SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submitted via IRC for Bytram
Top web browsers 2019: Microsoft's browser share falls to record low
According to data published today by analytics company Net Applications, Microsoft's browser share for September - composed of Internet Explorer (IE) and Edge - fell 1.8 percentage points to 12%, an all-time low. To put the decline in perspective, the browsers accounted for a user share of 12.4% at the first of this year and hit a high of 14% in April.
[...] Firefox added three-tenths of a percentage point to its user share in September, wrapping up the month at 8.7% and marking the second straight month of keeping things in the black. Even so, it was fourth consecutive month that Firefox remained under 9%, tying a record set in May, June, July and August 2016.
[...] Google's Chrome put another 1.3 percentage points on its frame, weighing in for the month at 68.5%, just a tenth of a point off the record high set in July.
Last month, Computerworld noted the odd pattern to Chrome's share, stretches when the browser would add share one month, lose much of it the next. That continued in September - this has been regular as the proverbial clockwork since February - when Chrome went on its growth spurt after shedding 1.4 points in August.
If the tick-tock continues this month, October should be a downer for Chrome.
But as Computerworld has said before, what counts is the long-term movement of a browser. There, Chrome has done well, adding 2.1 percentage points to its share over the last year. Another sign: The 68.5% of September was the second-highest mark for the browser, edged out only by July's 68.6%.
[...] Elsewhere in Net Applications' data, Apple's Safari grew by half a percentage point to 4.4% and Opera Software's browser stayed where it was at 1.4%. Safari's increase was the second straigh,t but was a due entirely to a nearly-two percentage point leap by macOS that put the operating system in unknown territory (and likely on shaky ground; macOS' 11.6% simply won't stand up).
(Score: 4, Interesting) by EEMac on Wednesday October 02 2019, @12:46PM (14 children)
Why Windows 10 keeps resetting "Open with . . . " settings when doing updates. My husband was yelling about why PDFs were slow and search wasn't working. Windows decided it wanted to open them in Internet Explorer.
It should be a joke. I wish I was joking.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday October 02 2019, @01:12PM (13 children)
Interesting. I thought MS was abandoning IE. I wonder if your .pdf reader somehow uninstalled itself? Or if a .pdf virus did that to you?
Either way, these things are why I refuse to run Win10 as my main Windows OS- until I accumulate enough patches and utilities that wrestle control of my computer back to me. Each version of Windows has forced me to find and use more and more "tweaker" and "smoker" types of utilities, and with Win10 you also need control over automatic updating:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2015/08/26/windows-10-how-to-stop-forced-updates/#1b02046c46f6 [forbes.com]
more of pretty much the same:
https://www.easeus.com/todo-backup-resource/how-to-stop-windows-10-from-automatically-update.html [easeus.com]
Not sure if that still works- not running 10 currently, but will revive a 10 machine someday soon to get caught up on things. And running updates manually does not stop the MS update from turning automatic updates back on, and generally having its way with your machine, chipping away at your control of the machine.
There are utilities to control Win10 updates, and I don't have time to search the web nor my bookmarks where I know I have them...
There might be a way to backup your file-type associations, then restore them after an update... I don't have time now...
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 02 2019, @01:42PM (2 children)
The "virus" here is Microsoft:
How do I stop Windows 10 from Resetting default file associations? [microsoft.com]
We have a ton of Windows Server 2016 VMs, and like many Windows Admins we have issues:
MS: "The "Available updates will be downloaded..." text in the UI is a bug that doesn't represent the actual automatic update settings." [reddit.com]
Microsoft seems hellbent on forcing everyone to be updated all the time, regardless of business schedule needs.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday October 02 2019, @01:59PM
Thank you, good AC.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 03 2019, @08:51PM
There are other things that cause Win10 to "restore" file associations without telling you and it ignores any registry changes or attempts to prevent it -- old applications. For example, old WinZip (I think version 15) will trigger this. WinZip tries to change file associations, WIn10 restores them to their hard-coded internal defaults instead of what the user wants.
(Score: 1) by i286NiNJA on Wednesday October 02 2019, @03:56PM (9 children)
I like that you have to revive your windows 10 machine.
My gaming box is awaiting reinstall atm and I have two laptops that no longer work because of windows 10. One was a "pentium" that ran dog slow and then broke when I installed linux. Another was my wife's after she enabled a bunch of windows features related to SQL server.
The gaming box is a bit souped up and has AMD drivers so that accounts for some of it's instability but jeez it's not like I haven't owned such machines in the past without them bluescreening.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Thursday October 03 2019, @03:59AM (3 children)
The embarrassing thing is the Win10 machine is one of my best. But pretty close to a couple of others, and I'm not really a power user. It was a spare, and I figured Win10 needed as much as I could give it. Besides, it's just a hard disk pull and pop in another one for some other usage.
SQL server, interesting. She maybe installed / enabled the network connector / driver? Shouldn't cause problems, but should be easy to disable / remove.
Which Linux distro did you try?
(Score: 1) by i286NiNJA on Thursday October 03 2019, @09:08PM (2 children)
Well whatever SQL related feature she turned on did something with the kernel, I can't remember how I know this or whatever the details were. Anyhow after that it wouldn't boot, it was over a year ago.
The other laptop was probably ubuntu. I wanted a machine for basic internet browsing but microsoft's secure boot feature killed it. I installed it several different ways with various bios configs but it simply would not boot linux off the hard disk. It'll boot a kernel off a USB and mount the hard drive as / just fine.
My buddy tells me he has a friend who can fix them for like $50 so I'm gonna do that.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday October 04 2019, @02:47AM (1 child)
So you can always do a "repair installation" of Windows. I hate that as a fix, but I've had to do it several times, esp. with XP, but not yet with 7.
And just booting from a Windows install CD you can get into other boot repair / chkdsk stuff. https://www.ubackup.com/windows-7/command-prompt-windows-7-boot-repair.html [ubackup.com] Important stuff under "Way 2".
There are newer Linux distros that will boot correctly from UEFI.
The problem is more likely due to disk partition / sector translation issues. Occasionally I've had to learn about the geometry and force the issue with Linux fdisk, and then also force the installer to use the partitions already there. To be save, make /boot the first partition and be sure to mark it bootable.
Some BIOSes will let you turn off UEFI and boot conventional / legacy BIOS mode.
Hope some of that helps! If it doesn't work, then spend the $50- I doubt you can make it worse.
(Score: 1) by i286NiNJA on Friday October 04 2019, @03:21PM
You know I didn't try my windows 10 cd because I thought it was like the old days when you needed a vendor cd to install your vendor windows.
Maybe I'll give it a shot this weekend.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Thursday October 03 2019, @04:03AM (4 children)
BTW, your username is interesting. I still have a very fast 286 machine- I think it's 24 MHz.
(Score: 1) by i286NiNJA on Thursday October 03 2019, @09:33PM (3 children)
Sadly I don't know what happened to my 286 but it was a 16mhz AMD
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday October 04 2019, @02:35AM (2 children)
Unsadly my 20 MHz 286 would love a new home. I forget what brand. "CompuAdd" comes to mind. Yeah, pretty sure it's a CompuAdd.
Somewhere I have a hard disk with a 286 Unix (maybe Xenix?) that boots and works. Well, it used to.
(Score: 1) by i286NiNJA on Friday October 04 2019, @03:33PM
Jesus fuck. Yeah mine was the compuadd 216 with 40mb hd and 1mb of ram. I can't remember the VGA card. Compuadd branded VGA monitor. I'd seen the same model whitelabeled to goldstar and other brands.
I used it until the hard disk had tons of bad spots, marked them bad and then kept on using it. I eventually partitioned off all the bad spots manually and used xtradrive to compress the disk.
It disappeared after I joined the navy. I didn't care about it when I left but after I got out I was sad to see that my parents made an effort to save it but they actually saved an old compuadd 386 that I bought from a used computer store.
Between the two machines I'd ran minix, minix-VMD, linux, netware 2.?, DR-DOS, msdos 4.11, 6.0 and 6.1, windows 3.0, and windows 3.1 (on the 286).
I also learned basic and assembly on that 286.
(Score: 1) by i286NiNJA on Friday October 04 2019, @04:31PM
I would love to take your 286 but sadly I'm paying tech city dollar ft^2 prices.
My current home setup is one gaming rig in a modded Mac Pro (i57600k and gtx1080 water cooled, 500gb ssd, 54gb optane that's not used yet, 16gb ram, 4tb data drive and 10tb backup drive) case. Sadly malfunctioning at the moment. Part of the reason I don't want to use it to backup the other machines anymore.
a massive dual mobo case (the size of a smaller minicomputer, bigger than a towers like the later pdp11s, smaller than a rack) that I modded to additionally hold a nuc i7 (with optane sotrage for boot and NFS cache, primary application server)
a udoox86 ultra(aux server, I will make this the storage backup with the 10tb disk that's in the gaming system) in addition to it's intend full size ATX ,athalon with RX480 and a pcie FPGA(just dabbling so far), "interactive app server" that I can activate with WoL.. I have some notion that I might be able to safely play pirated windows games in wine too but haven't tackled it yet
a nano-itx celeron (8tb storage cached to 500gb ssd + an overkill 32gb of ram for extra cache, serves NFS and CIFS)
I also have a banana pi r-2 running LEDE for a home router,
a cisco sg-300-something switch.
a secondary switch I never use but it's intended for 10gbe but it's a power hog too. I might sell it since it regularly sells 2 grand more than I paid for it.
Then two HDHomerun network tv tuners that serve out two channels of mpeg2 streams each
With the exception of the router, switch, and gaming PC and one tuner in the living room, it's all crammed into a small corner next to our dresser in the bedroom. Very low power, very quiet unless I boot up the ATX athalon board. Keeping it small and low power was tough, a fun challenge but really expensive. I also ended up testing a lot of hardware that wasn't good enough like rpis and rock64s.
I also have a cheap VPS out there that monitors and launches AWS spot instances. (So fucking cheap I'm paying a fraction of what aws would normally cost). I had nextcloud and postfix working this way but am re-thinking that as well.
I was running kubernetes on some of this mess but I've since removed it and have started rebuilding the servers with plain docker. Way too much maintenance overhead with kubernetes. Also it generated a buttload of network traffic and higher idle loads than I would have liked. The purpose specific way my nodes were set up didn't map well to k8s either, constantly fighting default behavior and losing the promised fault tolerance in the process (that I never really needed either)
I have a NeXT slab with greyscale monitor in the basement of my mother's house. I told her if anyone seems interested they're welcome to it for free if 1) they remove the hard disk and give it to her 2) they promise never to throw it away even if it breaks they should give it to someone else who will keep it around.
I simply don't have space for much more but it's fun to see how far we've come.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 02 2019, @01:15PM (2 children)
Once Edge switches to Chromium, will it be counted as MS, or Chrome?
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday October 02 2019, @03:57PM (1 child)
It'll be MiChrome
Seriously, though. From what I understand, it will still be Microsoft Edge, just with Chrome internals.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Wednesday October 02 2019, @04:33PM
From the point of view of a web application developer, any other Chromium-based browser will have the same set of web platform compatibility quirks as Google Chrome. It's like third-party web browsers on iOS: they all fail to support the same things that Safari fails to support because they all use the same underlying WKWebView library. Use of the same browser engine is why the statistics on Caniuse.com combines Safari for iOS and Chrome for iOS into one figure, for example.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Wednesday October 02 2019, @01:49PM (3 children)
What's needed for browsers is to have nobody that's actually completely dominating the marketplace. That way, all browsers will have to adhere to standards rather than doing their own incompatible thing.
This message brought to you by someone who saw far too many "Best viewed with Internet Explorer 6" notices back in the day.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday October 02 2019, @02:02PM (2 children)
Agreed. And, we need to apply the same philosophy to other aspects of life. Banking, social media, auto makers and other manufacturing, on and on it goes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 02 2019, @04:07PM
The Verizon trucks showed up this morning to hang fiber on poles for FiOS. In ~6 months or so, we'll have at least a competitor-on-paper for the not-so-good high speed internet from Spectrum (cable). Progress!!
(at least I can hope, right?)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 02 2019, @11:39PM
Exactly. Too-big-to-fail should be too-big-to-continue-operating-as-a-single-entity.
Not quite as catchy though.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday October 02 2019, @08:19PM (3 children)
I use Firefox whenever I can. Sometimes I use Firefox and Chrome at the same time, to have two independent browsers running without having to do stuff like switch user accounts. That way I can be logged into 2 different Google mail accounts, and other such things with less worry that information might somehow leak. One of the worst account mixups I experienced was perpetrated by Google when they merged YouTube. My independent YouTube account got connected to my gmail account.
On slither.io, Chrome is noticeably faster and more responsive than Firefox.
The version of Opera I have on my smartphone is too easily hijacked by malicious websites.
M$ Edge and IE don't run on Linux. So I don't use them.
Better text based browsing would be nice. Links and Lynx don't do the best job of laying out a webpage.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 03 2019, @03:24AM (2 children)
FTFY.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 03 2019, @11:36AM (1 child)
Marry little girls!
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday October 03 2019, @02:44PM
You mean Merry?
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.