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Chrome Becoming World's Second Most Popular Web Browser
redletterdave writes with news that Google Chrome is in the process of surpassing Firefox to become the second most popular web browser. Pinpointing the exact time of the change is difficult, of course, since different analytics firms collect slightly different data. The current crop of media reports were triggered by data from StatCounter, which shows Chrome at 25.69% and Firefox at 25.23% for November. Data from Net Applications shows Firefox still holding a 4% lead, but the trends suggest it will evaporate within a few months.
First post with Chrome!
This space for rent.
And still Mozilla doesn't get a clue that some of the recent changes are driving away users. Amazing.
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I think this was inevitable given how much better Chrome is then all the competition. Once Chrome gets the breadth of plugins that Firefox has, it's game over.
Does that include Comodo Dragon as "Chrome" since it based on Chrome?
I've been very happy with Dragon. Whether it really is more secure or not I don't know.
Used to use Firefox- prefer Dragon now.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
lol.. it does
With the way things have been going for firefox, it was a matter of time, not competition. The community said they wanted a swing and the firefox team has consistently provided a tire. I get that firefox is open source and they don't have the resources of google or microsoft, but still for a long time they were extremely competitive. What happened? My guess is they either stopped caring about anybody actually using firefox for anything reliable and began toying with the source, or senior developers left the project and were replaced by monkeys.
I actually had a chat on slashdot with a developer of ff. The guy was so disillusioned towards why would people ever have expectations of an open source project and he can do wtf he wants cause he's not getting paid to do it. Well he's right, but what will he do when nobody is using firefox anymore?
and you'll be fine. Horray for opera!
I'm not saying that Chrome is not a good browser, but, what happened IMHO is not that Chrome is getting better, instead, FF is getting worse every day.
I do not know how the Flash Plugin in a browser can suddenly take the 90% of a i7 CPU.
FF people forgot what made them succeed: simplicity.
Over my dead body.
We are constantly removing Chrome from the software packages that are bundling it. Kind of a turnoff for me.
Just like getting a new PC with all the trialware crap.
Self Defense - A Human Right www.a-human-right.com
I have tried to get my parents to use it, but for some reason they stick to IE, and sometimes use FF. It kill me cause they always bitch about all the tools bars in IE and yet wont click on the damn chrome desktop link. I love chrome, I hate tool bars, and FF generally got so bad i quit using it about a year ago (except for freecorder) I have AVG, Zonelabs, Ad-aware on there computers and they still manage to get them so mucked up I have to spend about 30 mins every month cleaning them up. I really dont see how they can stand the load times, slow page loads, searchs being redirected to some other site all the time. Progress does happen with them, but at this rate they will be dead before I can ever get them to use chrome as their default browser.
#include bier;
When Firefox appeared on the scene, it gave Microsoft the kick up the arse it needed to improve their crappy, aging browser.
When Chrome appeared on the scene, it gave Mozilla the kick up the arse it needed to improve their crappy, aging browser.
It'll be interesting to see if the same thing happens in a few years with IE.
Summation 2
A problem is that Firefox is adopting a lot of what Chrome is doing including look and feel and release schedule. It would seem to me the more Chrome gains the more the Firefox team wants to make it behave like Chrome but you are fundamentally correct that doing this isn't listening to users.
Everything is an advertising company at this point.
Facebook is the new AOL
With all the 100's of millions of iOS devices being sold each year its just a matter of time.
(Posting AC because I'm at work)
I wish that Chrome's success came at the cost of IE's market share rather than Firefox's, which I'm sure is a sentiment shared by many (all?) other web designers out there. I don't use Chrome nor Firefox so I have no investment in either of their success, but I most certainly would like to see IE taken down a few more pegs so that Microsoft would be forced to update and become more standards compliant or risk becoming more irrelevant. I'm so sick and tired of being forced to work around IE's deficiencies...
Do you know what changed between FF4 and FF10? Almost nothing! Really! From FF6 to FF10 it is nothing for sure. But they managed to break addon compability 7 times in between. So, from what I understood, we were going to have releases from often so that we could get more features more frequently. We got nothing! Or almost nothing. I jumped of from FF6 to Chrome and I lived happily ever after. By the way, 5% of the Internet users are stuck with the outdated FF3.6 today, without the HTML5 advances of FF4 and FF6, because of this new release process. It is as if we need another browser vendor holding the web back. Thank you Mozilla.
We noticed this in our site logs months ago. Chrome has been sitting higher than Firefox for a long time. When possible we encourage our clients to use Chrome because of the lightening fast JavaScript engine (we do a lot of heavy js development). On a personal level I use Chrome as my primary, but almost always have IE loaded.
Overheard in the Mozilla offices after reading this:
"Damnit, how are they still catching up? More releases! MORE! FASTER! If we reach version 100 first, we win! GO! HURRY!"
Not taking anything away from Chrome, in itself it's a pretty decent browser and I'd rather see the average Joe use Chrome than IE..
But by far the biggest contributor to Chrome's success is marketing and Google as a recognizable brand. You can hardly download a piece of popular software (Flash, Skype...) without being offered Chrome.
While nowadays all major browsers are decent, 5-6 years ago Opera was way ahead of the competition. Did that help them gain market share? Hardly. Sure, 1% of people might like Chrome for some technical merits, but the average Joe uses it because of marketing. Also that Firefox is playing "me too" with a "major version" every week doesn't help. Would it really be so bad if FF was at, say, 4.3.5 now instead of 8? At least Chrome updates in the background, without annoying users.
My own companies consumer website, I work for a financial institution, shows figures of 11% Firefox, 11% Chrome, 11% Safari (including mobile Safari), with IE having all but 1% of the rest.
I'm always skeptical of browser stats because they very much depend on the audience you are monitoring and don't take account of changing usage. As an example Firefox and IE are likely to have dropped percentages on google.com as Bing has been an alternative/default search engine. This could be interpreted as a decrease in the use of these browsers when in fact its just that the traffic is going elsewhere.
You may think me a tired, old, cynic. I'd have to disagree about the tired bit.
Only Firefox and Safari support color management. IE has partial color management support. Chrome and Opera don't support it at all.
Color management is vital to me so I use Firefox.
There's a little bit of a distinction. I personally have a love-hate relationship with it. Somethings it does well, other things are not present or idiotically implemented.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Since the Firefox developers seem to be tripping over themselves trying to copy chrome, there's really no reason to use anything else. If they just focused on better performance and a smaller memory footprint, I'd switch back in a second. Some kind of review of browser add-ons would be a compelling reason to go back also.
Chrome is popular partly because of three things: it's new, users are ignorant (below), and the Chrome plugin API[0] allows the browser to do some really fast, but braindead[1], crap (aka ActiveX/IE) like running native system code in a sandbox.
Re Ignorance: There has been a lot of misunderstanding towards mozilla "memory usage" over the years because users can't figure out that each of the 100 tabs they have open consumes a certain amount of memory. And several of those tabs, running Adobe Flash in the background, simply bring their system to it's knees.
Yeah, chrome is snazzy, and Mozilla does some brain dead stuff too, but I trust them more than Google. Furthermore, segregation in the market space is actually a really, really, really good thing for the consumer.
[0] - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/25/mozilla_on_npapi_pepper/
[1] - http://www.tech.slashdot.org/story/11/10/24/151238/bug-opens-chrome-to-easy-remote-code-execution
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I have a large web site that gets a broad spectrum of visitors. Over the last 30 days, I've had some 550,000 distinct hosts.
Chrome has less than 50% of the hits of Firefox and is in fact 4th behind Safari (desktop, not mobile).
I checked another site with a much smaller base, but more targeted towards web designers and software professionals. The results are very similar.
Someone's methodology is wrong.
They have been making developers lives a pain in the ass because of the constant changes, not just visual things or stuff like that, no, APIs, things that are supposed to be more-or-less constant and only upgraded, not changed EVERY DAMN TIME EVER.
It's like DLL Hell all over again, but with browser APIs.
Not only that, the updating process is painful, forced. (still not as bad as Opera... I deleted that browser because I was in a hurry and it FORCED an update on me! And then Firefox because it had that stupid retarded "THIS SITE IS UNSECURE YOU AIN'T GOIN TO IT BUB" nonsense that everybody hated)
The updating in Chromium branches are just elegant. Well, most of the time. I've had updates break the browser before, or throw some strange errors, but it was easy to fix. It ain't perfect, but it isn't as annoying as the others.
I honestly haven't liked Firefox since 1.5. That was the best version. Everything else after it has been atrocious. They ruined such a good thing.
Constantly adding features upon features to it because "OH THIS IS A POPULAR EXTENSION, LET'S ADD IT" without even a thought put in to it.
All the while adding more memory leaks and slowdown.
You'd think they would have a basic browser version and a "feature packed" version.
Yes, Chromium does have more overhead with more tabs opened, but that memory is used efficiently for the most part, besides the rare cases where some tabs just go loopy, or a plugin decides to screw things up and crash. (FLASH)
With Firefox, those leaks just pile up in the process.
I remember terminating the plugin-container process once after FF being opened for about 4 days, it took about a minute to terminate, probably taking a few months off my hard drives life with it.
Never again.
As a person who has their machine on constantly, this isn't a nice thing at all. (hey, at least it isn't as bad as those programs that want you to restart your OS... they get deleted and never used again, I don't care if it needs to, if it doesn't work after relog, it is gone)
If they want their browser to work in embedded environments, they best do some week long tests and fix those leaks.
See you Mozilla. You never listened to us. Instead you went loopy. Shame. I really liked XUL. I was hoping one day it would become the common spec for interfacing in browsers.
Now it looks like Mozilla is on a slow path to killing itself...again.
Google's views on privacy. Maybe my view is born of ignorance about what Chrome actually does track vs. doesn't track, but as of now I just can't trust them enough to use that browser all the time. I can't get past the, "Just don't do anything wrong..." comments by the Google leadership a while back.
Problem I had with Firefox is over the course of a day it'd gradually eat up more and more of my RAM until my computer started choking. So Chrome it is!
I trust Firefox with my privacy rights more than I trust Google, which is simply an advertising company.
To me what is more interesting here is what is happening with the engines and how OSS is forcing innovation. I have used browsers based on the Gecko engine for many years. Lately the browsers based on this engine has become less reliable, but that did not mean that I went to the proprietary Presto engine, even though it is no longer the garbage scow that it was before Mozilla forced MS to provide users with a decent MS Windows browser. No, I am using the Webkit engine more in the guise of Chrome and Safari. of course these two browsers, like IE, are targeted to promoting commercial concerns rather than providing the user with maximum configuration options(for instance my browser comes with flashblock built in, chrome blocking of third party cookies is hidden under a vague button in the preferences) so my primary is still Gecko based though it is not ideal.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I like Chrome, but until Adblock works as well as it does on Firefox I'm not interested. I'm not willing to watch Youtube commercials.
Exactly. Their main objective at the outset was to "take back the web". The shape of this graph, where it comes back from monopoly around 2004, is because of Firefox. We all have good reason to be thankful.
Microsoft's stranglehold on the market let them define the standards including not make any progress for 5 damned years. Stuck with cross-browser incompatibilities, stuck without technological progress or many of the features we take for granted these days, stuck with a browser that got everyone's system hacked and ate up countless geek hours with reinstalls. Man, what a nightmare.
And it wasn't just Microsoft's fault. It was also the fault of the users who did not opt for a heterogeneous browser ecosystem. Granted, it's a lot to ask the average person to defend a "heterogeneous browser ecosystem", but at least the geeks (and epidemiologists) should get it. And if you don't, let me spell it out for you: Don't push us towards browser monoculture . Not again, please. That sucked.
Somewhere between FF5 and 8 they fixed a lot of the RAM problem. FF8 has been running for more than 36 hours, with 14 tabs open most of that time and peaked at 580Mb. Currently using 509Mb. I can live with that, the RAM isn't needed for anything else and I've not run out of memory for weeks now, used to be a regular occurence thanks to disabled virtual memory for better XP performance.
Just a pity they broke so many other things with this insane release numbering. At least the Flash blockers kept working.
I switched to Opera just 2 days ago and it blew my mind. It's fast, lightweight and does everything you need and nothing more. It's what firefox used to be before it jumped the shark.
I always liked KDE Konqueror browser, but never thought that it would supplant Firefox - albeit by a different name.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I use Firefox since 1.0, and it pretty much covers my need (it rarely crashes, but it freezes for a couple of secons from time to time, but i learned that it depends on the web page's crap), i've tried Google Chrome, and just when i was starting to like it i found that Ghostery (a FF/Chrome extension that blocks tracking cookies and bots) would not block Google's shit on Chrome, right there, i've uninstalled it and never ever thought on install it again.
Opera?, i rather use Internet Explorer 6, no thanks.
I'll stick with Firefox until their tries to kill it finally suceed.
they really need [...] to replace the 13-click procedure for broken SSL certificates with a simple pop-up window.
Most people will just click past a broken certificate even when it's an obvious man in the middle (MITM) attack because they want to see the dancing bunnies.
But there's an extension for that, and it's called Perspectives. A browser with the Perspectives extension communicates with notaries scattered throughout the Internet to make sure that the certificate you see is the same certificate that other people have been seeing. The one weakness happens when the MITM is between the SSL server and its only connection to the Internet, but the Perspectives developers appear to operate under the assumption what the whitepaper calls an "Lserver attack" won't happen often.
I use safari so I have to post an off topic comment right below the first post. In the 2 years I went from safari to firefox, cause it lacked plugins and compatibility, and then when firefox got slow to chrome which was lightning fast. But Then I noticed that for chrome didn't work well with Netflix streaming (Netflix tech support agrees so it's not me) and I also started getting more and more ads related to websites I visited. To solve the Netflix streaming issues, I went back to safari with Lion 10.7. And Wow, safari is now awesome. It's plenty fast and has plugins like flash block. It works on more sites than even Firefox. I briefly flirted with Opera but liked safari because it was more mac-like in expected behaviors.
So for the next year I'm using safari. Which browser is king varies.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Seriously, as an IT manager, I've been replacing more and more installs of Firefox with Chrome due to features broken in each new Firefox release.
Our company uses several SaaS applications, and when basic javascript functionality is broken, we still need to get on with business.
Hell, MLS.COM after 4 major Firefox releases STILL doesn't work (used to), and I've filed a report each version. Just stupid shit that the devs shovel another bullet point onto a feature list, and be damned if it breaks other stuff. Fast and stable, Firefox's two features that made it king, are now dead and buried.
The Slashdot bandwagon immediately sees the opportunity to point out that "Firefox sucks because 8.0 should be called 5.0.3" and you reveal the real reason that Chrome is everywhere: They're bundling it with bloody well everything but the kitchen sink and the same lemmings that used IE6 until recently are now finding Chrome icons on their desktops.
14 tabs, is that all? Let me give you a hint, I don't use bookmarks, I use tabs (and session manager).
I could never complain about FF memory issues as I have 100-300 tabs (usually ~120) open, my only beef is that FF is becoming a mini-me of chrome, and I wasn't using chrome for a reason. Although chrome had nice multithreaded features like its own task manager to see what web page is eating all the resources, and an easy way to kill that page.
Also strange, it was just looking at stats yesterday and I was quite happy to see nothing above 50%. http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
Chrome is slowly improving, while Firefox is quickly becoming the worst browser on the market. Go figure the numbers reflect that.
I've been using Firefox for as long as I can remember, but this batshit insane update schedule is forcing me to look at other browsers.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
I sure love reading the same comments over and over on every article related to Firefox.
The best part is about the extensions breaking, because I didn't have any extension break on me since Firefox 4.
Of course it's becoming the second most popular web browser. It is the easiest browser to use! There's only one confusing box that you can type things into at the top of the screen, and people like that. Many older people (I constantly watch my parents do this) type their searches into where one would normally put the URL, instead of the IE or Safari-provided search fields. In Chrome, this is not a problem!
So, if I install Chrome on a clueless person's computer, and they try using it, they will find that Chrome allows them to do something that the other browsers would either choke on, or, depending on your ISP, just return awful search results? It makes sense to me that Chrome is pulling ahead.
hey!
IE apparently but the article links say "desktop browser", makes me wonder what it looks like for all browsers regardless of device. Seems kind of funny all the attention that the move to tablets and smartphones get in the media that we are still comparing browsers based on their desktop market share. I suspect Safari would have a much larger market share if all the other devices (iPad iPhone) were added. Similarly for Chrome with the android devices. So ... would IE still be number one? Would anyone be getting close to knocking them off?
We see Mozilla, Chrome, and Safari all on the same line. And I see a lot of lines like that. In fact of 587 lines I saw in my log that accessed the favicon.ico page, they all mentioned Mozilla and only three did not mention Safari.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I have noticed more and more that Chrome is coming pre-installed on many systems. I just set up a brand new Lenovo laptop last night and it came with Chrome installed but not Firefox. Maybe this is part of the reason it is gaining market share. If Firefox could get the OEM's to embrace them and start pre-installing it maybe their share would also jump. Just a thought....
This boost in chrome usage is almost certainly to do with Android adoption rather than desktop use.
I did the math. Firefox went from 26.39% to 25.23% in one month, a drop of 1.16%, while Chrome went from 25% to 25.69% in the same month, an increase of 0.69%. If you do the math, the crossover point is 25.51843243%. I wonder what the crossover point will be when Chrome passes IE.
. .etc., etc., are beginning to cost Firefox popularity with the users. Once the Firefox developers started stroking themselves, instead of providing useful features for their users, the downward slide in users was all but certain.
Egregious shortcomings, such as the inability to remove any unwanted plugin (there's only the option to disable them), ridiculous version turnovers, etc.,
As a browser, I loathe Firefox. I used it as my primary browser for maybe a year about 4-5 years ago. It is slow, cumbersome, has stupid url bar functionality, and the new update cycle is ridiculous with breaking addons and getting in my way.
However, Firefox with Firebug, Live Http Headers, a ruler and eyedropper addon, and maybe a few other things as needed, and you have the best web development tool available. Other browsers have been trying to add similar features, but nothing even comes close to measuring up at this point.
Chrome seems to be gaining the most ground in that area, and as soon as they can do everything Firefox can, Firefox will be dead to me, tossed in a bin next to IE and opened only for cross browser testing.
a lean, fast browser with a stripped down UI
I just looked at the Chrome system requirements:
"100MB disk space, 128MB RAM, WinXP SP2+, Pentium 4 or later":
It won't even look at Win2000, so if I want to use it at all I have to change my hardware, expand my OS size by '00s of MB and lose backwards compatibility with stuff that I use all of the time. With the number of websites that demand updated web-browsers such as Chrome it begins to look as if I'm being squeezed off the internet. (I wish I could switch more to linux, for which I have a double-booting system, but I can't get it to do the printing work that I need, and even then, Chrome claims to be very picky about which linux distro it works with.)
-wb-
Running as admin in Win 7, I was able to update Firefox without issue (8.0.1, IIRC). Under the regular account, the Apply Update button is still present; clicking does nothing. Aces.
If it wasn't for Mozilla the web browser landscape would be much worse state, than what it is now. They may have fallen behind because of their problems and Google managing to steal the hip and cool label off them but we owe them thanks. They broke Microsoft's monopoly which at one point seemed impossible. I wish them luck in the future, hopefully they will get their ship in order because at the end of the day they are the only group out there who has no secondary agenda. Microsoft, Google, Apple and Opera (to an extent) cannot be trusted.
Chrome might be replacing Firefox on my desktop, but I am finding myself turning to Firefox on Android more often to use pages that don't work well under Dolphin HD (UI layer for Google's standard browser component).
So, irony.
I still consider Firefox my "primary" browser. Even though I haven't used it on my home machine in months, it still has all my bookmarks, from back when I used to care about maintaining that kind of thing ;-P
I mostly blame StumbleUpon & maybe Twitter (which I mostly use only as an rss feed) that weened me off of maintaining my own set of bookmarks to frequented sites. Oh, and of course the Google Awesomebar.
I remember back in the fun days when I used Netscape, then Microsoft started their shenanigans and there began a period of seeming stupiditulation (my new word, capitulation by stupidity) on the part of the Netscape group where each succeeding revision actually was worse.
Firefox is really getting that bad vibe. I remember good old Firefox on my mac rendering page after page just fine, now I actually beachball in Firefox (the rest of the system works but FF is stuck) when loading some pages. Even on Windows it behaves erratically.
Time for another fork, when Netscape got too far from its roots a new browser came from a similar base and it was very good for a decent amount of time.
I like the idea of taking away stuff till its right, they need some of that
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Doesn't matter what browser is... ... as long isn't not IE!!
i dont care how is the first or second... as long isnt IE. FF, Chrome, opera or even safari all support valid standards, dont tie the browser to the OS, work very well.
IE9 is way better than IE6, but still support broken things, developed for "windows only". It it goes away, sites must update or will lose its users, and by that, everyone wins!
after all, isnt one of the ideias of chrome increase the pressure over IE... more browser, more fragmentation, more the IE lose by being non-standard
Higuita
Mozilla gets the bulk of its Firefox funding by Google. Just thought you should know.
I always knew chrome would be called the worlds most popular browser, but i had no idea it was only the second browser to receive the title.
A true testimony to the power of Angry Birds...
Well, you could always use Chromium, which is basically Chrome before Google's tracking nonsense is added.
The main issues I had with Firefox is that (a) it does some massive update seemingly every time I start it. If I want to bring up a browser to look up something time critical, I do not use Firefox because of the very good chance I'll have to wait for it to update and then tell me it has done so before I can use it.
(b), the memory usage is massive. It's better now that I've upgraded my machine to 8 GB, but you shouldn't have to do that for a BROWSER. This (massive resource usage) kind-of negates the idea of an inexpensive, low powered browser appliance.
After switching to Chrome, I immediately noticed that if it *was* updating, it was doing it in a completely unobtrusive way, and the resource usage was significantly lower. I'd been using Firefox since the original beta, but after switching to Chrome never looked back.
Mind you, Mozilla has done some good things. Firefox now uses a lot less vertical real estate for controls, toolbars and so forth, which makes it much better on netbooks and tablets with confined real estate. But they have to get the resource usage down in order to remain competitive.
I think it might be time for Mozilla to put Firefox in maintenance mode and start over. They've done it before, and we got firefox, and it was a good product for years. Who knows what they could accomplish starting again with a clean slate?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Apparently their increased popularity has not gone unnoticed by malware writers.
Who cares WHY extensions are breaking?
Anyone who wants to know who would be the best person to solve the problem.
Over my dead body.
Not sure that your carcass will have any advertising value, but good try.
Honestly I have to say I'm a little disappointed. I know I'll probably be modded to oblivion by daring to question Google, but I really don't see the advantage to Chrome over Firefox. Five years ago Google seemed to be the type of company that actually managed to "Don't Be Evil", but in the past few years, everything from GPlus "Real Names only, thank you" to other questionable uses of personal information and privacy policy suggest that they're being cowed to the almighty dollar. Google as a company makes their money from search and ads; the latter certainly not conducive to a great browsing experience. Hence, Chrome's variant of AdBlock not truly blocking the ads and allowing them to be downloaded at one time, and nothing similar to the power of NoScript easily available. The divide between Chromium and Chrome may grow even greater, with certain features (translate etc..) only available on the proprietary tracked version.
Putting too much faith in any monoculture is a bad idea, especially if they have a vested interest in restricting or guiding your experience for their profit while having demonstrated they're not always forthcoming as to how. The Google of the "You get awesome email, we're only going to put an adwords bar up here that searches terms in your mail and not record all sorts of metrics about what you do, is great. The Google of "Real names only on our social network; anything that loses value for advertisers is a no go. We need to cross reference your want of viagra with your age and type of sexual partner to sell to our clients" is less so, despite the retractions and wobble back and forth. I still have faith that Google is nowhere near as horrid as say, Facebook but I want to let them know that their dominance isn't assured just by existing, lest they become complacent and begin "monetizing" in opposition to ethics; I want to support them providing excellent products, open communication with well understood terms that we can both agree serves our needs.
Firefox is in my experience, an excellent browser and it is one of the few examples of FOSS that fulfills both the layman and geek's needs. I have near limitless control over my browsing experience, great addons, and all without a conflict of interest with the developers. What's really amazing, is that everything from Sync to Personas and even many addon installations can easily be used by those relatively computer illiterate! When I hear geeky breathren say why they changed over to Chrome, they usually cite speed. Personally, I've not had any problems with Firefox's speed and the vast majority of those who I've spoken with who did, loaded it up with 20 addons that heavily tax the browser and RAM below it! Of COURSE bare Chrome is going to be faster if you're giving up Sync/Personas/NoScript/AdBlockPlus/Stylish+Themes/Scriptish+Scripts/Tor/FlashGot/DownloadStatusbar/HTTPSAnywhere and more! I've not met any laypeople who've switched to chrome save for a few who just "heard about it" and transitioned from IE due to advertisement. Is this the volume of switchers at hand? Normal users who just found it better than IE? Strangely, I figured most of them would already have heard about Firefox in years goneby from computer literate friends and family. I've not met one to date who switched from Firefox to Chromium so I can't list there.
Mozilla's products, including Firefox seem to be everything that the FOSS/geeky user metric wants; nearly a holy grail in that they can give limitless power to the powerusers without impeding the novice. They provide the best experience possible, customizable for any taste on any platform, without an ulterior motive contrary to the goals of the project. I don't see how Chrome even comes close, encumbered with Google's business model in mind.
Mozilla's decision to drop MacOS X leopard, an operating system younger than Windows Vista and XP is infuriating. There are a lot Mac users out there who don't want to pay $29.99 just to run an up-to date browser. This is even worse than Microsoft dropping IE9 support for XP.
Firefox probably evaded a lot of criticism back when it was the only serious competitor to IE (when Opera was adware, Safari Mac only and Chrome is only from 2008), but now there are plenty of good browsers out there it is time for Firefox to pull itself together. They get $100 million a year in Google dollars yet they piss it away on stupid gimmicks like stealing your status bar which dates back from early web browsers (Even IE 9 has one) and other UI changes such as stealing the forward button.
The memory and speed issues are contentious but Microsoft does serious testing on IE to make sure its browser is good enough.
I am really mad at Firefox for messing up after being the good browser for several years. Firefox needs to be forked by competent developers to undo the brain damage that has happened in 2011. I want Firefox to be good again, don't make me flee to Chrome/IE permanently.
In related news, our news agency predicts news of incoming news on this topic sometime in the future! We're not sure exactly when, but now that we've started the rumour about news, you can expect to hear more news about this news in the near future, while this rumour spreads enough to start becoming news.
I've seen a lot of TV ads recently pushing Chrome. That has to have made at least a little difference for many people who would've never considered Chrome before seeing a TV commercial for it, which probably actually adds credibility to the product.
OTOH, I've never once seen a TV ad for Firefox. FF's growth was all about word of mouth. (It doesn't help that FF's recent word of mouth has NOT been positive - including what's in the comments here - but that's another story.)
If Firefox had the same number of TV ads, it would probably still be adding new users, despite the core user backlash against the FF changes.
I just quickly looked up Germany, France and the US.
In France and the US Firefox is having a lonely battle with IE while in Germany Firefox is at ~50% with IE in a _distant_ second position.
Where are all those Chrome users coming from?
Also why the hell would anyone use Chrome? At least use Chromium, people. Google actually IS evil. It's a data mining advertising company.
C'mon...
I use Chrome and Firefox equally. I love Chrome's speed, but one thing I've noticed is that the message history / auto complete is far superior in Firefox (I believe they called it an 'awesome' bar). E.g. if I press 's' and slashdot.org pops up automatically. Firefox's system for this is really really good, I almost never have to use bookmarks now. But Chrome is entirely reliant on bookmarks. Once Google fixes that I will probably permanently switch to Chrome.
It'll be interesting to see if the same thing happens in a few years with IE.
Do you mean Chrome?
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
All hail I.E..
Chrome for mostly everything, and Firefox to access intranet sites with self-signed SSL certificates because to this day and age I can't tell Chromium on Linux to accept a friggin' self-signed certificate and stop prompting me every single time I access the site. No, adding the certificate to my trusted list at the OS level doesn't work.
My english is sow-sow. Sowhat?
I have used chrome as my primary browser for about a year. However, for anything
like purchases, banking or important stuff, I have to switch to Firefox.
Chrome is just broken, more often than not.
The only problem that I have with Chrome is ... that you can't actually print via the print tab very well.
That is unless you have [ insert other open source pdf application here ] Nitro pdf which can print out a decent copy after you've made a pdf for filing.
The experimental Adblock for Chrome now blocks video ads and does a better job than the previous version. That was the only thing keeping me on Firefox.
Either Firefox sucks because it doesn't do enough or Firefox sucks because it's nebulously "bloated". Firefox's versioning is a hilarious joke, but Chrome's is totally awesome. Firefox needs to go back to its roots, and Firefox needs to stop removing features. What?
A lot of people seem to be angry without knowing what they're actually angry about. I don't know what happened here to make the masses suddenly froth aimlessly over Google and against Mozilla, but it's getting kind of ridiculous, and it sucks to see a genuine open source company be the target of nerd rage. Hell, Slashdot usually roots for the open source alternative even when it barely works.
More on subject: it's worth note that Chrome hasn't really been taking market share from Firefox. Firefox hasn't had a significant drop since Chrome came on the scene; it just plateaued. So this represents a bigger chunk taken out of IE (and, to some extent, Safari) rather than infighting between "alternatives", which is pretty great imo.
Wow that was fast!! I thought it'd take longer for such news to come.
I have been on SeaMonkey for the last 2 years and haven't really looked back. I've put on the classic skin for Netscape like nostalgia, and running as an internet suite with mail,news, browser,IRC and HTML editor in one package it still doesn't gobble as much RAM as Firefox.
And after the new crazy versioning process of Firefox, the SM developers have stuck to the more sensible subversioning, 2.4.x or 2.5 as of now.
I like how I can click a mailto link in the browser and have it pop up a new mail window, or click a link in a mail to have it immediately open in a browser tab. It's very well made, and for those who want to use the Gecko engine this is a saner alternative to Firefox.
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."
... for helping them achieve this?
How are they counting, when so many Abdroid devices running chrome block users from choosing any other browser...?