
Has Chrome fully taken over yet? - datalist
https://haschromefullytakenoveryet.com
======
meddlepal
I hope not, vive la Firefox!

I am disheartened though that I feel compelled to use Chrome now in some cases
because Google's UI's are poorly optimized outside Chrome (looking at your
GCloud UI and YouTube) and some companies have made a decision to only support
Chrome (looking at you Slack voice chat).

~~~
whatshisface
> _some companies have made a decision to only support Chrome (looking at you
> Slack voice chat)_

Well, there you have it. The beginning of the process that will remind
everybody why browser monocultures are horrible things.

~~~
bpye
Sadly using Firefox on Android is an exercise in frustration. There are
numerous sites I have to open in Chrome as they are in some way broken in
Firefox.

~~~
enitihas
I think firefox android user experience can be improved in a lot of cases by
simply setting the User Agent to chrome. I have found that this works very
well with a lot of sites. For example, doing a google search for any sports
league gives you a nice interactive table with matches and standings in
chrome, but with firefox the table lacks any interactivity. However, setting
the UA to chrome makes the table work very well.

Also, I feel firefox consumes less battery than chrome on Android. I used to
use chrome exclusively, and it would always show up as the largest consumer of
battery. After switching to firefox battery life has been much better.

~~~
rwmj
I wonder if this could be considered anticompetitive (in the legal sense)?

------
dpecos
Chrome is a really nice browser, but we're creating a monopoly for it, not
Google, ourselves.

I'm not going to talk about Google being evil or not. But as history has
shown, monopolies never result in anything good for the people.

That's why I'm choosing Firefox as my day to day browser, not because it's
better or free from a controlling enterprise, but because I want to keep the
web as an open and diverse system, and for that, we need different players to
play in equal conditions.

It's up to every one of us to achieve this, and to be honest, what are you
missing in Firefox that Chrome does? It's quite a nice and decent browser
nowadays.

~~~
rc_mob
Oh. I just think FF is a better browser. Never liked Chrome at all.

~~~
IamAHuman
I tried switching from Chrome (actually I use chromium) to Firefox, but I
switched back after one day. I didn't have any problems with any websites in
Firefox, but the user interface of Firefox is just lightyears behind Chrome.
What really was a deal breaker for me is how Firefox handles tabs, it's just
not usable if you open more than 15 tabs in total because you can't move more
than one tab at a time.

When I look online for say a RAM upgrade for my computer, I open a few tabs
with online shops, then I open a new tab for each product, now there are ~40
tabs open and I want to move half of them to the beginning of the tab bar or
to a new window. In chrome I press shift, select multiple tabs and move them,
In Firefox I have to drag each tab to it's new position one after another.

In about:config there's a flag to enable tab multiselect, but you still can't
move more than one tab at a time.

There's a few more minor issues like this and a 5 year old unfixed bug with
tiling window managers in Firefox. With Firefox I just spend more time
fighting the browser than browsing the web.

~~~
systemcluster
I just tried it, and moving multiple selected tabs does work in Firefox 64
(Dev Edition).

~~~
IamAHuman
If that's the case I'll give it a try again, last time I tried Firefox it had
version 62, so that must be a recent change.

------
haack
Having switched back to Firefox and Duckduckgo very recently, I'm feeling much
more optimistic about the future of a free web. Both have been on par with
Chrome/Google in terms of speed and performance.

Now just need to break away from gmail and calendar.

~~~
stabbles
I especially like how relevant the search results in DuckDuckGo are whenever I
query `[search term] !g`

~~~
apatters
Nothing beats searx.me - Google's results are good (but slipping), but when
you combine Google, DDG and Bing, it doesn't get any better

~~~
maxxxxx
Never heard of this before but will give it a try.

------
crazygringo
How many countries Chrome is ranked #1 in doesn't matter and is a distraction.

Overall market share is infinitely more important.

E.g. assuming a two-browser world, it would be drastically more of a problem
for Chrome to have 99% market penetration in 98 countries and 49% in the other
97 (so ranked #1 in only half, but still a huge problem)... than it is to have
51% market penetration in 192 countries and 49% penetration in a remaining 3
(so ranked #1 in nearly all, but no problem at all).

The real question from a healthy competition standpoint is, what is the
_market share_ which we consider to be "fully taken over", where competitors
are no longer viable?

~~~
treve
Yea, this statistic is as bad of a representation of marketshare, as
democracies without proportional representation.

------
kakaorka
I feel like it's scary what we've reached. Giving all our browsing history and
activity to a surveillance company.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
Human beings are pretty good, on the whole, about tradeoffs. For most people,
the information they're trading away is only theoretically valuable, but the
products they receive in return have very tangible value.

~~~
xg15
I agree - because humans generally seem to be pretty bad at including more
than the immediate here and now in their tradeoff calculations.

I'd see this as an argument why stuff like privacy _can 't_ be left to
individual choice.

~~~
tehduder9
So if I didn't voluntarily giving up my privacy for something (an invaluable
product to use) you wouldn't let me? Why? It's none of your business what I
desire from my personal privacy.

~~~
xg15
Because your personal valuation is likely very off-the-mark because the
consequences of that action may lie far into the future or may actually happen
to others and not yourself.

Also, if the product is really "invaluable" to you (e.g. you have no choice
but to use it) then your choice to give up privacy wouldn't be voluntary
either.

(Edit: added first paragraph)

------
weinzierl

       Has Chrome fully taken over yet?
    
                   No 
    
       These 3 brave countries still have managed to resist Google's charm
     
           Cuba
           Liberia
           Eritrea
    

So, essentially yes.

These countries combined have less than 4 million people with Internet access.
Most of them are in Cuba. Eritrea is the country with the lowest number of
people with Internet access per resident and a rate of increase that is as low
as that of industrial nations with saturated Internet penetration[1].

Digging into this a bit deeper on statcounter[2] there are a few other
surprises:

\- Firefox is only number four after Chrome, Safari and UC Browser.

\- Still Chrome is the market leader in China - by far.

\- Germany has been a Chrome holdout for a long time, but not any more,
apparently.

[1] [http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users-by-
country/](http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users-by-country/)

[2]
[http://gs.statcounter.com/browhttp://gs.statcounter.com/brow...](http://gs.statcounter.com/browhttp://gs.statcounter.com/browser-
market-share/all/germanyser-market-share/all/germany)

~~~
asveikau
Sub-100% market share in a populated country still means that a lot of people
are using alternatives. That is why it seems absurd to break it down by
country in order to declare a "total" victory. I sometimes use Firefox in the
US - that fact alone says you cannot say it's "fully taken over" in my
country.

------
rman666
No! Im still lovin’ Firefox:-)

~~~
mattmaroon
How is their Android app? Been debating trying them out again.

~~~
beatgammit
I use it and like it, and they'll be rolling out an update somewhat soon with
a complete makeover of the rendering engine (switching to GeckoView from
whatever they have now), so I'm hopeful that rendering will get faster.

I like it because:

\- syncs with desktop Firefox \- has extensions (I mostly use Bitwarden and an
ad blocker) \- interface is nice to use \- available in F-Droid

It's fast enough for me, though I haven't used mobile Chrome for years, so I
guess I don't know what I'm missing.

~~~
Brakenshire
The switch to Geckoview is for Firefox Focus, which previously used Blink (the
Chrome rendering engine).

Standard Firefox for Android has used Gecko from the start. It is gradually
being upgraded using the Quantum improvements, but the rate of change seems
slow. I thought that the emphasis on multi-threaded processing in Quantum
would be particularly useful for mobile, because the single threaded
processing capability of mobile (and particularly non-Apple mobile chips) is
very limited, but there don't seem to have been massive improvements.

I think it’s a shame they relegated Servo to a research project, integrating
Servo into Gecko has been long-winded, and the most important target of
porting a parallel/multi-threaded layout engine isn’t even being discussed.
Frankly, given their $500m budget, their core mission of browser development,
and the massive importance of mobile, they probably should have pursued both
Gecko and Servo at the same time. Even if Servo only supported flexbox layouts
it could be very useful as a wrapper while wider compability was being
pursued. The emphasis now is on WebVR, which seems not very relevant to the
mass market.

~~~
Yoric
The Servo team is very active.

Unfortunately, it's trying to hit a fast-moving target, and that's really
hard. Which is the reason for which I believe nobody else is currently
pursuing any new web engine.

------
danso
analytics.usa.gov provides Google Analytics-collected stats of all the users
who visit U.S. federal websites, including browser and OS info. As of right
now, Chrome is at 46.4%.

I couldn't find at the moment a historical dataset > 90 days. The Internet
Archive snapshot of the JSON from April 2015 [0] shows Chrome's share at
35.3%.

edit: the 2018 vs 2015 numbers for the other browsers:

\- Safari (iOS and macOS): 28.6% / 19.9%

\- IE (all versions, but not Edge): 10.9% / 28.2%

\- Firefox: 4.7% / 11%

[0]
[https://web.archive.org/web/20150412223314/https://analytics...](https://web.archive.org/web/20150412223314/https://analytics.usa.gov/data/live/browsers.json)

------
xg15
A lot of comments in this thread seem to argue that the share of countries is
less important than the overall market share. I think it's not completely
unimportant either. Not everyone uses the same corners of the internet. Yes,
many things are centralised but there are still a lot of language/country
specific sites around, which will adopt to the specific ecosystem in their
country. So if Chrome has 99% market share in a certain country, it's likely
that local sites will optimize for it and using other browsers will generally
be harder in that country.

The other way around, if Chrome is _not_ dominant in a certain country, that
might not have effects in other countries where they are.

As an extreme example, suppose China and Russia banned Chrome and mandated the
use of special domestic browsers - but Chrome climbed to 99% market share
everywhere else. Then the global market share would be far below 90%,
nevertheless you wouldn't have an actual choice anywhere in the world.

~~~
crazygringo
But a count of countries is a pretty arbitrary way to slice market share, and
one of the worse ways in my opinion.

If you want to measure the degree of competition in different corners of the
internet, then 1) it's still about market share and not about which is top-
ranked, and 2) better slices could be market share in desktop vs. mobile, in
workplace vs. home, and in something more macro such as "more free"
populations (U.S., Europe) vs "less free" populations (China, Russia).

------
_ph_
At least for me, Firefox has taken over again. I am using it on macOS, iOS and
of course Linux. The tipping point for me was the new rendering engine,
written in Rust, but I really like features like sending tabs to my other
machines. On iOS, I prefer the user interface with tabs shown as small icons
to the one of Safari.

------
burtonator
One of the amazing things about Chrome which is under rated is the ecosystem
in Open Source tooling that it's created.

Specifically V8, Chromium, NodeJS, and Electron.

I've been working in an offline browser and documentation platform named Polar
which is based on Electron.

[https://getpolarized.io/](https://getpolarized.io/)

Obviously it heavily relies on Electron + Chrome internals but the fact that I
can control the full browser is pretty amazing.

This is a hybrid desktop+browser app which allows me to some pretty awesome
things.

For example, I can inject myself directly into the networking stack in
Electron.

This is how Polar implements offline browsing. It captures the traffic of a
web page you're visiting and then keeps it in a cache for your usage forever.
No worrying about the site vanishing or your network going offline.

Now I _COULD_ do this with a PWA and service workers, possibly, but I think
the main thing I'm worried about is Google's control over the extension
install process.

I'm anticipating at some point that they might block service workers that
essentially register for * ... that actually DOES make a lot of sense to
prevent malware - but then I'm not malware.

------
xoa
Does anyone know what the actual metrics being used for this site are? Maybe
it was discussed in a previous HN? I don't see in the present environment how
Chrome can ever reach the kind of power IE once had given the existence of iOS
if nothing else. It's not just about pure marketshare either, it's about value
share (which is often the stat that companies actually care about, with
marketshare only being an occasionally useful proxy measure). Even if
alternate platform users like iOS/Mac/Linux who don't use Chrome were only
10-30% of users say, what percent of _revenue_ do they represent? It's not a
uniform distribution amongst the general population.

And while there remain and probably always will be quirks between browsers and
standards one implements that others don't yet and so on, I don't think there
is anything quite like ActiveX remaining in the modern web.

------
shubhamjain
Are those countries fighting back in any real sense, or it's a consequence of
limited internet access? In Liberia, you can only get very limited and slow
internet costing as much as $6 / hour [1]. And for Cubans, the problem was
severe enough to make an offline version of the internet (a periodically
updated hard-disk) be of any practical value [2]. The stats are meaningless
without total traffic share of these countries.

[1]: [https://www.lonelyplanet.com/liberia/internet-
access](https://www.lonelyplanet.com/liberia/internet-access)

[2]: [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/23/cuba-
offline-i...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/23/cuba-offline-
internet-weekly-packet-external-hard-drives)

~~~
tyingq
_" The stats are meaningless without total traffic share of these countries"_

They do publish the sample sizes per country. I assume the sample size is
proportional to traffic share, but it's not stated explicitly. Some of it does
look odd...the sample size for Turkey is close to the sample size for the US.
[http://gs.statcounter.com/sample-
size/StatCounterGlobalStats...](http://gs.statcounter.com/sample-
size/StatCounterGlobalStatsSep15_SampleSizeCountryBreakdown.csv)

------
esotericn
It seems to me that the web has split into two.

Developers that care are using browsers like Firefox and avoiding websites
full of cruft (e.g. GDPR/Cookie/Newsletter/Advert/... popups).

The general public is using whatever's preinstalled on their phone to go to
whatever websites are advertised to them.

There's some overlap (e.g. obviously these websites exist because there are
developers that have no principles and design the GDPR banner stuff), of
course.

I don't know how we break that. I'm not sure if we even should - I can tell my
friends and family that they should boycott anti-user practices, but they
don't care, and that's as far as it goes.

For the general public, computers are toasters. Whatever's marketed most will
win. Google has a bigger budget (and greater control over services people use
on the web in general) than Mozilla.

------
nerdponx
Is there a browser with something like uBlock Origin/Matrix built into the
browser engine? Something like SELinux for the web. The user should have the
option to take fine-grained control over the content in their browser on a
site-by-site basis.

------
gator-io
data on share
[https://netmarketshare.com/?options=%7B%22filter%22%3A%7B%22...](https://netmarketshare.com/?options=%7B%22filter%22%3A%7B%22%24and%22%3A%5B%7B%22deviceType%22%3A%7B%22%24in%22%3A%5B%22Desktop%2Flaptop%22%5D%7D%7D%5D%7D%2C%22dateLabel%22%3A%22Trend%22%2C%22attributes%22%3A%22share%22%2C%22group%22%3A%22browser%22%2C%22sort%22%3A%7B%22share%22%3A-1%7D%2C%22id%22%3A%22browsersDesktop%22%2C%22dateInterval%22%3A%22Monthly%22%2C%22dateStart%22%3A%222017-11%22%2C%22dateEnd%22%3A%222018-10%22%2C%22segments%22%3A%22-1000%22%7D)

~~~
shorsher
Am I missing something or is Brave not on this list whatsoever?

~~~
tyingq
Brave doesn't have a unique User-Agent.

 _" Removed Brave from the User Agent HTTP header to reduce fingerprinting"_
[https://github.com/brave/browser-
laptop/blob/master/CHANGELO...](https://github.com/brave/browser-
laptop/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md#090)

------
Havoc
Switch to FF recently was entirely painless - the seem functionally
identically for my usage cases. Probably prefer chrome on the whole but ugh fk
google and their stance to privacy

~~~
passthejoe
I switched to Firefox just to have one less Google-y thing in my life, and the
FF browser has gotten better and better in recent releases.

------
MrP
Firefox is going to win again, by the way.

We are the same intransigent nerds that originally moved to FF over IE6 on
principle, only this time also with more disposable income (You know, the
people you want to show ads to), on top of technical acumen and prescriptive
influence.

Chrome is a couple more undeleteable tracking cookies or proprietary languages
away from the tipping point.

~~~
rjsw
Firefox keeps getting new languages added to it too.

I'm still running Firefox 52 ESR on anything lower powered.

------
outside1234
If you haven’t switched to Brave yet from Chrome, you should. Great browser
built on open source

~~~
timbit42
It's also built on Chrome but BAT will be supported on other browsers soon.

------
redsparrow
I've been using Vivaldi for a while and find it performs better than Firefox
on my Mac, especially since version 2.0. I prefer the Firefox license, but
prefer using Vivaldi.

------
philshem
WebUsb is pretty cool
[https://github.com/WICG/webusb](https://github.com/WICG/webusb)

------
m52go
I think it's hilarious that 2 of the 3 countries hailed as bastions of freedom
(by this 1 metric) include Cuba and Eritrea.

~~~
porphyrogene
"Hailed as bastions of freedom" in what way? The only descriptor used to
describe countries on the list is the satirical use of "brave".

~~~
m52go
By resisting Google, which to me implies that they're instead using Firefox.
That may not be true, as they may be stuck on IE or dominated by some other
browser. I don't know the numbers...it was just a bad attempt at humor.

------
tobyhinloopen
Fulltime Safari user here :) Only using chrome for development.

I guess even North Korea are active Chrome users? Who would have guessed.

------
ourmandave
We could slow down the inevitable if Microsoft makes it so you can't download
Chrome using Edge.

------
rglullis
Firefox on Desktop, Brave on Android.

~~~
malikNF
Isn't brave based on chrome?

------
sn41
I use Seamonkey. I wonder if there are people who prefer Seamonkey over
Firefox.

~~~
monetus
How is going for you? I've been curious about how often it has trouble
rendering a site.

~~~
sn41
It renders most websites I visit (reddit, Facebook etc.) fine enough. It takes
a long time to start up, however.

One really bad point about it is that on MacBooks, it seems to use up the
battery charge really fast.

------
skrebbel
Can someone explain to me what those countries do wrt Chrome?

~~~
kristofferR
It's just a listing of countries where Chrome is not the most used browser.
I'm guessing IE is more popular in those countries, due to old computing
equipment being popular.

~~~
datalist
For these three countries it is Firefox with the largest market share.

------
pictur
The chrome is still bad. and Firefox is still and still bad.

