
Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time - okket
http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/05/firefox-overtakes-microsoft-internet-explorer-edge-browsers-first-time-statcounter/
======
mmastrac
Wow. I remember watching these stats, waiting for Firefox to edge past IE in
the 2000s. Chrome really took the ball and ran with it. They had the advantage
of seeing things that FF did that really worked (tabs, extensions, find-as-
you-type) and the intelligence to iterate on that (multi-process support, a
world-class debugger) and a really solid foundation in WebKit (née KHTML).

In a way Chrome was in the right place at the right time, with the right bunch
of people. If they hadn't launched, Firefox would likely be sitting where
Chrome is now, though likely without a bunch of drive to improve things as
much as they currently have.

Of course, in an alternate universe where Firefox was #1 and IE #2, we might
have had royalty-free video codecs mandated by standards and no W3C-endorsed
DRM...

~~~
kpcyrd
> Chrome really took the ball and ran with it

I'm still kind of bitter with the way they did that. A lot of windows
installers, which usually installed you toolbars if you forgot to uncheck a
box, started installing chrome as your default browser if you forgot to
uncheck a box.

I've seen a lot of non-technical people using chrome who have no idea what
chrome is or remembering giving consent to installing chrome.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Chrome also had the advantage of being advertised on Google.com.

~~~
zobzu
anywhere i go without an adblocker begs me to install chrome and stop using
whatever horrible outdated browser im using (according to the google ad), and
how youtube, etc work best with chrome anyway

thats quite a lot of powerful advertisement, on the sites people browse every
day. its not too different than being part of the default install IMO ;-)

and of course - chrome is a pretty good browser (though edge is actually quite
good and firefox is pretty much ok as well despite not yet doing sandboxing)

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
And the thing is it's sadly not a lie. YouTube and such _do_ work best with
Chrome. Google's effective web vertical integration means they control every
stage of the pipeline. They control the sites and the browser. They can deploy
experimental tech in Chrome which nobody knows about and which only Google
sites use.

It's terrifying.

~~~
ahochhaus
One example of "google only APIs" that I ran into recently is the chrome
extension browserAction.openPopup API. This API is whitelisted (in stable) for
use by the Google Cast extension. Extensions authored outside of Google cannot
use it. This is creates an uneven playing field.

[https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=436489](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=436489)

~~~
DarkLinkXXXX
It seems it's not necessarily malicious. From
[https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=399859](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=399859):

"The popup is anchored to the extension icon, which might be in overflow or
not even exist, in which case it is anchored to the Wrench menu. That kind of
anchoring would make the message in the popup to appear to be from the Chrome
browser (since it points to the chrome UI) and would present a vector for
tricking users into thinking the message is from a trusted source.

Since this is not safe to allow all extensions to do we'd need a lot better
reasoning than "I'd like to use this in my extension" before allowing
widespread use of this API."

~~~
ahochhaus
I agree that the API limitation is most likely not malicious and I did not
intend to imply otherwise. Still, lack of malice does not change the fact that
the Google Cast extension has a competitive advantage over other non-Google
extensions (which can't use all of the same APIs).

------
SimeVidas
Mozilla: We are a non-profit and we protect your privacy; we won’t use your
data to make money.

Most users: Nah, man. We’ll go with the search engine and ad network company.

~~~
larrik
Every time I try to switch to Firefox, it just doesn't work as well, and I
switch back. I'd rather Firefox over Chrome for philosophical reasons, but I
feel like Firefox just isn't there technologically. It's getting better, but
they really let it stagnate back in the day.

~~~
distances
Can you elaborate on this? I've tried Chromium once and again, but always fall
back to Firefox as it feels better to me. Direct reasons are the address bar
functionality and better privacy support out of the box, but also some generic
feel is somehow just more familiar to me.

Firefox does have global freezes on particularly heavy pages due to the single
process model. It's rare enough not to bother me much though.

As a tip, the Firefox Android version allows add-ons -- uBlock most
critically. It's just great.

~~~
SimeVidas
Multi-process is being tested in Firefox Beta right now, according to
[https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Schedule](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Schedule).

~~~
epoch1970
While some progress is being made, it worries me that it's taking so long to
get this functionality into the release versions. I'm not suggesting it should
be rushed out, of course. But the Electrolysis efforts date back to 2009, if
not earlier. That's a long time to make users wait!

~~~
AckSyn
Why does this concern you? Mozilla, isn't as cavalier as Google as far as
releases are. I remember a time in chrome's beginning it was horribly unstable
but patched often. It was the lure of constant quick updates that kept a lot
of people eager for the "fixes".

~~~
verroq
Grandgrandparent: firefox is shit because it doesn't have feature X which
causes it to crash if a single tab becomes unresponsive

grandparent: firefox is building it

parent: it tooks them 7 years and it is still not done?

you: why do you care, who cares if mozilla updates slow?

me: ???

------
shmerl
Recently I experienced a high profile site throwing some errors in Firefox,
and their support rep suggesting me to use Chrome (of course I didn't). This
brought the memories of "best viewed in IE" times...

~~~
StillBored
Chrome is the new IE. Its actually got a lot of bugs that have existed for
years and years
([https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=180722](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=180722))
and the developers refuse to fix them. Yet, I still find web developers that
only run chrome and give blank looks over their mac/linux machines when asked
if they tested the code in IE.

But that isn't the primary problem. The primary problem is that its simply too
hard for most web developers to install/run a HTML validator in their web
browser and fix the errors it finds.

Try it out, run html validator, for a few months while browsing the public
web, its almost a surprise when a major web site actually has syntactically
correct code. As a "systems" programmer spending about 30% of my time doing
web development, simply having my code syntax checked (yah I run php and
javascript validators in my deployment package too) before it makes to the the
browser increases my productivity significantly. In the year or so after I
started running validators/JSlint/etc (1) a lot of things started making sense
in HTML/CSS and I went from a crappy web hack, to being the guy in the office
helping the full time web guys when they get stuck...

Now if I could just find a good way to ask "experienced" web developers if
they run a validator without leading them to the "right" answer I might have a
good interview question.

(1) Part of this was I completely customized our "build" environment so that
there was a debug vs release package/deploy process too. Things like JS
minificantion/php obfuscation only happen during release deployment.
JQuery/etc are actually checked into the version control in their unminified
version. Plus, it usually only takes one or two calls from a web developer who
can't figure out why their code won't deploy before they start checking the
build logs.

------
AdmiralAsshat
I'm curious how this graph would look if you compared only Linux users
(obviously IE and Edge would drop off). It didn't strike me how important
Firefox is to the FOSS world until I started experimenting with Linux distros
and found that it was consistently pre-installed on flavors of
Ubuntu/Debian/Mint/Fedora/FreeBSD. It becomes even more valuable on distros
that refuse to pre-load any proprietary software.

~~~
gbersac
I tryied chrome on Ubuntu. It is so slow it is almost unusable, so I switched
to firefox (that I feel less user friendly). That may be the reason why it is
preinstalled on linux distos.

~~~
gtirloni
I've had a lot of problems like that due to bugs in 3d acceleration and AMD
GPU drivers. The latest kernel 4.5 updates practically fixed all Chrome
issues. It's fast and doesn't break while rendering any more. I can also open
other apps that use 3d acceleration and everything works fine.

------
jedberg
This isn't entirely surprising to me.

For one, Edge only runs on Windows. Windows is losing market share to Mac OS,
iOS and Android (Firefox is on all three as well as Windows).

For two, I personally use Safari, Firefox, Chrome, and Chrome Canary on my
box, each for their own purpose, but I have yet to find a need for Edge. There
is no site that I go to that works best in Edge.

~~~
bobajeff
I won't care about Edge until they've open-sourced it and made it cross
platform.

~~~
BenElgar
Does that same logic apply to Safari?

~~~
bobajeff
Yes.

Though Safari at least has their rendering engine open sourced. But really
that just makes me care about Webkit.

------
lucasmullens
About a month ago I saw a news story that said Chrome finally passed IE, based
on some other browser usage tracker. Each website that tracks this can have
some huge bias, so making a general claim about a browser passing another
doesn't really mean much.

------
hackuser
More significant is that Firefox' marketshare dropped from 16.1% to 15.6% in
three months, and all lost to Chrome, it appears. Yikes!

What is Chrome doing right now to advance so quickly? Or has that been the
rate of increase for a long time?

------
EdSharkey
This has to be worrisome to the Chrome team. I take this to mean that Firefox
is getting faster and less janky with recent releases. Enough Windows users
who are in the know and who occasionally kick the Firefox tires are finally
settling on it. I don't view this as a knock on the quality of Microsoft
products as much as an overall improvement in Firefox.

I'm on Mac, and I believe Chrome software quality has slipped in the past 12
months. Lots more crashes than I have ever seen and some new CSS curiosities.
And that's with me rarely running Chrome - Firefox is my primary browser.

Maybe Mac is a much tougher platform to target and isn't the priority for
Goog, or perhaps the transition to Blink has been rough. Whatever the reason,
Chrome seems to be getting creaky in its old age.

~~~
untog
> This has to be worrisome to the Chrome team.

Looking at the data, not really. Their usage continues to grow, Firefox growth
is at the expense of IE/Edge, not Chrome.

~~~
EdSharkey
Yes, Chrome is the current 800lbs gorilla, and they continue to grow.

I am still operating under a browser wars mentality where Netscape/Mozilla's
marketshare completely collapsed and they slowly recovered over time. I'm just
impressed that Firefox is in double digits in terms of marketshare given that
they don't have a huge marketing engine driving them (Okay, I guess Yahoo is
pretty decent as engines go.)

I remember when Chrome shipped with V8 as being a big turning point for the
way Firefox was run. Management went from complacent to reactionary. The bug
reports regarding JavaScript performance in the Firefox bug tracker at that
time were really fascinating to watch - Mozilla was a very disturbed hornets'
nest! Then came rapid release and all the arewe*yet.com websites, etc.

Mozilla has been punching above their weight class ever since Chrome came to
market, but I perceive that recently Mozilla management has been transitioning
from reactionary to offensive. Their moves on Rust and sunsetting XUL and
XPCOM are geared towards security AND performance, which are painful and
necessary shifts. Largely hitting pause on FirefoxOS and Thunderbird and
everything else not Firefox is also the right, if painful, thing to do.

That's why I'm going to stick with my assertion. Every day that
Mozilla/Firefox doesn't shrivel up and die has to be a concern to the Chrome
team!

~~~
sqeaky
Does the Chrome team really care?

Ads in Firefox provide the same revenue as ads in Chrome. What does Google
gain by monopolizing?

I think they care more about internet explorer, they don't want it dead
specifically, but if it sticks around they want it reliable. Using ie used to
be a giant pain and nothing worked right, people would use it to accomplish
their goal and be done. Now using any of the three is fairly pleasant and
people on any browser could reasonably view many ads.

~~~
eunoia
> What does Google gain by monopolizing?

I would guess control. Owning the dominant web browser allows them to:

* Softly guide front end web tech in a direction of their choosing

* Ensure the supremacy of Google the search engine.

Also if things ever really come to head between ad-blockers and ad-providers
owning the dominant platform the former runs on would be very beneficial to
the latter.

~~~
scholia
_> I would guess control._

Most big companies want to control their own technology stack and optimize for
their own products.

So Google wants people using Android phones and Chromebooks (ideally, fed by
Google Fiber), with Google Chrome browsers feeding traffic to Google Search,
Google Docs (with all your files in Gdrive), Gmail, YouTube etc.

This provides the maximum surveillance capacity for maximum tracking and thus
the most efficient delivery of advertising. At least to the people who don't
use ad-blockers and anti-tracking systems ;-)

"The result is a world where our most intimate personal details are collected
and stored. I used to say that Google has a more intimate picture of what I'm
thinking of than my wife does. But that's not far enough: Google has a more
intimate picture than I do. The company knows exactly what I am thinking
about, how much I am thinking about it, and when I stop thinking about it: all
from my Google searches. And it remembers all of that forever."
[https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/11/surveillance_...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/11/surveillance_as_1.html)

~~~
tunap
I hate to defend them, as I choose not to use their products, but all that is
stated in plain language in the first two paragraphs of their EULA. Nobody
reads them, but if they did, they would know at least Goog is clear, unlike
pretty much all the rest of the EULAs in the wild.

------
wodenokoto
Didn't Firefox use to have almost 30% ? Or was that only in select markets?

~~~
mtgx
It did. It dropped off a cliff when Google made Chrome default on Android,
though.

~~~
wazoox
BTW I'm using FF on Android too (and it's way better than Chrome, with a true
adblocker which is even more important than on the desktop), but since the
upgrade to Android 6 applications revert to the stock Android browser without
any option to select FF instead, grrrr...

~~~
zobzu
IMO..

FF on android is a great browser. Much better than anything else - yet has
like 1% marketshare. Go figure.

FF on the desktop is an average browser. Chrome and Edge are slightly better.

~~~
AdmiralAsshat
I use it (mainly for the adblocker), but FF on Android inexplicably fails to
run well on certain pages, even after I disabled uBlock Origin and requested
the the Desktop versions of the site. humblebundle.com was the last site I
recall where I actually had to open it in Chrome Android to get the site to
render properly.

------
netheril96
Firefox is really bad at rendering Chinese fonts. It chooses different font
than other browsers, sometimes using a Japanese font to render Chinese text,
and the pixelization is just palpable. I know most people here couldn't care
less, but the poor internalization may be one of the reasons for a _global_
disadvantage compared to Chrome. Internationalization is really something open
source products have been lacking traditionally, as it is neither fun nor
sexy.

~~~
woodman
Sounds like there aren't enough Chinese open source contributors. As the
saying goes, works for me - patches welcome, they'd be in a better position to
do so anyway.

~~~
netheril96
Yes, that is true. But at the same time, they should not lament about the
global dominance of other browsers that do not have this attitude.

------
partiallypro
I prefer Firefox to Chrome, Edge is still unstable but I do like some of the
direction they are going in. The lack of extensions I think killed it out of
the gate. It's also odd to me that Edge doesn't update through the Windows
Store, and instead is updated through Windows Update...doesn't that defeat the
purpose of it being a UWA?

I actually find what Opera is doing a lot nicer than any other others are the
moment though, find myself using it more and more.

~~~
scholia
_> The lack of extensions I think killed it out of the gate._

True, but the extensions are coming.

 _> I actually find what Opera is doing a lot nicer than any other others are
the moment though, find myself using it more and more._

I use Firefox and Opera, mainly, but I'm increasingly using Vivaldi. It's
Chromium based and from the guy who originally founded Opera, but didn't like
the way it was going.

It's extremely configurable. If you have any nostalgic feelings for Opera 12,
it's worth a go....

------
ksec
As some had pointed out on Installing Chrome by other software etc, but
normally these are real bad software. Most users who had no idea what Chrome
was at the time was presently surprised by how fast Chrome was, and they stick
with it.

In ther early 2010s I forced switch the whole company about 200s to Firefox,
but few years down the road everyone quietly installed Chrome and was using
it. It was fast, and they dont care about anything else. Forcing them back on
Firefox were met with opposition, saying using somthing inferior was insane.

Complaining to Mozilla has been served with deaf ears. It was mostly an
management issues from top to bottom, they were so full of themsevles, so
righoutous, that they fail to relaize the marketing is changing. By the time
they realize they have shrink below 20% market share already and were
continuing downwads.

Somewhere along the line, Mozilla changed their tone, it wasn't about market
shares. It is about Open Web, and always has been. How do you force the Web to
be Open if had no influence on it what so ever? They wasted resources on
Firefox OS, which is a dismal failure. They think JS is king, and evrything,
including the OS should be someday written in JS.

Firefox is dying, and i am glad. Becasue as a users from Netscape era
everytime Mozilla / FIrebird / Firefox reborn things has become better.

Firefox is very noble. But the world has never been about one way or the
other.

Luckiy in the past year something happen within Mozilla. I have no idea what
it is because i am not following their post anymore. ( e10s is STILL not
shipped ) But things are getting better. User experience matters, less Janks,
memory usage kept low and most importanly Chrome has been getting worst with
every release. ( Strange indeed ) This mean more people are swithing back to
Firefox.

And for users with specific workflow and 100s of Tab, Firefox is still the
only option on the market.

------
KORraN
I always wonder how big influence on these statistics have all kind of
adblockers. Like a lot of you said, there are a LOT of "forced" installs of
Chrome on computers of not-so-power users. Most of them don't even know what
the browser is so I bet they don't have any adblocker (unless someone
installed it for them). On the side, we have power users that have adblockers
and (AFAIK) they are not visible for scripts from StatCounter and similar
companies. So results of browsers like Firefox, Opera, Vivaldi, Brave may be
understated, am I right?

------
cpeterso
The numbers just show Firefox losing market share more slowly than IE/Edge,
not that Firefox is gaining. Chrome is still climbing. I wonder when Chrome's
market share will peak and level out.

------
xiphias
It must be really hard for the Microsoft CEO. He's doing what he can to fix
the problems that Steve Ballmer left, but it's extremely hard for him.

~~~
Upas
The decision to put Edge under the Windows org and make it Windows-only was a
decision made under Ballmer. I'm guessing if Satya had to do it today, he'd
try to make Edge cross-platform.

------
pessimizer
Chrome's share is a Firefox's reward for making their browser
indistinguishable from Chrome in every way except for the fact that their
entire UI freezes every time it hits some bad javascript. Great choice, to go
from being a great Firefox to a crappy Chrome clone.

------
tkubacki
What I like about Firefox and Chrome is that they democratized Linux as a
desktop OS. Till IE was mainstream all sites assumed you are Windows box. Now
it's rare that there is site I can't use except few Silverlight based
dinosaurs.

------
iLoch
What an awful way to present that data...

------
beefsack
If Servo ever lands in Firefox I wonder what sort of impact that'd have on
market share.

~~~
Manishearth
I don't think Servo will "land in Firefox" (it's possible, but it's a lot of
extra work). However, components written in Rust (taken from Servo or written
in scratch) may indeed land in Firefox -- there are a couple in Firefox today!
(Except on Windows).

[https://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation)

(There are a bunch of alternative paths forward other than sharing components
with Gecko that don't involve dropping it into Firefox)

------
erikb
Didn't that happen, like, 10 years ago?

------
dukenuke
Firefox also sends enormous amounts of metadata about your browsing to the
cloud and it's very difficult for non-savvy users to turn this off. They call
it telemetry and 'safe browsing', but users overlook that every URL is checked
against a database of URLs already in Google's 'safe browsing' repository.
Firefox is not actually private and their business model can't allow for
privacy, because they're in bed with Google.

Use something like Palemoon and configure about:config a bit more and you
should be fine. But be very skeptical of Mozilla claiming FF is some privacy
enhancing tool. Their plugins ecosystem is also a security nightmare...

~~~
ChrisGranger
If a user is too non-savvy to click a couple of check boxes in Options >
Security to turn off Safe Browsing, they probably _need_ that protection.
Users this non-savvy are probably already being tracked left, right, and
center and an easy target for malware served by advertising networks, and Safe
Browsing is the least of their worries.

It's similarly easy to turn Health Report and Telemetry off from Options >
Advanced > Data Choices.

~~~
wldcordeiro
Ignore the user you are responding to. Their expectations of Firefox are
unrealistic and misinformed.

------
hrbrtglm
For me, it's all about the details, and I just can't come back to Firefox for
silly reasons, even if I appreciate their stance on privacy.

The tabs shape is repulsing me, I know that's a strong feeling and I can't
explain it. The disymetrical back and forward buttons bothers me as well. I
can't find how to whitelist domains accepting cookies in Firefox. Switching
profiles is much easier with chrome. I'm used to chrome developper tools.

I don't like neither safari neither MS edge.

If it wasn't for the missing onenote extension, maybe I'd be using opera.
Again, all about the details.

~~~
infogulch
Isn't this something that could be fixed with an extension?

A quick google (heh) brought me to the FXChrome add-on [0]. 100k+ users.

[0]: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/fxchrome/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/fxchrome/)

