Slashdot Mirror
Chrome Set To Take No. 2 Spot From Firefox
CWmike writes "Google's Chrome is on the brink of replacing Firefox as the second-most-popular browser, says the Web statistics firm StatCounter, which shows that Chrome will pass Firefox to take the No. 2 spot behind Microsoft's IE no later than December. As of Wednesday, Chrome's global average user share for September was 23.6%, while Firefox's stood at 26.8%. IE, meanwhile, was at 41.7%. The climb of Chrome during 2011 has been astonishing: It has gained eight percentage points since January 2011, representing a 50% increase. During that same period, Firefox has dropped almost four percentage points, a decline of about 13%, while IE has also fallen four points, a 9% dip. That means Chrome is essentially reaping all the defections from Firefox and IE."
The climb of Chrome during 2011 has been astonishing: It has gained eight percentage point since January 2011, representing a 50% increase.
Well is that really a surprise? Google pushed it really hard in their search engine and YouTube, and pays software developers to include it in their programs like all those toolbars and adware do. Of course it gains matket share so fast as software distributors are pushing it for the money they cain from installing on users computers and Google uses their huge market share to push it.
Through Firefox... see it's still fast. Unless someone got here first. Then it was through IE.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
I use it to wall in Google. Since everyone has put Google+ icons on their sites, Google scripts are running on every page I go to, and I don't like that. (I long ago walled facebook into IE since I don't use either.) But I continue to run Firefox as my primary browser, but now Google is blocked out of everything, well, except super cookies, I imagine.
Firefox is not losing users because of the new rapid release schedule.
I was once a fan of FireFox, but I think it's had its day. WebKit is the way forward.
I rather like chrome myself. It's not got all the robust addons of firefox but it's also not as bloated as firefox is now days. I don't have the same memory issues I do with firefox in chrome. I still have firefox installed and use it for a few tasks every now and then that require specialized addons that I can only get reliably in firefox. Though there is a lot of frustration with some addons working with only certain versions of firefox.
Most people do not care about tracking,add-ons and the like, and Chrome is simply easier to use than IE or Firefox. The minimalistic design is actually a triumph, while IE is a mess - the first time it runs it is simply a PITA, and its home page is an embarrassing barely sfw aesthetic monstrosity.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
The problem is that Mozilla's revenue is directly tied to the number of installs (i.e Google searches). If their marketshare goes down, it might as well be the end of Firefox soon. Their CEOs have failed to diversify the revenue in spite of getting paid > 500k/yr.
This space for rent.
Not sure why, but the 6.x releases all seem to have a bunch of crash problems. If it weren't for all the plugins I use that can't port to Chrome, I'd seriously consider migrating. It's worst on the Mac ...
Dog is my co-pilot.
Web developers care. They want to support the majority of users and typically will gather statistics and read articles about it. The days when you could cover your bases by testing for IE and Netscape are over. Devs that tested for IE and firefox should consider adding Chrome in order to cover >80% of their users.
Man, you really need that seminar!
The point is that decisions CHANGE the number of users worldwide (the reverse of what you're saying). It's interesting. No one's attempting to convert you to Chrome.
So they're up to FF 7.0 now? Mine is 5.0 (according to the About box) and when I click on "Check for Updates" it says Firefox is up to date. Am I really expected to update to 7.0 by going to mozilla.org and downloading a new install? That's never going to happen. I might as well go to Chrome.com. Oh wait, that's been updating automatically in the background. I'ld rather it didn't, but I don't mind a little prodding every now and then like Thunderbird does. Why have a "check for Update" box if they are never going to update but just keep coming out w/ new numbers?
I switched to chrome only recently after firefox started taking 1.6GB of RAM while running the latest version, with almost no add-ons installed. It seems many people had issues like this, but it wasn't believed by the Firefox team.
I've never understood why people preferred Chrome to Firefox
Both of them have similar UIs, more or less the same features (if I'm not mistaken, Firefox has more), and they're both reasonably fast. Firefox has a more extensive add-on catalog, more configuration options, and as of Firefox 7 is the fastest browser currently released outside of maybe Opera. Chrome is nice, and I don't mind using it, but I can't think of a single major advantage Chrome has over Firefox that would make people want to switch. The only reason I know of for why my friends are using Chrome is because "it's faster", but as of 7 that's null and void.
Can anybody help me out? I'm not trolling here, I seriously want to know what Chrome has over FF.
"Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded." -Archbishop Fulton Sheen
... but I keep my Firefox up and use hundreds of tabs/day (opening/closing),
In the end, the memory leaks of FF6.0.x just made me switch to Chrome. I would eventually plateau around 2.2GB of RAM (peak 2.5GB) with few tabs open, system crawling down to slow pace, *seconds* of waiting before a click makes FF react at all, Flash video pausing every 12s or so. PDF viewing freezing all tabs. Unusable.
I'll give FF7 a try though.It's "only" at 600MB right now (1GB peak) with the same usage pattern.
all spyware... Beware... It's a trap
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Devs that tested for IE and firefox should consider adding Chrome in order to cover >80% of their users.
Browser usage varies drastically depending on who your users are. Corporate users are 90-95% IE from what I've seen. Chrome is maybe at 1%. This is one case where YMMV should be taken very seriously. The aggregate of everyone world-wide is completely meaningless as to what you should be testing for.
May eventually happen, but It's going to be a bit...
Stats from from a real world web site over the last 30 days...
MS Internet Explorer No 891,058 47.4 %
Firefox No 317,909 16.9 %
Safari No 264,506 14 %
Google Chrome No 162,473 8.6 %
Android browser (PDA/Phone browser) No 93,691 4.9 %
Unknown ? 54,509 2.8 %
IPhone (PDA/Phone browser) No 28,603 1.5 %
Mozilla No 25,610 1.3 %
Opera No 12,074 0.6 %
BlackBerry (PDA/Phone browser) No 9,396 0.4 %
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
If you're someone who develops any sort of web property for a living, you care. And that happens to be quite a lot of people.
> Google tried to make a browser that was tied into the OS
FTFY
As of Wednesday, Chrome's global average user share for September was 23.6%, while Firefox's stood at 26.8%. IE, meanwhile, was at 41.7%.
Maybe it's not as dreamt of as the year of linux on the desktop (mine was 2007 FWIW) but this is what we wanted. We wanted there to be options. Remember when IE controlled 80 - 90% of the browser market? Remember how much IE6 sucked? Firefox and Chrome (two open source browsers to boot) now have a bigger market share then IE. MUCH bigger. Throw in Opera & Safari and we have five capable, world-class browsers which to choose from.
We fucking won
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
You've now asked a herd of web-addicted sheep to behave against the will of their omnipresent God(dle).
I'm with firefox exactly because of the same reason (be it against google, webkit, almost-nearly-opensource-ware, or whatever). Sadly this reason counts as a 'feature' only for some of us.
I've switched to SRWare Iron for a large chunk of my personal browsing, mostly forums. It is Chrome with all the Google removed. There is a noticeable improvement in speed over Firefox.
I still use Firefox for most of my work, mostly because I like Firebug, and I use it for browsing sites that I don't already have accounts with because there is no Chrome equivalent for NoScript that I've seen, and there are a few other plugins I don't want to give up entirely. If there was I would probably switch to it at home for pretty much everything.
How much of this can be directly attributed to growth in mobile browsing? Between iOS and Android, I'd assume that if you had the ability to seperate mobile devices from PC-driven browsing, you'd see Chrome and Safari in the top two spots (or vice versa).
Hi, Dotzler! Good to see you here. You don't have to be anonymous, you know :)
Firefox had been my browser of choice for years, but lately (is mozilla listening?) it's kinda sucked. I used it regularly on three desktops and a laptop, and sometime this year it's started to hang regularly and exhibit extremely slow behavior. Task Manager shows MASSIVE memory usage and significant CPU usage.
Needing a browser to verify a website I maintain, and with Firefox taking forever to do anything, I tried Chrome and have switched to it. Chrome renders significantly faster and doesn't appear to consume nearly the resources of Firefox. I'm sold.
I'm not getting religious here -- I am happy to go back to Firefox if some future version performs well. But in the meantime, I gotta get work done.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Me, I'm waiting for 8.0, which is due out next Tuesday... Unless of course I have to work late, in which case I'll just wait until the Thursday afterwards for version 9.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Chrome seems to be faster and more responsive.
The update cycle for Chrome may be faster, but people knew that from day one. Those who didn't like the update cycle didn't adopt it. On the other hand, Firefox went from a slow update cycle with easily distinguished bug and feature updates to something similar to Chrome. So people who are more conservative with updates (rightfully) feel burnt.
And did I mention the user interface? Chrome and Firefox may be quite similar these days, and are liberally borrowing from each other. On the other hand, Firefox's UI has changed dramatically over the past few years while Chrome has been more of a steady evolution.
In short, all of this change has alienated existing Firefox users. All of this change also gives a sense that Firefox lacks any real sense of direction. Is it any wonder why people are slowly ditching it?
Web Inspector gained the ability to live update CSS and I gained the ability to switch to Chrome. Between the addon compatibility problems that come from rapid-fire releases and the general slowness Firefox suffers from, I was eager to leave it behind. I still think Firebug is better, and still have it installed, but Chrome is just so much easier/faster/mindless. So I switched.
Implicit Evaluation with PHP
Chrome is advertised extensively on all Google properties, but you don't see the ads as a Firefox user because they don't want to tarnish their image with happy Firefox users. Chrome is advertised on TV and the web. Advertising works, that's how Google rakes in the profit.
Can anybody help me out? I'm not trolling here, I seriously want to know what Chrome has over FF.
There's not really any reason to use Chrome over Firefox any more, but many reasons to use Firefox over Chrome (customization, open previous session as it was, better extensions, better rendering, etc).
I love that 1 source from Ireland shaped the opinion of the article. I like both Chrome and FF. I think we have all been lab mice, for Chrome as the platform for netbooks. Thats where chrome will shine, imho.
And Chrome will be on 21.8.235.876 by then
...if only for preventing giving Google more power/data.
On my netbook I use Chromium, for exactly this reason. (Also, it can't really handle Firefox.)
On my desktop I use Opera. It's not open source, but I think they do good for the web, and it's Really Fast.
Hear, hear. I use Konqueror, and I don't care what anyone else uses.
There had to be one...
I was pretty certain after Mozilla started crapping on their userbase, along with numerous bugs and semi-critical flaws, that most people pretty much stopped using FF, except for those that still don't know any better. I'll truly be satisfied when I see Chrome overtake IE for the #1 spot. Once that happens, then the fanbase of the respective #2 and #3 spots can resume their internet slapfight over forums that nobody really cares about.
In recent months, I've noticed that Google Maps satellite view has been pretty hideous in Firefox. Satellite view tiles get updated on a haphazard basis with long delays, and that wasn't the case beforehand. It's just as much a problem on fast machines as it is on slow ones. Recently, I decided to fire up Chrome, and, lo and behold, the satellite views work quite nicely.
It makes me wonder whether it's Firefox's fault, or if Google Maps has been tweaked to work better in Chrome, or perhaps both.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
You do know that most of Mozilla's budget comes from Google, right?
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I'm amazed more don't put two and two together. Most of Mozilla Foundation's income comes from Google. Seems like a huge conflict of interest...
And many others feel the same way - below is an excerpt from a cnet article from a few years ago to ponder when considering what's happened with Firefox lately...
"However, the open secret in the tech sector is that at the end of the day, Google calls the shots. As this blog post will explain, when a pro-user security feature in the browser threatens Google's business model, it is the feature that is made to compromise--not the search engine."
Read entire article at http://news.cnet.com/8301-13739_3-9776759-46.html
One has to wonder whether some driving Firefox development are really in cahoots with Google with the objective of marginalizing Firefox as a Chrome clone.
Regardless of whether that's the case, Firefox is looking to be more like Chrome all the time ... and, hence, imho, it's no surprise so many Firefox users are flocking to Chrome.
Are you kidding? Every other software I install is trying to convert me to Chrome. :)
Except for iTunes, Quicktime and similar, which jam Safari down your throat.
Dependencies on a particular browser is SOOO 1999.
Google has the marketing muscle to push Chrome, and the goal of preferring standards compliance to proprietary lock-in in their browser. If Chrome increases marketshare by mostly taking away from IE users and pulls ahead of Firefox, it seems that it would be better for Firefox by improving the standards landscape across the web.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Chrome is simply easier to use than IE or Firefox.
My own usage does not bear this out as a fact. I have my company using Chrome as our primary web browser since we use gmail for our email communications. However, printing in Chrome is clunky and slow, it handles PDFs and other files rather clumsily, and I do not find it to be meaningfully better than the latest version of Firefox overall. You may like Chrome better and that is fine but I reject your argument that it is "simply easier". That is very much a matter up for debate.
The minimalistic design is actually a triumph
A "triumph"? That is very much a matter of opinion. Personally I'm rather indifferent to how it looks. The minimalist look also has the downside of confusing some of our users. Nothing horrible but it is a drain on my time.
The big advantage that Firefox had were the extensions. With new versions coming out so often, and extension writers not keeping up, it becomes "plain firefox" vs "plain Chrome". And at that point, all the benefits of having an installed base go up in smoke.
When we're talking about browsers, the geeks that fix their parents computers and install a browser for them are a fairly substantial marketing presence. They helped FF go a long way... and now they're not.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
really, most the sites that are clients for my employer left IE in the dust years ago because it's a malware spigot. That's thousands of financial services and municipal/state government PC. Since they stay with a particular set of versions for so long this current version churning might not be issue for them though.
My decision is NEVER based on the number of users worldwide.
Well, you have to use a browser that will work on the websites you visit -- websites designed based on the number of users on various browsers worldwide (or locally). Those numbers filter through a couple layers and eventually come down to force your browser choice, unless visiting and properly viewing the websites you're interested in isn't a priority.
Both IE and Chrome are browsers from companies who have a vested interest in changing the Internet. Microsoft tried to make a browser that was tied into the OS and would cause sites to break for everyone else, and who knows what Google's going to twist the browser into by the time they're done. I like that Firefox is just a good, solid product without ulterior motives.
In regards to Microsoft, I don't think they have any idea what they'd do with it if they did control the internet. Their vision seems to be one of trying to beat everyone for goals that are ultimately a waste of money.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
It seem to me, and mind you I have not studied this problem, that there will be a significant bias in any statistics gathered based on the content of the site those statistics are gathered from. For example: If your looking at /. I would expect a much higher percentage of FF or Chrome VS IE. Most of us are tech savy and refuse to use IE (Anti-microsoft BIAS)
While if you look at Facebook, you will likely see a higher percentage of IE because that ecosystem is so much more diverse with fewer tech savy users.
If you go to a site with content related to Apple products you will likely see a higher percentage of Safari or iOS.
Android web sites, higher Android Percentage.
Because of this kind of BIAS, which will be present almost anywhere in one form or another I would say its VERY difficult to rely on any of these statistics.
As for myself I'm a Mozilla user for now. Though I have a copy of Chrome that I use on my desktop. One of the main reasons I am considering switching to Chrome is because Mozilla hasn't kept up with their releases on Linux and I'm tired of manually updating every time a new version comes out.
First, the continual updates make it difficult for businesses to use, because they won't re-test all their web-apps every time there's an update. I know the counter argument to this already, to make proper web-apps that are compliant with standards but guess what -- it doesn't happen. That's why the popularity of Silverlight grows hugely in the enterprise space, because they can build a webapp, and not care about the browser. It runs the same.
The second problem, is that Chrome takes a lot of memory up. Not that Firefox is innocent either, but I find IE to use less with the same amount of tabs open. Granted, I still prefer Chrome due to Adblock and other things, but if IE comes out with a decent plugin engine and keeps the memory usage down, it could be a good competitor. IE9 is really not that bad, just barren in terms of usability for more advanced users.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
There is no Chrome on Android. The browser on Android is not Chrome.
Really what are people doing with all these tabs open? I've had maybe 8 at the most open at work when looking at things like datasheets. At home its rarely more than a few. I usually close the browser and just open it again later. Its cached already and opens instantly. What are people doing with 50 tabs open?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I'm still happily a Firefox user. Mozilla has given me an open-source browser with nigh-limitless user customization and control, with seemingly the least amount of conflicts of interest embroiled in its development. The entire Chrome ecosystem seems to be part of Google's recent wave of bad decisions that seems to highlight they can no longer be trusted to act in the best interest of the user and privacy, when there is money to be made; contrary to the Google of five years ago who seemed to be able to resist the void.
Chrome as a browser seems to be better serving Google's needs than the user's needs. Be it the lack of comprehensive AdBlock,NoScript, and HTTPSEverywhere addons (and tons of others) and other user privacy settings, Chrome vs Chromium "conveniences" and other issues, its appearing more and more to me like a better version of IE - integrated and serving Google instead of Microsoft. That's not what I want in my web browser.
Especially amongst the educated, open-source and privacy knowledgeable community I'm surprised how many have switch to Chrome, typically citing resource or speed uses. I really don't think its acceptable to be the sort of person who runs 20 high-end addons including a ton of Stylish and Greasemonkey scripts and then says the browser is using a lot of memory with your sixteen tabs open.
Firefox, Thunderbird, and other Mozilla projects are more important now than ever - open source, standards compliant, privacy respecting, user focused and customizable. Everyone here would balk if I suggested we should all switch to Internet Explorer, Hotmail, MSN, Bing, and Skype because of convenience - Why kowtow to a monoculture just because its Google? This is not to say never use Google products, but we need to make it perfectly clear that we do so because they offer terms that serve our needs, including privacy, as users - not because we have so much invested we're now locked in. Google's gleaming facade has dulled considerably with some of their more recent decisions and spots of possible greed, arrogance, and apathy may be showing up - they need to know that we won't stand for it.
While Firefox isn't perfect, I urge everyone to be alert and make their usage decisions with the long-term ramifications in mind. In a world where most business interests would rather have you access their "cloud" services through a dumb client, completely on their terms, we need to stick up for some of the last bastions of user focused software that can be introduced to laypeople with ease and show them a real difference in the experience! How many of you introduced a friend or relative to open source software with a Mozilla product, which they found to give them better security, privacy, features, and customization? That's worth its weight in gold, so to speak. Sure, the geek community will always be able to roll up Midori or Lynx or some sort of other custom Gecko/WebKit browser from the bowels of a repository, but Firefox is relatively unique in that its features are nearly as accessible, secure, and powerful for the layman as they are for the guru. Trading that in for a product which is controlled by a corporation who's shortest distance to money infringes on user privacy and security is not a smart idea.
What's the problem with Webkit? It's not even a Google project.
Dilbert RSS feed
Ads on google.com, ads on the underground, ads in the paper. Surprised they haven't been handing out free CDs AOL style.
"XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, use more." - Anonymous Coward
Like all Google mobile web developers, they only code for Mobile Webkit. you never get the good mobile editions of GMail, docs, etc, when using a non Webkit browser
Remove more features and change the behavior that everyone expects in a browser. That will surely bring people back in droves and ensure Firefox's "We're #2 so we try harder" position.
So long as we don't end up with a single browser dominating the market again.
The Great Languish of the web really sucked. Molasses advance of technology and compromised systems galore.
Yep.
I've been using Firefox exclusively for six years now, and just this month I switched to Chromium. Firefox has tried so hard to duplicate Chrome that it's no longer a distinct, nor innovative browser. At this point it's simply a poor knock-off of Chrome. A poor knock-off full of memory leaks and bugs. I decided I might as well just use the real thing.
There have been a few minor FF features I've missed in Chromium, most of which I can rectify with extensions. Chrome is a far, far better browser though. You don't realize how disruptive it is to have to restart Firefox every 8 hours or so to free its several gigs of wasted RAM until suddenly you don't have to do it anymore.
Is this a news report or a trailer for a motion picture?
Yes, I RTFA and it doesn't seem to say. Growing sales of Android phones and tablets would give a huge post to Chrome's marketshare, and while you could count it as the same browser, the distinction should be noted.
I'm pretty sure the expression is "there can be only one."
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
I'd consider switching if the UI for Chrome didn't SUCK! :)
A customizable interface... One of the best things FF has going for it! (well the huge lib of add-ons is nice too
You were asking why people use Chrome, saying you can't understand it.
A user kindly took the time and extensively explained it. You dismissed all of his reasons, and continue to express puzzlement on why anyone would use Chrome.
It's not anecdotal if it's happening to a person personally, it's a fact. Similar to the anonymous user above, I switched to Chrome because it was faster than Firefox, and used less memory. I don't care that this doesn't happen on the Firefox dev's machines. It doesn't happen on my machine, either, when I use Chrome.
I'm sure I'm not alone in that I run multiple browsers. In order of use: firefox, opera, IE on WIn7. Nope no chrome. Yes android phone, but no chrome on PC. No Safari either, though my wife has iphone. Only use IE to handle my 3rd gmail account. OTOH I don't consider it competition. It is not a race to me.
Please mod me 1 or troll. It's where the truth is these days, even on Slashdot. Beware the power of moderators everywh
Wow, how did he deserve that?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Yes, you do need to be a statistics major to make any sense of "intersect soon". All users are created equal? All page views are created equal? It boggles the mind.
I sometimes wonder if 25% of all FF traffic is reloading my 200 active tabs every time FF or Ubuntu request a security reboot.
For every user like me who reads everything on my screen--if it warrants a flick of the eyeballs--there's probably 100 Joe pornloaders out there lapping up floppy crumbs.
Seriously, the first lesson in statistics is "wash before you divide". You don't know where those numbers have been. Ewww, if only you knew.
If PHK gets his way with software liability, either slashdot will have to start including definitions of "user share" in its never-fails-to-amaze TFA preamble, or we'll have to host a giant ten minute memorial service for the good old days when any random claim was newsworthy.
firefox has lost its way. It has become a resource hog. I have been considering switching to chrome since it has all the same addons I regularly use on firefox. I do have it installed and I do use it every now and then, especially on websites that becomes unresponsive with firefox. The only reason I am still using firefox is I am hoping the next update will get better but...
Wait, we still have to test in all browsers? I thought if you used CSS and "em"s instead of "px"s, you were safe! I was LIED to!
Google tried to make a browser that *was* the OS.
FTFY.
And they did that because they were trying to define a new product category.
Microsoft included IE as a part of Windows for the express purpose of squeezing out competing browsers such as Netscape. When the US gov't went after them for monopolistic practises, they tied their browser into their OS so that they could turn around and say, "But it's a part of the OS! We can't just leave it out!"
Many years later, Europe had the balls that the US did not, and Windows N Edition was born.
May eventually happen, but It's going to be a bit...
Stats from from a real world web site over the last 30 days...
Which website? What does it host? Who's your target audience?
I'm sure your numbers will differ from www.slashdot.org which will differ from www.theponyclub.com which will differ from www.microsoft.com.
I'm sure that if you polled the webserver at http://ubuntuforums.org/ you'll find that 90% of the world runs Linux, what a shock!
Here in Melbourne for about 4 months Chrome had an excessive add campaign in one of the main train stations.
That coupled with the youtube and TV ads they're really catching the lay-person market for web browsing.
My internetting is no good.
Firefox was really the browser that broke the internet out of MSFT's painful grip. There is good cause for brand loyalty there.
In the early 2000's, Internet Explorer 5 and 6 had nearly 90% of the browser market share. The only real competitors were Opera, which was basically adware at the time, and Mozilla Suite, which still felt like a re-branding of the godawful 90's Netscape browser even though it used the Gecko engine.
When Firefox came out in the 0.x stages around early 2003 (named Phoenix then Firebird), it was out of this world. It was free. It was insanely fast. It rendered old quirky pages as well as IE did, and supported open and well-documented standards for future projects. Best of all, it was secure -- unlike with IE, you wouldn't get rooted and spyware'd to death from ActiveX garbage.
But times changed. I switched to Chrome well over a year ago and haven't really looked back. It's just too quick and bloat-free in native speed, UI navigation, and especially versus the damned updates Firefox has. Sadly, I'd almost consider the test version of Internet Explorer 10 to be a better browser...
This is a bummer. And it shows that Mozilla has been mishandling the whole situation. They should've cleaned up the memory usage years ago.
The world would be an inherently better place with the majority of users on a free open source browser.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
How should developers deal with differences among browsers? Should they avoid MathML because Internet Explorer doesn't support it?
AdBlock and NoScripts are both available for Chrome. I switched from Firefox about a month ago after finding out about this. So far, a very smooth experience.
It also seems a little more stable on Linux than Firefox.
I'm not a big extension user. flashblock and a basic adblock is all i install.
I haven't noticed a speed difference between the two.
I myself use Chrome a lot more than Firefox because Chrome renders web pages very quickly and is by far the most HTML 5.0-compliant web browser out there. I also like the very clean interface, too.
Indeed, since I'm going to be getting a new desktop computer very soon running Windows 7 Home Premium (SP1), it's likely it will NOT have Firefox running on it--I find Firefox to cause weird issues with my computer whenever a new version arrives until I install all updates and reboot the computer.
The problem is the number of people creating content that's WebKit-specific. It's not a problem with WebKit per se, just with market positioning.
The reason I stuck with Firefox is that I kinda liked only upgrading my web browser, say, once every year or two. I don't really feel a need to stay on the knife's edge. Now, with their turbo update schedule and rapid version deprecation, coupled with add-on version checking issues, I have to deal with all that upgrade heartburn to something that otherwise seems to work.
I'd love to just get bug fixes occasionally, you know? For example, when I right-click and choose "open in tab", about 1/3rd the time it seems to open a previously visited link instead of the one I selected. This might be a Linux 64-bit bug only, but it's a bug. I started seeing it in 6.0, but 6.0.2 hasn't fixed it. Does 7? Or does 7 break something else?
A friend of mine who's a Mac user ran back to Safari because she was tired of the "Update Firefox!" dialogs. Safari works well enough for her. She doesn't need the constant pestering to close her eleventy billion open pages and reboot her browser, only to discover that all her GUI controls moved around, things work strangely differently, and there isn't any real measurable improvement so far as she can tell. I feel her pain.
No less than Donald Knuth complained about the "always improving system." A system that's continuously improving is unusable, because it's unstable. Go look up his interviews on "webofstories". In one interview segment, he recounts how he was glad that the operating system research group lost their funding, and as a result the department's computers became dramatically more usable because they stopped improving, and therefore were stable.
That's not to say that improvements are bad. Lack of any stability is bad.
Program Intellivision!
User Agent strings aren't the only way of identifying browsers. Generally these days, you do UA strings and object detection. Basically the latter is running JavaScript with a whole bunch of if statements to see if certain objects are defined. document.all is an IE only thing, and window.performance only exists in IE9 for instance. window.opera only exists in Opera (duh).
With WebKit browsers (Chrome, Safari), you can detect to see if they have Canvas and WebGL support. With IE, you can even use conditional comments.
If you have a UA string claiming to be Firefox 2 but it responds to document.getElementsByClassName, you know something is lying to you. ;-)
To see how this sort of thing works, take a peek at http://www.quirksmode.org/js/detect.html
catch (HumourFailureException e) { e.user.send("You, sir, are a humourless idiot."); }
Under which operating system and which version are you experiencing massive memory usage?
Type "about:about" (without the quotes) into the Chrome address bar for plenty of interesting stats and access to useful features.
For example chrome://net-internals/#hsts allows you to force HTTPS on a per-site basis.
"Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace." V.Stone, Microsoft Corporation
If you're less than 25 years old, Chrome is cool. Firefox is not.
which was followed up by
I'm 17 and I don't get it :/. [...] I'm sure there was a point in time where Chrome was faster than Firefox, but there's really no reason to stick with it anymore.
So the poster was trying to point out why their personal data refuted the statement.
Surely people your age can sympathise when a post that mentions age attracts followup posts that mention age too?
Most people do not realize that even if you set Chrome to delete files on exit, that it still retains your history and cahche.
Firefox can be configured to dump all your data on exit.
This is a big reason why I went back to Firefox.
There are blogs complaining about this, but Google remains silent.
The purpose of all arguments, is to change reality.
This is going to be a rant.
Firefox is the most pedantic browser out there. It is way better than IE, but it's always working against the user. The timeouts in the accept buttons, the stubborn refusal to accept invalid certificates (there is no way to bypass its, which means I cannot use it to configure my router), the awful memory management and the obnoxious update mechanism made me finally switch to Chrome.
They sacrificed all usability for reasons that escape me. What moron thought that forcing the user to wait in order to click a button was a good idea? How much has security improved because of that? I would guess that not much.
The only advantage it used to have was the huge selection of plugins to configure it to your taste (in the end I only use AdBlock), and that is lost already since pretty much anything you need is also available for Chrome.
I keep it around just in case some site doesn't work with Chrome (which are not many), but that's it.
Google uses their huge market share to push it.
If by "push" you mean pushing out updates automatically, being quick and responsive, sand boxing tabs, and not being a pain in the ass to IT, then yes. I'm a Chrome advocate. Years ago, I was a Firefox advocate, passing around those little banners promoting the "new alternative to Internet Explorer". Those days are dead.
Firefox flipped IT the bird like we're nobodies. I'm not one user on one computer. I control hundreds of boxes, and none of them will ever run Firefox. IT flips the switch, and we can take any product from 100% usage to 0% usage throughout entire companies. Wrong people to piss off.
Piss off a couple thousand guys like me and tell us that you don't give a damn about Enterprise or IT. Boom! You just lost tens of thousands of installs instantly. And the "press" is guys like us telling people what to install on their home computers, and on social media sites and news sites like this.
So goes IT, so goes the world. And tech companies better learn that lesson here and now.
I8-D
Yes, but I don't suspect that Firefox funnels detailed usage data over to Google.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Right now there's a bakers dozen comments, most from AC's, saying the same thing: that Chrome is not on the Android. I got the memo from the 2nd person who responded. I'm putting the cover sheets on top the TPS reports, thank you.
One single memory allocator has been rounding up to the nearest factor of two, with bugs that make it request double the amount of space. This was resolved Aug 2011. Example, I allocate a string for 1024 bytes but didn't consider the additional null-term, so it comes back using 2048 bytes.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=676457
Several other bugs have been known for 3-5 years, the whole time that Mozilla has blamed anything but the code for memory problems, and are just now getting fixed.
http://blog.mozilla.com/nnethercote/2011/08/05/clownshoes-available-in-sizes-2101-and-up/
This article isnt too meaty, but it seems to be saying that google has indeed (as I suspected) refused to implement the necessary functionality, but the author of the notscript add-on found a way to hack a different system to achieve roughly the same effect.
That might make *possible* for me to switch to chrome, but it sure doesnt motivate me to do so. Firefox is still working fine, and developers dont have to hack unrelated subsystems to give me critical functionality there.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.