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posted by martyb on Tuesday August 04 2020, @01:35AM   Printer-friendly
from the I-use-Lynx,-you-insensitive-clod! dept.

Firefox Browser Use Drops As Mozilla's Worst Microsoft Edge Fears Come True

Back in April, we reported that the Edge browser is quickly gaining market share now that Microsoft has transitioned from the EdgeHTML engine to the more widely used Chromium engine (which also underpins Google's Chrome browser). At the time, Edge slipped into the second-place slot for desktop web browsers, with a 7.59 percent share of the market. This dropped Mozilla's Firefox – which has long been the second-place browser behind Chrome – into third place.

Now, at the start of August, we're getting some fresh numbers in for the desktop browser market, and things aren't looking good for Mozilla. Microsoft increased its share of the browser market from 8.07 percent in June to 8.46 percent in July. Likewise, Firefox fell from 7.58 percent to 7.27 percent according to NetMarketShare.

[...] As for Mozilla, the company wasn't too happy when Microsoft first announced that it was going to use Chromium for Edge way back in December 2018. Mozilla's Chris Beard at the time accused Microsoft of "giving up" by abandoning EdgeHTML in favor of Chromium. "Microsoft's decision gives Google more ability to single-handedly decide what possibilities are available to each one of us," said Beard at the time. "We compete with Google because the health of the internet and online life depend on competition and choice."

[...] Microsoft developer Kenneth Auchenberg fought back the following January, writing, "Thought: It's time for Mozilla to get down from their philosophical ivory tower. The web is dominated by Chromium, if they really *cared* about the web they would be contributing instead of building a parallel universe that's used by less than 5 percent."

Is the browser monoculture inevitable or will Firefox hang in there?

Previously:


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Booga1 on Tuesday August 04 2020, @01:55AM (34 children)

    by Booga1 (6333) on Tuesday August 04 2020, @01:55AM (#1031067)

    Still on Firefox, but not for their lack of trying to kill it. They're constantly reworking things that are just plain annoying the shit outta me. The latest being the stupid expanding address bar they introduced a few versions ago. I tried disabling it and that went well for a while. Then they disabled the disabling and now disabling it again using the new hidden method disables all the autocomplete functionality. Gah!

    So, to push this one visually annoying and purely cosmetic feature, they've thrown actual functionality under the bus if you want to turn off the bling... Then they wonder why they keep losing market share.

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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by leon_the_cat on Tuesday August 04 2020, @02:34AM (6 children)

    by leon_the_cat (10052) on Tuesday August 04 2020, @02:34AM (#1031077) Journal

    I couldn't be bothered with that UI fight anymore, plus the attitude of the developers to feedback sucked imho. Using Pale Moon instead.

    • (Score: 2) by coolgopher on Tuesday August 04 2020, @02:40AM

      by coolgopher (1157) on Tuesday August 04 2020, @02:40AM (#1031078)

      Same.
      Well, the New Moon build on Mac, and Basilisk on Linux. I gave up on Mozilla when they they broke all the extensions a couple of years ago.

    • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday August 04 2020, @03:08AM

      by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday August 04 2020, @03:08AM (#1031092) Journal

      Palemoon is my "primary". I have a small stable of others, chrome based and gecko based, in various stages of security lockdown. I don't rely on any one of them.

    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by driverless on Tuesday August 04 2020, @06:23AM (3 children)

      by driverless (4770) on Tuesday August 04 2020, @06:23AM (#1031149)

      Do Pale Moon, Waterfox, and others get counted individually in the surveys or are they all classed as Firefox? If they're all lumped together as "Firefox", are there actually any Mozilla Firefox users left or have they all jumped ship to the forks that still retain some sanity?

      • (Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Tuesday August 04 2020, @01:49PM

        by PiMuNu (3823) on Tuesday August 04 2020, @01:49PM (#1031230)

        I use firefox - I don't care that much (except not chrome) and can't be bothered with getting something else working.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2020, @08:53PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2020, @08:53PM (#1031409)

        Perhaps not coincidentally, the percentage using Firefox almost exactly equals the percentage who self-identify as transgendered people.

      • (Score: 4, Interesting) by ChrisMaple on Wednesday August 05 2020, @01:52AM

        by ChrisMaple (6964) on Wednesday August 05 2020, @01:52AM (#1031530)

        I use 4 versions of firefox: 28, 52, 64, and 71. The older ones have the best add-on capability; I only use the newer ones when the older ones can't render a site.

        Mozilla puts a great amount of effort into worsening the user experience.

  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2020, @03:23AM (14 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2020, @03:23AM (#1031100)

    I personally stopped on the FF-52-ESR branch and have yet to need to update. Everything I need still works on it, just by spoofing a newer user-agent version (Which by the way uMatrix 1.1.4 supports, while later webextension versions don't!)

    Quite frankly ever new version of firefox hogs ever more memory, and despite their claims to be fixing all these problems in later editions, they don't seem to be getting any better. Furthermore, leaving javascript disabled and not creating too many windows seems to keep memory fragmentation down which keeps from hitting the virtual memory limit (the normal cause of crashes on 32bit firefox, and if you left it running for long enough, on 64 bit firefox as well!)

    • (Score: 2) by driverless on Tuesday August 04 2020, @06:25AM (12 children)

      by driverless (4770) on Tuesday August 04 2020, @06:25AM (#1031150)

      What pisses me off about Firefox is that playing Youtube videos on it will eventually lock up the system it's running on, requiring a hard reset. Had that with Dell, Lenovo, and Samsung laptops, so it's not a system-specific issue. How the fsck can you hard-lock a system just by playing videos on it?

      • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2020, @06:39AM (9 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2020, @06:39AM (#1031152)

        Google did that one on purpose. There are even articles about it and other techniques Google does to sabotage other browsers. The particular workaround for that one is to refresh the window every so often so that way the browser starts from the fresh DOM, rather than all the javascripty manipulations piled on top of each other that bloat the node count and rearrange trees.

        • (Score: 2) by driverless on Tuesday August 04 2020, @06:53AM (8 children)

          by driverless (4770) on Tuesday August 04 2020, @06:53AM (#1031154)

          Ah, thanks for the info, will give that a go. I know that sometimes I have to do a refresh/reload when the system runs out of memory while playing videos, so I'll give that a go.

          It also seems to be caused by the VP9/AVC1 that YT forces onto you, I've tried blocking them to force H.264 use which has never caused any problems but they've been getting better and better at blocking the blocking over time.

          • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday August 04 2020, @11:14AM (6 children)

            by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday August 04 2020, @11:14AM (#1031193) Journal

            Been getting warnings from Youtube for months "We will soon discontinue support for your browser." Recently, sound has been degrading badly. I was actually looking at hardware!!

            Same videos that sound like crap on any flavor of Firefox, sound great on Chromium. I suppose I'll have to change my browser usage, or stop using Youtube.

            • (Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday August 04 2020, @03:31PM (2 children)

              by Freeman (732) on Tuesday August 04 2020, @03:31PM (#1031258) Journal

              While YouTube has some useful/interesting things. It's not going to be the reason why I choose a different browser. I might use YouTube on a special browser that I use for nothing else, though. Prerequisite would be that browser having an adblocker, because I do not surf the web / visit sites without it. I get enough junk I have to filter out every day, without needing to filter out the random advertisements thrown into everything.

              --
              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: 3, Interesting) by tangomargarine on Tuesday August 04 2020, @09:14PM (1 child)

                by tangomargarine (667) on Tuesday August 04 2020, @09:14PM (#1031418)

                Considering how hard a lot of website fight against adblockers, I'm a bit surprised YouTube hasn't figured it out over the years. I still get surprised when I'm periodically on some other device and "oh right, they have ads on YouTube. This must be what non-adblocking people see."

                --
                "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
                • (Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday August 04 2020, @09:27PM

                  by Freeman (732) on Tuesday August 04 2020, @09:27PM (#1031428) Journal

                  YouTube isn't fun to watch, with advertisements.

                  --
                  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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2020, @05:03PM (1 child)

              by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2020, @05:03PM (#1031292)

              Re YT Videos,
              If I manage to find one that has something of interest, or someone sends me a link I'll point youtube-dl at it, watch the downloaded copy with the video player of *my* choice, not some braindead browser thing then delete/keep, depending on usefulness.

              Granted, it's not what Google/YT want or how they expect people to 'interface' with their site and it's content, nor, I suspect, would the 'content creators' like this as they probably get hee fucking haw in their wallets for it, but I find it preferable to do it this way than deal with the vagaries of their site and associated browser/OS fuckwittery...and I can also do this from termux running on my android phones if I'm out and about..

              • (Score: 3, Interesting) by tangomargarine on Tuesday August 04 2020, @09:11PM

                by tangomargarine (667) on Tuesday August 04 2020, @09:11PM (#1031417)

                If I manage to find one that has something of interest, or someone sends me a link I'll point youtube-dl at it, watch the downloaded copy with the video player of *my* choice, not some braindead browser thing then delete/keep, depending on usefulness.

                I've been in the habit of doing this for years, partly after that first time you go back to watch a video and find out it's been taken down so you start hoarding everything, and partly for other reasons. The next-highest priority for awhile was downloading Zero Punctuation videos so I could watch them in VLC at .85x speed to actually catch everything he was saying, but I guess over time my brain has gotten used to 1x.

                With my current desktop there seems to be something in the YouTube player logic that uses up enough system resources on my Linux install that it kicks the fan into higher gear, too, which gets a bit annoying. Not so with VLC.

                --
                "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
            • (Score: 1) by MIRV888 on Thursday August 13 2020, @09:25AM

              by MIRV888 (11376) on Thursday August 13 2020, @09:25AM (#1036069)

              Just host your own media server. Then it can sound how you like. No advertising is even better.
              They are selling 12 & 16 Tb usb Hds. All you need is the library.
              it's like Buttah

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2020, @06:53AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2020, @06:53AM (#1031607)

            Maybe try: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/h264ify/ [mozilla.org]

            Seems highly recommended but I can't vouch for it personally.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2020, @08:39PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2020, @08:39PM (#1031940)

        What pisses me off about Firefox is that playing Youtube videos on it will eventually lock up the system it's running on, requiring a hard reset. Had that with Dell, Lenovo, and Samsung laptops, so it's not a system-specific issue. How the fsck can you hard-lock a system just by playing videos on it?

        Actually it does not. The "hard lockup" could be your system running out of memory but other than that, I never had that happen to me.

      • (Score: 1) by MIRV888 on Thursday August 13 2020, @09:41AM

        by MIRV888 (11376) on Thursday August 13 2020, @09:41AM (#1036075)

        Never been an issue, but I am using a plugin to just pull the d@mn video as an mp4.
        Once it's on the media server it's mine.
        It's like Buttah.
        I know it seems absurd, but this has always been how I have handled my media.
        No advertising was always my primary motivation, but that's just me.

    • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday August 04 2020, @09:04PM

      by tangomargarine (667) on Tuesday August 04 2020, @09:04PM (#1031414)

      Yeah, I should look to see what version of Firefox I'm running. It's not my main browser anymore, but it finally prompted me to figure out how to go into the package manager settings and tell it "stop asking me to update this fucking thing constantly, because it only ever breaks things and gets rid of features I like." I think I did because if I had dist-upgraded it would've bumped me up something like 14 FF versions and broken all my extensions.

      For a number of years I used Pale Moon,* which I still do when I need my extensions, but now my day-to-day browser is Chromium. They changed something, either in Pale Moon or this one online game I play daily, that ended up somehow breaking the latter with how it uses iframes, so I sort of wound up in Chromium by default because it worked over there.

      I miss classic 3.6-era Firefox back before the rapid release, when extensions worked and everything was in about:config.

      *even PM isn't untainted by idiocy, though...I remember there was drama when the main guy who maintains it got butthurt about NoScript for some reason and made you jump through hoops to turn off his "I don't like this, don't use it" enabled-by-default deterrents in the addons system. Because who would ever want to use NoScript, in a fork of Firefox, specifically for technical/extension users? Can't think of anybody. /s

      --
      "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2020, @06:36AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2020, @06:36AM (#1031151)

    The UI is the last thing you want to change. You can take a UI that is on top of C, then port it to an application written in Python, to Rust, then JavaScript, then Haskell, Go, Prolog, and F# to fix your coding itch and it is perfectly possible no one will notice. You move an icon 1 pixel to the left or change the color by .5% and everyone will notice and have an opinion. Mozilla's problem is that they have all these UI people that have to justify their existence, so you get changes for no apparent reason just to keep their process going. No one else would care if Word, Windows, Chrome, Firefox, Photoshop, etc. looked the same they did in 2000, as long as they could still get their work done.

    And that doesn't even get to where they actively cause problems, replacing menus with ribbons, getting rid of status bars, flattening everything so you can't tell what is text and what is a button, changing action icons from their established symbols, and changing designs wholesale between versions. Each and every time some program decides to change their icon, I get calls for weeks from people saying their computer is broken or they can't find their program because the familiar environment changed just enough to throw them off.

    • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2020, @09:48AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2020, @09:48AM (#1031183)

      Those UI people could spend their time designing sensible form controls or something. But that'd be work, I guess.

      • (Score: 2) by krishnoid on Tuesday August 04 2020, @08:50PM

        by krishnoid (1156) on Tuesday August 04 2020, @08:50PM (#1031406)

        For which companies like Microsoft and Apple pay money. You know, for the work.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2020, @03:05PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2020, @03:05PM (#1031248)

      The same thing happened with Unity desktop which I am cursed to have to used.

      Obviously no menus any more. Just light grey on light grey barely visible unlabeled buttons. And who the hell decided disabling right-click was the way forward? Want to create a shortcut on the Desktop? Want to change a setting? Want to save your documents?

      Ha ha ha ha ha ha fuck off!

  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2020, @12:04PM (6 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2020, @12:04PM (#1031200)

    It's easy to sit here and say, "Mozilla should have kept their UI and Firefox add-ons the same way they were in 2006, and worked solely on performance and standards compliance since." I'm sure that was their original plan, and then they watched Chrome eat their share of the browser market by millions of users per month for years at a time. They had to try something different, and maybe they botched but I understand why they couldn't just continue what they were doing previously.

    I'm still using Firefox with a few add-ons and I don't have any issues.

    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2020, @02:31PM (4 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2020, @02:31PM (#1031240)

      No, the users didn't jump the ship because firefox was stale. There a small period of time when firefox would hang on too many tabs and Google spent all their marketing on "yeah our browser sucks but at least each our tab is a new process so it won't hang". Mozilla did what Nokia did. They hired a mole who purposefully broke Firefox to make sure people jumped the ship. Every single person I know, when the technically incompetent - especially the technically incompetent ones - preferred firefox over chrome. "Different processes" is not a marketable thing. Google had to do what it did - pumped money into corrupt management of Firefox while fucking around on Javascript so that it only functions on Chrome. I mean, they created their own consortium to validate html.

      It is called embrace, extend, extinguish. That's what Google did.

      The reality is that death of firefox is another sign of consolidation of the web into a the hands of few mega corps.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2020, @08:05PM (2 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2020, @08:05PM (#1031382)

        I forgot to add one crucial thing - mobile. Google spent inordinate amount of money in developing Android and its reliance of Chrome to get anything done. It spent inordinate amount of time in developing mobile-friendly JavaScript frameworks like AJAX and bootstrap, and its backend NodeJS. It had the money, and they had the reason to spend a large amount of it as soon as possible because they couldn't lose their edge to competition. Google couldn't wait for "standardization", it pushed for mandatory HTTPS and HTML 3.0 (or whatever that is). End result was that it Google took lead in mobile space and used to punch a hole in web. Firefox tried to do OS, same like Samsung, but they cannot compete when their largest funding comes from Google! They were left to squander resources and play catch-up game. And why?

        This is the context where Microsoft's statement should be read. It is a philosophical debate to make sure a parallel system stays there to compete with Chrome's monopoly. And Microsoft doesn't want to play catch-up, it wants to dominate like Google does. It is purely a strategic step that you don't play the game when the board is set up by your opponent. And I am actually surprised because (and I know a lot of Americans hate Satya for being an Indian who stole their jerbs) it is actually a very smart move.

        • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2020, @06:56AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2020, @06:56AM (#1031610)

          Very smart? To be a software company and give up on your own product? What the hell is MS going to learn from downloading and running the other guys' code? Where I work (a uni) some guys do that - basically download other people's stuff without putting in the effort to do it themself. It's a death spiral. What else will you not do? Eventually everything.

        • (Score: 2) by DECbot on Wednesday August 05 2020, @03:24PM

          by DECbot (832) on Wednesday August 05 2020, @03:24PM (#1031767) Journal

          it pushed for mandatory HTTPS and HTML 3.0 (or whatever that is).

          I think you mean HTML5 and CSS3. When faced between an open standard to play videos over the web (even if controlled by a mega-corp) or propriety executable to play videos (flash), I would opt for the open standard. Did Google abuse its market position? Probably. Will the DoJ prosecute? Not for cause--but for political punishment. Here's my predictions: If Biden wins in November and Trump administration doesn't start a prosecution before January then probably not. If Trump wins, 100% after 2024 by the new Democratic administration; otherwise, possibly before 2024 if Google doesn't fluff Trump's ego the correct way (which I believe varies depending on his mood, day of the week, and who he has heard speaking in the last 20 minutes).
           
          I think you're correct on the Microsoft analysis. They saw big businesses and government outsourcing their data centers and correctly pivoted to keep that market segment in their pocketbook. What revenue was lost in new license sales was gained by new subscription sales. I would not be surprised if MS pivots on the desktop replacing the Windows kernel with WSL/Linux kernel if they could make a better emulator than Wine for legacy custom business software. That would unload MS resources developing kernel and drivers to the Linux Foundation and they could focus on the UI, Windows Store, and services like Azure and Office365 to generate revenue all the while maintaining OEM contracts for desktop OSes. Even if MS decides to forgo providing an emulator, looking at Apple as an example, I think MS would see success and business will have to pay developers to port their custom software to the new platform. If Microsoft won't compete in the browser space, why should they compete in the kernel space. Let open source developers write the kernel and then bolt on a proprietary userland/desktop kludge that vendors need to sell laptops.

          --
          cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2020, @04:02PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2020, @04:02PM (#1031798)

        You and I were talking about two different things. You explained what Google was doing to make Chrome eat Firefox's market share. I agree with everything you wrote. But my post was about what Mozilla was doing in a desperate and doomed attempt to fight back.

        I really believe the Microsoft engineers and managers satisfied with the move from their own rendering engine to Blink think they're doing the right thing. It's absurd, they are letting Google succeed at controlling web standards in a way that Microsoft tried with Internet Explorer and failed.

        I hate the bloated web. The task managers built into Chrome and Firefox desktop routinely show javascript-heavy websites I use consuming 200-800 MB of RAM for a single browser tab. The few JS-free sites I use, like sourcehut.org, consume less than 2MB of RAM per tab. However, offline-first Progressive Web Applications (PWAs), in some cases with WebAssembly, seem to be the only chance the world has of breaking free of proprietary software control. If you can do everything on your device that you care about in a browser, then you can jump between MacOS, iOS, Windows, Chrome OS, Android, desktop Linux, desktop *BSD, and so forth with no effort. I don't see any other practical way to protect users from platform lock-in. Microsoft seemed to be actually contributing to this kind of independence for a few years, but I think they've just ceded all of their power to Google.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 06 2020, @01:36PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 06 2020, @01:36PM (#1032244)

      It boils down to hypocrisy. They claim privacy is integral to the design, but any programmer who looks at the way the application is designed can tell you... That is just B.S.

      Of course that is all legacy, going all the way back to Netscape. But still, they don't do what they say. I'm pretty sure they integrate institutional backdoors as well. And teaming up with Comcast just proved the point. Firefox needs to cut loose and be the browser they say it is, not the browser it is.

      There are other forks and other browsers. Firefox is probably the second most maintained open source browser out there. The other forks of the old netscape code are so exploitable, that they really are a public hazard. But that describes the web in general. The WWW architecture has devolved into a game of "the most busted wins" in terms of how pages are renderend, and the number of formats processed. It is just implausible that this much code can be reasonably maintained in a secure way.

      Which is why search engines should start fracking out MIME types on the query page. Really if somebody implemented TTF fonts in HTML 1.1 and added inline video support, and a office suite style database UI builder, you could trash 90% of the code that makes up modern web browsers. Doing everything over HTTP was ALWAYS a bad idea. That is what has facilitated control grabs by a small number of companies. Or at least partly.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by SomeGuy on Tuesday August 04 2020, @03:38PM

    by SomeGuy (5632) on Tuesday August 04 2020, @03:38PM (#1031262)

    Same here too. Gave up on trying to wrangle each new Firefox version back in to a usable state. Switched to PaleMoon/Newmoon They just keep fucking things up worse and worse. If they had left things alone, or made improvements without borking what was already there, I wouldn't have even messed with it.

    These days Mozilla just wants to appease consumertards, not knowledgeable power users.

    They also have piss poor OS support these days. Back in the day, they tried to get it running under as many OSes and platforms as possible. At least several external open source projects have picked up the slack there.