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Microsoft Browser Usage Drops 50% As Chrome Soars (networkworld.com)
An anonymous reader quotes Network World's report about new statistics from analytics vendor Net Applications:
From March 2015 to February 2017, the use of Microsoft's IE and Edge on Windows personal computers plummeted. Two years ago, the browsers were run by 62% of Windows PC owners; last month, the figure had fallen by more than half, to just 27%. Simultaneous with the decline of IE has been the rise of Chrome. The user share of Google's browser -- its share of all browsers on all operating systems -- more than doubled in the last two years, jumping from 25% in March 2015 to 59.5% last month. Along the way, Chrome supplanted IE to become the world's most-used browser...
In the last 24 months, Mozilla's Firefox -- the other major browser alternative to Chrome for macOS users -- has barely budged, losing just two-tenths of a percentage point in user share. [And] in March 2015, an estimated 69% of all Mac owners used Safari to go online. But by last month, that number had dropped to 56%, a drop of 13 percentage points -- representing a decline of nearly a fifth of the share of two years prior.
In the last 24 months, Mozilla's Firefox -- the other major browser alternative to Chrome for macOS users -- has barely budged, losing just two-tenths of a percentage point in user share. [And] in March 2015, an estimated 69% of all Mac owners used Safari to go online. But by last month, that number had dropped to 56%, a drop of 13 percentage points -- representing a decline of nearly a fifth of the share of two years prior.
Firefox became a bloated monster (built in weird chat client, seriously?). Microsoft ... well, yeah.
Opera became ... skinned Chrome.
What's left? Chrome.
I can say that while Firefox people definitely haven't "given up," they keep killing every feature people love, and bringing in features that their core demographic doesn't care about. 64-bit doesn't matter, it has to be installed differently and my mother isn't going to figure out how or which version she's launching. Multi-process? For what? Javascript apps are still going to run in a single thread, and background tabs are still going to be slowed to a crawl. If they don't, nobody will notice anyway.
The add-on story is far worse. They keep threatening to get rid of extensions and only support X or Y type (is XUL still being pushed? I haven't checked lately). There's so many uncertainties there.
What I'm saying is, I love Firefox as a piece of tech, but they keep abandoning their community in the pursuit of some ideal that none of their users care about. My favorite example of this? There is a bug in Firefox where if you disable a button in Javascript for whatever reason, and then refresh the page, that button will remain disabled because it's "preserving the form state" even if the HTML clearly defines it should start enabled (like form validation or something, it doesn't matter, really). This is /only/ in Firefox, and the devs won't accept a fix patch or fix it themselves, because "it would be a bad user experience." The user can't disable or enable a button without using Javascript anyway, and that's not a user at that point. Logically, without any opinion on what should be done, none of this behavior should exist, but it was added by design from the core devs.
That is not the only example, but it is a distilled version of their attitude towards users and devs. Their story is the only reality. It is as this point that any project ultimately loses all but the die-hard fans. Lots of historical precedence on that one.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/s... It's 6 years old, the Bootstrap team started weighing in 3 years ago. This is why people might believe they have "given up." An incorrect wording in my opinion, but the sentiment is accurate and measurable in their written communications.
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Firefox's problem is that they do not listen to actual users and their social agenda which many find distrusting (the entire Brendan Eich thing and the SJW rules in rust code of conduct).
I somewhat stopped evangelizing it a bit earlier when it became bloaty and started straying from the light and fast browser it used to be. Chrome filled the gap nicely and I became use to it from various android devices so I didn't need to relearn or re-familiarize myself with the layout every other release. Right now, I will use either, but if asked, I recommend Chrome over Firefox because of it's default on other devices and I know the agenda with google (you are the product not consumer).