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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.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @12:57PM (5 children)
That setting is deprecated. They will rip out everything relating to the old interface: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1709425 [mozilla.org]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @01:15PM (4 children)
That's how they do it!
Step 1: Pull out all easy access to a feature.
Step 2: Tell people they can "easily" access it by flipping a switch in the browser's basement which is not obviously accessed and comes with warnings about how you're going to burn your browser to the ground if you breathe wrong in the proximity of even the safest of the hundreds of options listed.
Step 3: Most people grudgingly give up and leave for Chrome, or resolve to "do it later" but never work up the courage to do so or time to deal with the problems they fear are inevitable if they try.
Step 4: Mozilla: "Obviously since only a few die-hards are using $CURRENT_CHOPPING_BLOCK_FEATURE, they must overwhelmingly favor this new feature. Obliterate all evidence that the original ever existed and let's start hacking away at $NEXT_FEATURE_MOZILLA_HATES".
Step 5: Loop until out of money or out of features.
Step 6: ...profit?...
(Score: 5, Funny) by kazzie on Sunday June 06 2021, @03:57PM
Not to mention the warning "Beware of installing on OSX Leopard".
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Monday June 07 2021, @12:58AM
Modded you Insightful, but was sorely tempted to make it Funny. Perhaps it's the mood I'm in this morning.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday June 07 2021, @07:18AM (1 child)
Does anybody else remember when Microsoft did this with the Start Menu? I want to say it was Windows 8/10?
"Well since we completely ruined the Start Menu, everybody stopped trying to use it for anything, and started just running searches in the Search Bar instead of trying to actually locate anything in the shambles. Ergo this must mean that everybody hates the Start Menu, so let's rip it out." (and that's when the Classic Shell third-party thing got big?)
It's been enough years that I don't trust my memory anymore, but I'm pretty sure it involved the Start Menu.
"You can't tout 'Discoverability' and your users running searches in your interface to find anything at the same time."
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @09:22PM
The worst part is windows 8.1 is actually GOOD once you install classic shell and remove the mero stuff.