Do More People Use Firefox Than Edge and IE Combined? (computerworld.com)

A funny thing happened when Net Applications' statistics began excluding fake traffic from ad-defrauding bots. Computerworld reports: Microsoft's Edge browser is less popular with Windows 10 users than earlier thought, if revised data from a U.S. analytics vendor can be believed. According to Net Applications of Aliso Viejo, Calif., Edge has been designated the primary browser by fewer than one in six Windows 10 users for more than a year and a half. That's a significant downgrading of Edge's user share statistics from the browser's portrayal before this month...

By comparing Edge's old and new shares, it was evident that as much as half of the earlier Edge traffic had been faked by bots. The portion of Edge's share credited to bots fluctuated month to month, but fell below 30% in only 4 of the 19 months for which Net Applications provided data... Microsoft's legacy browser, Internet Explorer (IE) also was revealed as a Potemkin village. Under the old data regime, which included bots, IE's user share was overblown, at times more than double the no-bots reality. Take May 2016 as an example. With bots, Net Applications pegged IE at 33.7%; without bots, IE's user share dwindled to just 14.9%. Together, IE and Edge - in other words, Microsoft's browsers - accounted for only 16.3% of the global user share last month using Net Applications' new calculations... In fact, the combined IE and Edge now face a once unthinkable fate: falling beneath Mozilla's Firefox.
StatCounter's stats on browser usage already show more people have already been using Firefox than both of Microsoft's browsers combined -- in 12 of the last 13 months.

Comments

It's reverse for me, at work.

[Nutria]

Required web-based systems running SAP and requiring 2FA just don't work well with FF, and Chrome refuses to connect to the server (something to do with TLS, no doubt).

Thus, I use IE11 most frequently.

Re:It's reverse for me, at work.

[Nutria]

Out in the real world, both of Microsoft's browsers are years behind FF and Chrome and lack most of the functionality that users have come to expect.

The Real World is where I get my paycheck. Thus, I use IE11.

Re:It's reverse for me, at work.

[AmiMoJo]

We have the opposite problem. Our sites only work in Chrome and Firefox. We use Google maps extensively and IE11 doesn't work properly. In Edge the maps work but it's implementation of the HTML audio tag doesn't seem to work reliably.

Since none of our customers are without access to either Firefox or Chrome, it's not worth fixing.

Firefox is abusing its market share

[Anonymous Coward]

It decided to take its trust and waste it on a gimmick for a TV show causing malware alerts and even disrupting people’s exams. Thats on top of the XULocolypse and Pocket. Projects like Pale Moon and Waterfox are minor patches to the Mozilla problem we need a big fork that gets rid of the gimmick developers just like Xfree86 to X.org and EGCS to GCC.

Edge pitches so funny it hurts

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Got a Win10 recently. The homepage that came preloaded out of the box in Edge was some serious comparison stats with chrome. In default apps settings switching out of edge begs "please give edge a chance" or something like that. Looks like the only use for edge is to download chrome or firefox.

There is a God. There is karma. All they did to Netscape! It is justice delayed, no doubt, and all the jerks who did that have cashed out and gone. But I do feel some schadenfreude looking at its problems.

Re:Edge pitches so funny it hurts

[arth1]

FTP? I still use gopher, you insensitive clod!
(I actually do - some of the documentation I sometimes access is in a local gopherspace, and hasn't been ported to web yet. One day....)

FTP pretty much died as mainstream when NAT routers became ubiquitous. Switching from active (PORT) to passive (PASV) ftp on the client side only worked until the FTP servers themselves were also behind a NAT. NAT on both sides means "forget it", unless the server side has an admin who actually knows what he's doing, and controls both the firewall and the FTP server.

The final nail was the insecurity added because the newer generation of "admins" (and I use this term loosely) didn't understand the FTP protocol, or how to correctly open different ports in different directions, and added rules that also let in hackers. There's likely ten misconfigured FTP firewall rules for each correctly configured one.

You're not going to believe me ...

[eneville]

I use FF heavily at home. Chrome at work. On the phone, however, I use opera most, very light and fast to navigate within a page.

Firefox is now being banned on some networks

[Anonymous Coward]

I just got word that Firefox will be completely banned on our network after Mozilla's recent "Looking Glass" advertisement extension injection attack. Our network admins have deemed Firefox to effectively be a form of malware after that stunt. We've been told we'll be spending the next few days removing all traces of Firefox from our network's computers.

I don't know what this will mean for those of us who need to test our software using Firefox. Maybe we'll be able to talk the network admins into allowing us to run heavily isolated VMs with Firefox installed. But more realistically, we'll probably just stop supporting Firefox, as it's already only used by about 4% of our product's users. That puts it well below Chrome, Safari, and IE/Edge. We're even seeing more Opera users than Firefox users these days.

Edge can't even do basic tasks!

[nctritech]

I've got Firefox and use it 100% of the time. I push everyone to it. Microsoft is desperate to move people to Edge and wants us to think it's faster than everything. That's fine, but even if it was the fastest browser ever, I can't even do simple things in it. I've navigated to this very page in Edge and I'll tell you what is missing when I right-click some things:

Save page, undo close tab, view page info, view page source, inspect element, and everything I have add-ons to get. Right-click on an image and you can't view image, copy image, or copy image location, only save it or open the link under it. No bookmark link, save link, or open in private window.

Just tried a page with auto-play video and there was no way to mute the tab like in Firefox. One major feature I love in Firefox is highlighting a non-linked URL or domain name and being able to right-click it and follow it as a link anyway, and being able to highlight and search any phrase on a page is another good one. None of that is in Edge. Edge is NOT a browser for getting things done; it's a browser for crappy tablets and people that have no idea how to internet on them. Even then, that's a bit of a stretch; way too many basic functions are missing to take it seriously. Saving web pages locally was in Netscape and IE in the mid-1990s, for god's sake!

Re:Edge can't even do basic tasks!

[TFlan91]

...Edge is NOT a browser for getting things done; ...

Correction:

Edge is for getting Chrome or Firefox.

Re:Edge can't even do basic tasks!

[Tablizer]

Microsoft screwed the pooch. People sometimes used IE for compatibility. Edge came along and was neither compatible with IE nor had many features. Since people saw that IE is being phased out for Edge, they had no reason to keep using IE and no reason to use Edge because its feature-poor. Edge could someday catch up, but people won't wait around.

MS forgot the main reason people use MS is compatibility and familiarity. They keep losing when they try to compete on raw merit. Edge is yet another example.

Re:Firefox sends user data to Google and others

[Bert64]

Use a third party build of Firefox or Chromium... A few people produce such builds which have all the telemetry stuff either removed or disabled by default. If you're concerned about the binaries these projects provide, grab the source and build it yourself.