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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.
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
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?
I would have had first post but was applying my Firefox updates.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
it really does not. I still find the available plug-ins and interface reason enough to continue FF as my main browser even if it takes 2 second longer to load on start up...soit
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." - George Orwell
And your FirstPost extension broke?
This space for rent.
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.
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
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
Everything is an advertising company at this point.
Facebook is the new AOL
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.
... and they still manage to get them so mucked up I have to spend about 30 mins every month cleaning them up ...
Sound like a job for Deep Freeze. Makes tech support for clueless relatives much easier.
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.
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
With all the 100's of millions of iOS devices being sold each year its just a matter of time.
Safari runs on Cisco?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
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.
Firefox still doesn't desegregate tabs properly like Chrome does.
As in, if you remove a tab from a windows to form its own new window, Chrome does it seamlessly while Firefox sort of trudges along.
It's better than it used to be, when it would just refresh the whole bloody page, but it's still pretty mediocre.
Plugins like Flash also lose orientation if you do so from a non-fullscreen window while they're operating. That's a big usability glitch with Firefox.
They also seem to be getting the "white page only rendering" glitch that Chrome has after a couple hundred tabs in multiple windows, wherein each tab contains a large amount of data or images. It's one of the main reasons I switched back to Firefox, and now a reason I'll have to jump to another browser as it gets worse with each version release.
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.
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 use Opera as my primary browser and I absolutely love it, but I have to admit that it's not as idiot-friendly as Fx or Chrome so I rarely recommend it to other people. Opera is great for power users who appreciate the fact that you don't need to install plugins, extensions, add-ons or bells and whistles to make it a useable browser. However, I do highly recommend Opera Mini to users with mobile devices due to the fact it tends to be faster thanks to Oepra Turbo as well as more user friendly and intuitive than the native Android, etc browsers.
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!
Guys, we've got him! The last Opera user in the world!
And he reads Slashdot!
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.
What the heck do you people do to make Firefox use all that RAM? Firefox here has been running for a couple of weeks with dozens of tabs open and is using 260MB.
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.
http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/http-authentication
Chrome has supported Kerberos for a while. They kind of want to be able to work in IE environments so they need Kerberos to function in ActiveDirectory shops ... and well, their own internal networks are Kerberosized.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
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.
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.
I'm currently testing a website in various browsers. I've had Firefox and Chrome both open for a few days. Firefox has only had one tab open during this time (the site I'm testing), while I've been using Chrome for active browsing (two Gmail sessions, Google+, Google Reader, the site I'm testing [in several tabs], and various searches on StackOverflow, RFC's and the like).
Firefox's current memory usage: 692mb (never had more than 1 open tab, just loaded pages periodically when I needed to test something).
Chrome's current memory usage: 200mb (currently 11 open tabs, actively browsing for days).
Firefox does have memory issues. After a few days of actively using Firefox, I need to shut it down and open it back up to let some other programs have some RAM. Chrome is also just a lot faster in many ways. Faster rendering of pages, faster execution of JavaScript, faster startup, faster opening of new tabs, more responsive to UI events (eg, Firefox takes 2 seconds to tear off a tab, Chrome the tab is torn off as I drag my mouse)
I agree, platform competition is good for all involved. I sincerely hope Firefox sticks around and remains popular. I resisted Chrome at first too, but when you've used it for a while, Firefox just feels sluggish. Also, when Chrome upgrades itself, my extensions all keep working. It seems like every time I fire up Firefox, some new extension is broken and I have to go hunting for a new version.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
A true testimony to the power of Angry Birds...
They have a FF extension that creates a small singularity inside /dev/null I think it is called fantroll.
Actually, it does. Firefox market share has been flat or gone down by a percentage point or two (depending on which stats you look at) over the last 2 years. Over the same time, Chrome share is up 10-15%. Guess whose share those 10-15% came out of?
> Where are all those Chrome users coming from?
Try checking stats for South America....
Or if you want to be somewhat depressed about the whole thing, try China or South Korea. ;)