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posted by martyb on Tuesday June 05 2018, @08:50AM   Printer-friendly
from the approved-using-a-Pale-Moon-browser dept.

Netmarketshare reports that Mozilla Firefox's share of the desktop and notebook computer web browser market has fallen below ten percent.

Firefox had a market share of 12.63% in June 2017 according to Netmarketshare and even managed to rise above the 13% mark in 2017 before its share fell to 9.92% in May 2018.

Google Chrome, Firefox's biggest rival in the browser world, managed to increase its massive lead from 60.08% in June 2017 to 62.85% in May 2018.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer dropped a percent point to 11.82% in May 2018 and Microsoft's Edge browser gained less than 0.50% to 4.26% over the year.

[...] Netmarketshare collects usage stats and does not get "real" numbers from companies like Mozilla, Google or Microsoft. The company monitors the use of browsers on a subset of Internet sites and creates the market share reports using the data it collects.

While that is certainly good enough for trends if the number of monitored user interactions is high enough, it is not completely accurate and real-world values can be different based on a number of factors. While it is unlikely that they differ a lot, it is certainly possible that the share is different to the one reported by the company.


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by The Shire on Tuesday June 05 2018, @01:29PM (3 children)

    by The Shire (5824) on Tuesday June 05 2018, @01:29PM (#688835)

    What this actually is saying is that Chrome is far more likely to divulge your browser info to 3rd parties than Firefox. I refuse to use Chrome on account of the privacy implications and have been perfectly happy with Firefox for years. Firefox can be configured to not report itself to these 3rd party data harvesters, Chrome cannot. So I think the stats are almost certainly wrong - Firefox users are simply better at protecting their data.

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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @01:54PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @01:54PM (#688847)

    With Chrome I know that Google is watching.
    With Firefox, I know that Google AND Mozilla is watching.

    Also, I have yet to get malware installed through Chrome. Where as Firefox users recently found malware related to some TV show installed without their knowledge.

    Nobody got fired for the Google incident, and nobody got fired for the malware incident.

    Mozilla keeps answering "trust us". We did. We trusted you to do none of the above, and that trust is now broken. Where as we trust Google to monitor everything, and so far they have been living up to expectations.

    When the choice is between a known enemy, and an unknown enemy, the known one is always the best choice.

    • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @04:35PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @04:35PM (#688919)

      "Where as Firefox users recently found malware related to some TV show installed without their knowledge."

      opinions of stupid windows slaves don't count for shit.

  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @01:55PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @01:55PM (#688848)

    Firefox can be configured to not report itself to these 3rd party data harvesters, Chrome cannot. So I think the stats are almost certainly wrong - Firefox users are simply better at protecting their data.

    This is true, but practially every bloody firefox release adds another handful of options buried in about:config that you need to toggle to protect your privacy.

    I recently learned that even with telemetry "turned off" in the preferences, and "never save history" enabled, Firefox continuously saves megabytes of data logs to the disk. This is like, the total opposite of what was intended by those settings. Who the fuck knows what kind of personal information is in there? You have to drill into about:config to find the "toolkit.telemetry.archive.enabled" option...