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Firefox 89: Can This Redesign Stem Browser's Decline?

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

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

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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Original Submission

• Re:Definition of insanity Re:Definition of insanity (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday June 06 2021, @11:36AM (2 children)

  by Runaway1956 (2926) on Sunday June 06 2021, @11:36AM (#1142335) Journal

  I vaguely recall tabless browsing. Did it last as long as IE4, or was that IE3? Somewhere in that time frame, somebody published an overlay sort of addon for IE that gave you tabs.

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• Re:Definition of insanity Re:Definition of insanity (Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Sunday June 06 2021, @01:30PM (1 child)

  by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Sunday June 06 2021, @01:30PM (#1142354) Journal

  Tabs were introduced in IE7 [wikipedia.org] in 2006.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface) [wikipedia.org]

  The tabbed interface approach was then followed by the Internet Explorer shell NetCaptor in 1997. These were followed by a number of others like IBrowse in 1999, and Opera in 2000 (with the release of version 4 - although a MDI interface was supported before then), MultiViews October 2000, which changed its name into MultiZilla on 1 April 2001 (an extension for the Mozilla Application Suite), Galeon in early 2001, Mozilla 0.9.5 in October 2001, Phoenix 0.1 (now Mozilla Firefox) in October 2002, Konqueror 3.1 in January 2003, and Safari in 2003. With the release of Internet Explorer 7 in 2006, all major web browsers featured a tabbed interface.

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  • Re:Definition of insanity (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @11:30AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @11:30AM (#1142703)

    Prior to tabs, if you wanted to have multiple websites open at once, you needed to use separate windows.
    And we had to move the mouse fifteen miles down to the start bar to switch between 'em. Well it was either that or use alt-tab.
    Course back in them times, we didn't have touchy-feely interfaces. We had a keyboard, with real keys, that you had to press down forcefully with your own fingers! Great days.

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