-have-a-monopoly.html/?a=viewall [cheatsheet.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 03 2017, @06:15PM (5 children)
When internet exploder was the dominant web browser it was a real problem because it was not standards compliant. It's fair to say Micro$oft pretty damn close almost captured the entire internet as web pages were developed for IE, not real standards compliant web browsers.
Not saying the current situation isn't worrying, just very different.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 03 2017, @08:32PM (4 children)
There was, i think, an attitude within Microsoft that whatever they did was a standard.
(Score: 2) by Chromium_One on Sunday September 03 2017, @11:41PM (2 children)
There is, I do believe, still much of this attitude present, though it's not quite as all-pervasive as it used to be.
When you live in a sick society, everything you do is wrong.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 04 2017, @07:58AM (1 child)
What is a "microsoft"?
*Posted from my Android tablet, running free and open source software that Gill Bates can never get his hands on, ever. *
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Chromium_One on Monday September 04 2017, @09:11PM
MS is trying, oh yes, they're trying.
So far they've been contributors to Linux kernel code, though as far as I know that's been entirely benign - patches to allow Linux to run better under Hyper-V and such. Also looking at the entire Linux subsystem for Win10 - how long until they're trying to add code back to upstream wholesale? Bet ya their line of thinking is something like "Give it time and us acting like responsible community members, and maybe some patches later don't get checked as thoroughly as they should." Then there's the entire CyanogenMod thing. MS was a financial contributor and was starting to contribute code to the project as well. Pretty sure I'm not the only one who is REALLY happy that it all fell apart and Lineage OS got organized so quickly.
Not as directly damaging, note that last I looked, MS is still collecting something like $5/pop in patent royalties for a great number of Android devices sold. Insert argument here about good and bad points of current IP law, software patents, etc.
When you live in a sick society, everything you do is wrong.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 04 2017, @06:06AM
ref provided https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 04 2017, @08:14AM
Which rock have you been hiding under?
People here are (or the green site) quite unhappy about the browser situation, and discussions about Firefox gets tons of comments.
The difference is that IE got big because Microsoft forced it on Windows users, so we blamed Microsoft. But Chrome has gotten so big because Mozilla is doing everything they can to get rid of Firefox users with every single update, so we blame Mozilla instead.
Many of us preferred Firefox, but have found that it no longer does what they want, and reluctantly switched to Chrome. A few of us are still holding out, worrying when the update that will break the remaining add-ons will be forced upon us (by security holes for those who simply stop updating), and we too will have to give up.