
Edge beats Firefox to become second most popular browser - me551ah
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-edge-is-now-2nd-most-popular-desktop-browser-beats-firefox/
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fenwick67
As expected, we're approaching a web browser monoculture. When you have an
open platform where only one company controls it, it fails to be open any
more. I'm sincerely worried about an ad company controlling the largest source
of information on Earth.

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beefbroccoli
It's not a browser monoculture, it's a browser-engine monoculture. I for one
welcome our new overlords.

I think it's great to have diversity in a browsers; one browser might focus on
being light weight, while another might have a new spin on the UI.

But I do NOT want diversity in how different browsers render a table.

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fgonzag
You must have missed the 90s. When a single vendor mandated every new
technology in the browser space. ActiveX and other pleasantries came out of
those times.

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beefbroccoli
I remember the 90's. It was the era of "Best viewed in X version Y".

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WorldPeas
I'm a firefox user myself, and am slightly angered by this news, but at the
same time, the good news is that because most of these users are upgrading
their copy of windows, which means fewer people using IE11! The death of IE11
can't come soon enough, at least there's a silver lining to this cloud.

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djdeusudufy
Firefox had been a bad browser for years, the only people I ever meet who use
it heavily are tech enthusiasts and privacy activists. If nobody is choosing
your browser for practical reasons then you've failed to make a useful browser
but pointing this out only ever results in jeering and being told some token
line like "Compromise means the erosion of privacy!". This is what that
philosophy gets you and down the line I expect the real situation will be
Firefox in 4th since Brave has been gaining momentum too.

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rumanator
> Firefox had been a bad browser for years

Honestly I have no idea how someone can honestly arrive at this conclusion. I
have been continuously using both Chrome and Firefox and I'm yet to notice any
practical difference between them.

I'm curious, in your opinion what's the worse thing about Firefox?

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djdeusudufy
Sure. Firefox doesn't work with acceptable universality first and foremost,
I'd never use Firefox to take an online test at University for example because
the one in a million chance it has a hiccup isn't worth the risk when using
Chrome or Edge is riskless. The way that situation arise may not be Mozilla's
fault but it doesn't change the reality. There are ways to make Firefox more
reliable in terms of hiccups on websites but we're past the point of asking
users to do extra work being acceptable if they're not your employee.

Perhaps relatedly, Firefox's features for syncing across devices are
unappealing because there aren't terribly many Mozilla products that I care
about whereas most people have a Gmail and many also have Microsoft accounts.
I can't imagine the circumstance that would lead me to have a Mozilla account
already and so it's just one more thing to have to think about in an ecosystem
where I have other options.

Extension support is stronger in Firefox but most users aren't heavy extension
users and if they are it's probably an adblocker. Ad-blocking is a lot less
special now since most of the competing browser's have acceptable adblock
options whereas once upon a time Firefox was the only choice if you wanted a
not awful internet experience.

Edge pays you to use it, Brave does this too but have yet to see the growth of
Edge yet I feel it's worth acknowledging because this might just be the cost
of trying to genuinely compete with Chrome. Chrome doesn't pay but it has
little reason to since it's Chrome.

Finally, Firefox's mobile browser is terrible. Chrome is similarly terrible in
terms of UI but Edge and Brave are light-years ahead in terms of having a
layout suitable for a mobile device. It's worth noting this might change in
the future since Firefox Lite and Firefox Focus both have much better UIs for
mobile than the flagship mobile browser but until the flagship catches up
those are just novelties for alternate markets.

I'm sure Firefox is still the 'ethical' browser and it runs fine for non-
critical web usage, but the market is past that being enough to make a web
browser stand out in the mainstream. Nobody wants to manage two web browsers
when they could make due with one and so it makes the most sense to just use
the critical task browser for eveything. Related to this, most people don't
have the extreme outlook on browser ethics that the privacy movement does and
so Firefox doesn't offer them anything in that regard anyway. It flies on
hacker news to handwave this part as a matter of normies just not knowing
better (informed consent arguments) but the reality is that no one has made a
convincing argument for demonstrating how all of this is actually damaging the
mainstream users and the topics are old enough that there's been plenty of
time to come up with persuasive arguments

Summarized, Firefox's strengths are things that mainly appeal to particular
ideologies. For people who don't share those ideologies it doesn't offer
anything over the other browsers and I've seen little that suggests Firefox
will be able to overcome this hurdle since its identity these days is built on
being the private/ethical browser.

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peschu
Sorry to say that, but...you use a lot of words and in the end you say
nothing...

Some points are just personal preference (like mobile UI) and ecosystem(I
really like the function to send a tab to my mobile...can't remember that
chrome had it at least I never used it in chrome)

And other points are just wrong/not true ... or missing proof for your strange
assumptions...

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djdeusudufy
Mobile UI is far from preference in the browser examples I used. Menus and
interactive elements at the top of the screen are holdovers from the desktop.
Bottom screen menus are vastly easier for exclusive thumb use. Considering
that both Focus and Lite adhere to this, I suspect Mozilla knows it as well.

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rumanator
At best your complains boil down to subjective and highly exaggerated and
outright nonsense nitpicking.

The only thing that Firefox mobile has at the top of the screen are the URL
bar, which automatically hides when the user scrolls down, and a couple of
buttons piggy backing to save on screen real estate.

And complaining about these UI elements in Firefox mobile while boasting
Chrome mobile as the best is something that makes absolutely zero sense, as
Chrome mobile has the exact same UI elements at the exact same position.

It seems you are desperate to both find reasons to criticize and justify your
complains at a rational and factual level.

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Barrin92
I have to say I wouldn't have thought it but I really like Microsoft's take on
Chromium. It seems at least for some reason faster and more responsive than
Chrome although it's built on pretty much the same base.

The "reader view" is quite nice and the text to speech feature is great, the
quality is really good. It also seems to be getting vertical tabs pretty soon.
For now I'm only using it on windows though, it'd be great if there was a
linux version at some point.

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pjbk
It is also very responsive in Android. I use FF in the desktop but in my phone
and tablets it is practically unusable. Switched to Edge there a couple of
years ago and it was a smooth transition and has some good configuration
options, like blocking ads.

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jrnichols
Maybe it was in the article and I missed it, but has Edge started to eat into
Google Chrome's marketshare at all? Or Safari's? (Yes, I know, Safari's
marketshare is less than 4%, but it's been consistent.)

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stevavoliajvar
:(

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techslave
why are folks sad about this? Edge is great. It doesn’t make firefox any less
great.

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peschu
really strange how fast people forget what kind of company microsoft is...

so: F*CK MS! Viva la revolucion!! (somebody has to say it) :)

Everyone is talking about compliance and risk management and all that blabla,
but the most obvious and highest risk (and btw not compliant to GDPR) of a
quasi monopolist (with closed source), is not being taken into account...

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hereisdx
:(

