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.
(Score: 2) by DarkMorph on Wednesday June 06 2018, @11:51PM (1 child)
There are a handful of (personally) meaningful reasons I stick to FF. I can compile it in roughly half an hour. Chromium is a horrendously monstrous C++ abomination that probably takes longer than every other package on my entire OS install combined. I can't tolerate keeping up with upgrading that fucking thing, not to mention preparing an overlay to build it for patches that strip out the Google bullshit still buried in that OSS project. (Let's not forget the hotwording scandal that amplifies the concerns for privacy in what's really going on there.) The replacement of the extension API caused me to wait before adopting Quantum since browsing the Internet without noscript is a privacy and security sin. As soon as that add-on launched for 57+, I moved. And wow, the performance definitely was improved.
As for the sound, well, the apulse shim was effortless and works perfectly. I can't even tell that technically the pure ALSA support isn't in the src anymore.
FF's developer tools are also fantastic. The Firebug project called it quits because it evolved to what it is now, eliminating Firebug's raison d'ĂȘtre. Along with noscript are Ghostery and uBlock Origin, and the 3 key add-ons together prevent me from trying other browsers. I would favour a more lightweight option like Midori but without tight control over content, especially JS, it's insane to use a browser on the web. I can probably use a copy of Midori for testing my own work but that's it, just to make sure things render okay in an engine that's not Quantum('s Gecko).
Oh, and who can compete with about:config? The level of control is ideal in FF. I can knock out the Referer HTTP header if I want. I can force FF to ban "passive" mixed content for HTTPS sites. Learning what else I can control in FF manually is almost as thrilling as discovering new features in vim by browsing the help manuals for it. FF still represents the modern implementation of the web standards and still obeying freedom (well, there's the EME scandal, but you can compile FF without it!)
And lastly as others have mentioned, it's not Google which is a positive aspect by itself. It's repulsive that the most common browser has become the one from the most privacy-intrusive vendor. Note that I realise several details I've mentioned are not necessarily exclusive to FF, and that Chromium has feature parity with many of them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 07 2018, @01:21AM
To be honest, Firefox is also a C++ abomination.
Fuck that language, hope it lands on the garbage pile of history soon.