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posted by mrpg on Sunday June 06 2021, @08:16AM   Printer-friendly
from the 89?! dept.

Firefox 89: Can this redesign stem browser's decline?:

Mozilla has released Firefox 89, proclaiming it a "fresh new Firefox," though it comes amid a relentless decline in market share.

Firefox matters more than most web browsers, because it uses its own browser engine, called Quantum, and its own JavaScript engine, called SpiderMonkey. By contrast, most other browsers, including Chrome and Chromium, Edge, Brave, Opera, and Vivaldi use the Google-sponsored Blink engine, while Apple's Safari uses WebKit (from which Blink was forked). The existence of multiple independent implementations is important for web standards, helping to prevent a single vendor from pushing through changes without consensus, and ensuring that the standards are coherent.

A glance at a statistics site like W3Counter is telling. In April 2008, Microsoft enjoyed a 63 per cent market share with Internet Explorer, and with Firefox performing strongly behind it at 29.3 per cent. By April 2010, IE was down to 48.6 per cent, Firefox up to 32.7 per cent, and Google's newer Chrome was starting to make an impact, at 8.3 per cent.

In April 2012, the three were almost on a par, though Chrome (26.8 per cent) had overtaken Firefox (25 per cent). Today, Chrome is at 65.3 per cent, Safari second at 16.7 per cent, IE and Edge has 5.7 per cent, and Firefox has just 4.1 per cent share. Despite numerous updates, Mozilla's browser has declined from 6.1 per cent share a year ago. Statcounter tells a similar story, reporting a 3.59 per cent share for Firefox, down from 4.21 per cent a year ago.


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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by MIRV888 on Sunday June 06 2021, @09:08AM (3 children)

    by MIRV888 (11376) on Sunday June 06 2021, @09:08AM (#1142306)

    I hated this latest update in particular, but it's still my browser. I hate Chrome, IE, IE2 (Edgy), and Apple has never been my thing. Firefox with noscript and adblock has served me well. With phones being the primary target for all browsers, the dumbing down / simplifying of all things configurable is not gonna stop. Most people don't even understand what a walled garden is. I will use it until it folds here in a few years.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @10:42AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @10:42AM (#1142325)

    I hated this latest update in particular, but it's still my browser.

    But are you sure you've managed to turn off all Mozilla's telemetry and spying shit? If you haven't maybe it's still not your browser... ;)

    See: https://www.netmeister.org/blog/browser-startup.html [netmeister.org]

    Firefox makes a surprising number of connections and lookups

    See also: https://brave.com/popular-browsers-first-run/ [brave.com]
    https://www.reddit.com/r/privacytoolsIO/comments/ajrub3/firefox_worse_than_chrome_on_telemetry_yes_i_know/ [reddit.com]

    With Mozilla doing shit like this I might as well recommend that people use Chrome by default and Tor browser for other scenarios. That way their "public profile" is "Yet Another Chrome User", not "Someone who uses multiple browsers (and thus is more likely to be a Tor user)".

  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @01:42PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @01:42PM (#1142358)

    Have you tried Palemoon? It has a umatrix clone and adblock...

    • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday June 07 2021, @07:27AM

      by tangomargarine (667) on Monday June 07 2021, @07:27AM (#1142669)

      I hate Chrome, IE, IE2 (Edgy), and Apple has never been my thing. Firefox with noscript and adblock has served me well.

      Have you tried Palemoon? It has a umatrix clone and adblock...

      I remember there was a whole wacky kerfluffle a number of years back about the Pale Moon developer forcing users to jump through hoops to install NoScript because he had some personal ethical objection to...something about the advertising practices on the NoScript website? I want to say it may not have even had anything to do with the extension itself. I don't remember anymore.

      If you're going to get petty about your own little fiefdom, at least have the balls to just blacklist the extension, not mess around passive-aggressively making the users do extra fiddly work bypassing "I really think this is a bad idea" prompts.

      As if anybody would've been running Pale Moon in the first place unless they had already made up their mind about such issues without your help.

      --
      "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"