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Firefox Tops Microsoft Browser Market Share For First Time (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader writes from a report via Ars Technica: For the first time, Firefox has pulled ahead of Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Edge browsers. Mozilla's Firefox grabbed 15.6 percent of worldwide desktop browser usage in April, according to the latest numbers from Web analytics outfit StatCounter. Google Chrome continues to dominate two thirds of the market. StatCounter, which analyzed data from three million websites, found that Firefox's worldwide desktop browser usage last month was 0.1 percent ahead of the combined share of Internet Explorer and Edge at 15.5 percent. Firefox has reportedly been losing market share over the last three months, but Microsoft's Edge and Internet Explorer browsers appear to be declining faster. Last week, Mozilla launched Test Pilot, a program for trying out experimental Firefox features. They've also been fighting the FBI in court for details about a vulnerability in the Tor Browser hack, which may affect the company since the Tor browser is partially based on the Firefox browser code.
Goes to show you just what a steaming pile of shit Edge is.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I just knew Netscape Navigator could do it!!
You mean the StatCounter website I have blocked in my browser? Yeah that's the one. So the "stats" are skewed since the way they collect information can be blocked in-browser.
You're new here, huh?
I comment occasionally so that I can mod others -1 overrated or -1 offtopic.
Yeah you and three others. Those who block the site are such an insignificant percentage that it doesn't matter.
Firefox has pulled ahead of Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Edge browsers
If I'm reading the graphs in TFA correctly, Firefox has "pulled ahead" of IE/Edge by losing market share over 3 months (going from 16.1% to 15.6%), but losing less than IE and Edge combined (16.6% to 15.5%). Yippee, terrific surge!
The User Agent reports as Firefox, but Pale Moon is the superior browser.
Isn't something missing? For the first time ever? For the first time since ....?
http://www.w3schools.com/brows...
Firefox used to beat IE in 2009 for example.
FTFY:
"Firefox 'Tops' Microsoft browser share.... if you don't count chrome which has an 60% install base"
Seriously, I expect this type of clickbait on BuzzFeed, not Slashdot :/.
Well yes, Firefox tops Microsoft browser share whether or not you choose to count Chrome, since Chrome is neither Firefox or Microsoft. In other words, Summary Title, which did not imply that Firefox had the most browser share, is not misleading at all. Unless you want to mislead yourself and then get upset about it.
Seriously, I expect this type of post from ACs.
More like : Microsoft Bottoms Firefox Browser Market Share For First Time.
For fuck's sake, I was playing fullscreen video on an Ubuntu install on a Pentium II a decade ago.
Are you a liar, or just a fucking retard?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Firefox: Still the only browser I know of that properly supports side tabs via the TreeStylesTab plug in.
46137
Probably running X via framebuffer
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
I just switched back to Firefox from Chrome because Chrome under OSX was burning up my laptop. If I opened a few tabs with Javascript, the machine would go to 100% CPU, the fans come on full blast and I would just sit and wait forever.
Now that I've switched back to Firefox, there is none of this drama. I can open as many tabs as I want and the CPU use stays very low. Much better.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
"Firefox 'Tops' Microsoft browser share.... if you don't count chrome which has an 60% install base"
"Ferrari tops Lamborghini sales" is a perfectly valid sentence, it doesn't imply either is the absolute top. Though it gets a little confusing since you can parse it both as "Firefox Tops (Microsoft Browser = IE + Edge) market share" or "Firefox Tops Microsoft (browser market share)", which would say Firefox is the most used browser on Windows. But if you'd substituted for "IE and Edge" a normal reading would suggests it beats both IE and Edge, not the total of IE and Edge so it's not easy to make a short, clear and correct headline.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
He is probably both. Most peeps don't want to READ. If it isn't a shiny icon or picture then most peeps are lost. To be able to use a computer yet not be able to fucking READ is called an oxymoron. The PC was MADE to READ. Also it was made to WRITE, which coincidentally they cannot do either!!!
You are attempting to convince a troll. An anonymous troll at that. Good luck with that!
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
a few years ago when firefox tweaked the toolbar and the preferences dialog thing, and feature bloat screwed it up i abandoned firefox for chrome, i tried palemoon for a little while but it dont cut it when it comes to HTML5, chrome is fine, chromium is good too if you need the tinfoil hat
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
He's right, statcounter by default has been blocked by AdBlockPlus for a long time (although possibly only the "easyprivacy" list).
And seeing as ABP is the most popular extension by far, and the in-built Tracker Protection in Firefox also blocks statcounter (although currently only active in private browsing mode).
... the stats could be pretty skewed.
Somehow there's money rolling into the development of these browsers. If memory serves, Opera is purchased. The others are all free downloads. Yet there's no ads.
My question is, where is the money for these coming from and why? There must be some large donor base somewhere that really drives the feature set.
IE is not good, but EDGE is awful. I've got Win10 on a laptop I use quite often and after doing some damage control, e.g. taking control of the update process, I found it is quite useable, not my favorite but far from the worst OS I've ever used, but EDGE is hands down the worst browser I can actually recall using in more than 15 years. Edge is ugly, slow and cumbersome, and lacks basic features that nearly every other browser on the market commonly supports.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Don't worry, Mozilla is working on breaking [Tree Style Tabs].
How?
By switching from XUL to the Chrome-inspired WebExtensions. This is ostensibly part of the Electrolysis project to add a multi-process model to Firefox in order to keep a long operation in one tab from causing other tabs to lose responsiveness.
Google Chrome development is subsidized by Google Search revenue. Firefox once was as well until Yahoo! offered a better deal to be Firefox's default search provider.
Are you really that thick? Firefox tops Microsoft browser share, regardless what Chrome is doing. Chrome tops them both big time.
What is it about the UK that Microsoft usage is above average? The UK had shockingly high sales of phones running Windows Phone (or whatever it was called at the time).
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Anything to contributes to pushing Microsoft a bit closer to oblivion is excellent news.
And why does Firefox now install tracking cookies?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Here we are in 2016 and it is STILL impossible for me to play fullscreen video on ANY machine running linux, no matter how fast or in what player - including in firefox's html5 player - without awful video tearing due to fundamental architectural defects that x.org refuses to fix .
Right. As I'm watching Youtube fullscreen HD right now on a Core2Duo Dell Optiplex with a decent but nondescript Video card. Ubuntu Mate. None of what you claim is endemic is happening,
Tell us now about how hard it is to find drivers.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
1) Firefox is very standards compliant, even exaggeratedly so; there are things for which Chrome is needed, but some other pages only render well with FF.
2) Firefox adapts to your processor and doesn't cause "illegal instruction" errors.
3) Firefox talks to your smartcard hardware; other programs can use FF infrastructure to e.g. sign files.
4) Chrome is gonna bury 32-bit; FF is perfectly happy in a 10+ year old PC (given memory requirements are met, that is).
5) These days FF is less memory-hungry than before.
6) There's so many extensions that there must be extensions for extensions.
7) Lots and lots of shortcuts: will work even without function keys (as in my Android Bluetooth keyboard).
8) Plays Youtube and if you got the right gear... even 4K!
9) Stood up from defeat many decades ago and won (many years ago, before Chrome came up), proving Linux can also win in the long run.
What is not so cool:
a) It's still a heavy browser.
b) You gotta use Classic Theme Restorer to get a decent Open Bookmark single-click button.
c) Still not that usable in less powerful smartphones.
d) Does not play Netflix.
Here we are in 2016 and it is STILL impossible for me to play fullscreen video on ANY machine running linux,.
Dear Bullshit Artist/PEBCAK,
Even my old IBM Thinkpad T22 with 256 MB of RAM happily plays full screen video with VLC on a Debian QT-Razor DE. You
really need to stop sucking Bill's dick and/or trying to play MKV movies transcoded from shitting small resolution AVI movies with low frame rates and piss poor audio into large screen multi-channel audio by morons running Winblows. Maybe if you hired someone who can read and who "has a clue" to install and configure Linux you'd have a computer that "just works" - instead of downloading Ewebuntu, gluing a bread crumb to the Enter key and letting a chicken do your "install" so you can wank on about how you are a "sysystem administrator". Choices are obviously not your friends.
Just wait until the JS in one tab hangs and causes the whole browser freezes because of Firefox antiquated single process model. And I don't want to hear anything about enabling the experimental electrolysis. It is unstable and too buggy for every day use. Firefox is the only browser still living in the past with all the tabs running in a single process model. Yes I know plugins are split into a separate process, but that doesn't do anything to stop one slow tab freezing up the whole process and bring your whole web work space coming to a halt.
They originally starting on electrolysis in 2009, then stopped the project even though it was the only clear path for the future of the browser. Two years went by with nothing being done towards multi-processing. Then they start back up the electrolysis project, "hey we should probably get this multi-process thing going since everyone else already has completed it."
Then they pulled the BS with changing their release model, so instead of having changes to the API only done with major releases, which is the sane thing to do, giving add-on developers time to update for the major release. Instead they changed to the quick release model which ends up with constant changes to the API causing add-ons to break constantly and causing unneeded stress and pressure put on add-on developers to constantly update add-ons just to keep them functioning. They claimed this was to make a better experience for us all, but they have since announced they they will be dropping their existing API and use one similar to chromes. Meaning not only did they piss off the developers that were trying to keep up with the constant changes, now they find out it was all for nothing because they will now be dumping the existing API, meaning starting their add-ons from scratch.
Mozilla needs to stop all the BS they are doing with Firefox, put it in a security maintenance cycle, where only updates will get release to fix security problems. While in this maintenance cycle, they need to tear Firefox down, break everything and rebuilt it with multi-process tabs, sandboxing, redo their API, etc. Continue to work on it until it gets to the point where it is usable, somewhat stable, when it gets to the point where it is good enough for a release, push out a beta, let add-on developers some time to re-build their add-ons. Iron out bugs then push out a release for the public.
I was a big fan of firefox, I used it longer than most, but got to the point where that single process model was slowing down my work flow, so I had to switch to Chrome, not because I wanted to, but out of necessity. Chrome isn't perfect, I've pretty much got used to all the quarks of Chrome, the only one I still dislike is the lack of mult-row tabs. I know I could just open a second window and have the tabs split, but that's not for me, I want multi-row tabs and I know plenty of the public do also but the chrome API doesn't allow that. (technically it could allow it using the panel API, but that would basically be implementing a whole new browser GUI for chrome using a panel and implementing your own address bar and tabs, but the problem with this is basically all your sites would load in a frame in a panel window which could be a security risk due to the ease in someone making a phony window and in essence phishing and being able to steal using information, also since all tabs would be loading in a iframe I don't know how chrome would handle this, if it would load the iframe in a separate process or would load it in the same process as the panel, so may just end up with the same problems as Firefox, so better off not pursuing that route )
tl;dr: mozilla shit decisions, crappy release model and slacking on finishing electrolysis project, so firefox sux /rant
I held out on switching from firefox to chrome for as long as possible but I simply could no longer trust it for accessing mission critical accounts (banking, tax filing, bill pay, etc). I'd rather not have my every move tracked by Alphabet Inc. but firefox done went and let their shiat go bad in a big way. Give me a lightweight mobile version of firefox with an embedded ad/script blocker and then maybe we can reconcile our differences.
totally right.
The process racks up a RAM foot print while the window stops refreshing or accepting input. POS
I suppose it works mostly well and it's fast but as a nerd who's been on Firefox since before it was called Firefox (I've finally forgotten the other name) I prefer FF.
I mean, ok, google don't want me to skin Chrome? Ok fine, fine - but do you think I can find a decent tab mix plus alternative? I *NEED* tab mix plus, I utterly need it.
I 'learnt' tabbed browsing with NetCaptor (skin over the top of IE, added tabbed browsing, it was very good for its day) and I found and still find the tap ordering the most logical with it, by far.
Tab Mix Plus provides incredibly powerful tab control options, so I can replicate NetCaptor under FF.
My firefox does this:
*Middle click a link*, open in the background, one tab slot to the RIGHT of the current tab (inserting itself)
*CTRL N* (new tab) opens a tab, one tab slot to the RIGHT of the current tab, in the foreground
*Close tab*, closes tab and takes you to the tab to the LEFT of the one you just closed.
Duplicate tab (CTRL-ALT-T), same as middle click, opens a copy of the existing tab to the RIGHT of current tab and in the background
Now I suppose if you're not used to that system and you're used to chrome, that probably sounds awful? For me, I find it immensely logical. I NEVER want a new tab or duplicate tab or middle click tab to open right at the very end of my tab grouping, why would I want that? I want this new piece of data, right next to me, where I'm working.
I don't know if finer tab control options are blocked in Chrome or not but no such addon yet exists, built in ability to do this doesn't exist. Considering the age of Chrome and the popularity of TMP, I can only guess Chrome has simply not go the option to do it.
I do use chrome but it's relegated to be my 'second monitor, good at youtube / flash video' browser while I use FF for my main work.
FWIW I'm ... an extreme browser, likely extremely addicted to the web. Right now I've managed to close several hundred tabs this week and I'm down to about 200. I like to be as low as possible of course but right now I have 200 open, it's just how I browse.
Actually, Firefox is the living proof that Communicator "suite" kind of mess killed Netscape brand and Netscape Navigator was the thing to push rather than full communication suite.
Don't get me wrong, I always liked the full integrated suite idea myself but ordinary users liked "A functioning, fast browser only" aka UNIX way of "do one thing and do it perfectly" doing things better.
"The way they're (mis)handling Windows 10 shows that they haven't learned anything, and are going to try to be as obnoxious as people will let them get away with."
Every indication we have is that Microsoft will become even more abusive.
For those tied to Microsoft Windows because of software, possibly it would be good to have 2 networks, one with Windows that has no internet access. Another network with Linux for browsing. A question: What would be the most secure way of sharing files between the 2 networks? Someone suggested running Windows in a VM, but sometimes they have vulnerabilities.
While I have been a big proponent of Firefox in the past, I've begun to abandon it for Google-Chrome,
Since FF continues to chase G-C for features and seems to be more like G-C every release, why not use G-C?
It's faster and I can get my most-used extensions there and FF is dropping support for my favorite FF extensions.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
If you are going to lump Edge and IE together, then you need to recognize that Netscape used to have a larger market share than Internet Explorer.
It took some questionable tying practices for IE to beat Netscape.
But how do we expect the under 30 crowd in IT to have any clue.
So what I'm hearing is that Firefox has beaten Edge/IE... and it did so even with a lot of underreporting of Firefox's true numbers. Yup, Edge is a steaming pile. Microsoft can't even give it away for free.
I used to love FF. The only thing better was the old Opera. But for the past several years it has steadily turned into a memory-chewing, crash-happy pile of crap.
There is ZERO reason that I should see memory usage creep up over 1.5GB when the only thing I've done is open 4 tabs to Google and left each sitting with the result of different searches for several hours.
More than 10 years ago, I reported the Firefox memory-hogging bug. That still hasn't been fixed. It's amazing to see Firefox taking more and more memory, even though nothing is being done with it. If a lot of windows and tabs are open in Firefox, Firefox becomes unstable and crashes.
Use the free Process Explorer to see the memory hogging. Mark Russinovich, the author of many free SysInternals tools, is one of the very few excellent programmers to work for Microsoft, IMO. (Another is the designer of the NTFS file system.) You can tell Process Explorer to replace the Windows Task Manager; that's a menu choice.
"Now, after experiencing Windows 10 day in and day out at the office, and the constant bewilderment of Microsoft's decisions regarding it, I have come to like Windows 10 less and less. I am to the point now where I prefer Windows 8.1 over 10."
Just curious - what don't you like about 10? I use it at home and it seems much cleaner and less annoying than Windows 7 and 8.1. Is it just the privacy issues that (rightfully so) bother you, or is something else about it broken that I'm not seeing?
I would be worried that Windows 10 would not allow denial of access.
I am a longtime FF user, as it was really the only browser that did what I wanted, how I wanted. Several years ago, it started bogging down, and really pissing me off. Add-ons kept breaking, and I really like mouse gestures. Memory leaks abound. I think it was flashplayer constantly breaking that pushed me over the edge, and I switched to Chromium for a while. It was ok. I didn't like the bookmarking at all. I was used to my mouse gestures and add-ons. But YouTube and other things worked so much better. But I got weary of just how Chromium was. Nothing wrong with it... it just wasn't FF. After about a year I switched back. I got my menus-in-the-bookmark-toolbar back. Things were where I liked them, and youtube worked again.
But lately, something happened. FF launches immediately... then sits... for 15, 20 seconds before it starts responding. Every time. It's maddening. I don't like leaving it up and running because of past trangressions (sudden extended bouts of CPU hogging). I know there are ways to clean things up and start fresh (e.g. removing browsing history) but I LIKE having my browsing history because I can search it. I use that often.
I don't care about skinning, or any of the other billion add-ons to FF. I want a few basic features (tabbing, mouse gestures, ABP, videodownloadhelper, bookmark toolbar), plenty of screen real estate, and for it to work. That's it. I really am looking forward to the next update, because the current version 46 just isn't working for me. At work I am on Win10, and IE11 sucks but we are a MS shop. I am amazed at how awful it is to "manage" favorites. I tried Edge exactly once... actually shockingly bad.
If the Dolphin browser for Android ever came to Linux I would probably be using it right now.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I don't like Chrome's UI. I don't like that it's got a very Appley "we know what's best and refuse to let you change anything" philosophy. But dang if it isn't noticeably faster pretty much across the board - Chrome keeps getting faster, Firefox keeps getting slower, it's gotten to the point where I just don't have a choice anymore. So I've been slowly moving things over to Chrome. :(
...so a resurgence might really just be migration to the palemoon firefox fork.