Keizer: IE and Firefox catch a break last month

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Gregg Keizer has his usual excellent analysis of the monthly browser statistics: For the first time since June, Microsoft’s two browsers managed to ho
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Chrome continues to swallow the earth.

Pretty scary, when you realize that Google is gobbling up as much personal data as they can.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

1 user thanked author for this post.

Fred

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Fully agree especially since Google “reads” your email content and they are on the the line with gathering and using people’s private information for monetary gain.

“If you are not paying for the product, YOU are the product”  no truer words!

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Microsoft stopped improving or enhancing the browser, specifically IE11, in early 2016. Since then, the Redmond, Wash. company has only serviced the browser with security updates.

The only “enhancements” I’m really concerned about are security updates. For some reason, Keizer and others think that users want software that is continually getting new features. Personally, I prefer stability over a continual stream of new features.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

7 users thanked author for this post.

dononline, Karlston, Elly, Microfix, JohnW, SueW, David F

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I don’t mind using Edge anymore, it does have its hiccups but mostly its pretty good. But Chrome has become the next IE that holds a lot of clout with that much user base across platforms. The browser market share is mostly stagnant now, and doesn’t appear to change much month to month. Other then Firefox makes money off cushy deals with Google ads and search and Microsoft will probably keep finding ways to push Edge onto users.

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I’m Win 7.  I’m use to Firefox. Simple ease of use and look trump’s every thing else,

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The article title should read “IE and Edge catch a break…”  Firefox didn’t catch any breaks, falling to below 9% market share.  It turns out that cutting off the one distinguishing feature Firefox had didn’t propel it to never-seen-before market share.  Who would have thought?

As a Waterfox user, I am conflicted regarding the continued decline of Firefox.  On the one hand, it serves Mozilla right; they arrogantly sliced off the powerful extensions Firefox used to have in exchange for a very insignificant boost in speed, ignoring the comments of those Firefox stalwart users who had stuck with them up to that point, trying everything to try to make Firefox into the perfect clone of Chrome.  Through all of these decisions to ape Chrome in one way or another, Firefox has been losing market share, and Mozilla’s answer has been to make it even more like Chrome.  It seems that they’re convinced that the reason they’re not popular is that they haven’t yet made their product indistinguishable enough from the competition, and even though they’ve shed huge market share while pursuing that ideal, they stubbornly refuse to recognize it as a foolish decision.

Mozilla has been making bad decisions for years in their quest to become Chrome, and if anyone deserves to lose market share, it’s them.  The market has been trying to let Mozilla know for several years that the course they’re on is not a good one, and if they refuse to listen, the outcome is predictable.  The idea that they can be exactly like Chrome except for the data slurp, and to hang several years’ worth of development strategy (and the future of the entire project, in fact) on that idea, is foolish– there are already a ton of de-Googled Chromium-based browsers, and the odd Chrome user who realizes he hates the spying can utilize any of those without ever having to put forth any effort to learn how things are done in a new browser platform.  The biggest majority of Chrome users, though, just don’t care, quite evidently.

As much as Mozilla deserves to fail for their string of horrible decisions, I don’t want to lose Waterfox.  None of the Firefox-based browsers like Waterfox, Pale Moon, or Basilisk have large enough organizations backing them to develop the Firefox code (supporting new standards, fixing security and other bugs, etc.) that powers the Firefox alternatives.  Maybe someone else would step up to the plate (FF is open source, after all), but I’m skeptical that anyone would bother, given the market share of Firefox.  Who knows… FF is still a lot more popular than desktop Linux, and it’s not going anywhere.

 

 

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3 users thanked author for this post.

mindwarp, EstherD, wavy

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I used Firefox for many years and was really happy with it, and then they started the feature and discontinue this and that thing going and the newer versions have so many bugs , that I seriously wonder if someone from M$ is giving them advice. The Mozilla help forums are busier than I ever have seen them.

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I’ve been a user of Firefox for years – the main reason being the use of certain add-ons to prevent the ‘data slurp’. My add-ons are almost all about protecting privacy against all types tracking: cookies, fingerprinting, DOM storage, indexDB, cache, referer tracking, injected resources, iTags, CSS Exfil, canvasing, etc. . (I know it’s like an arms race with the Borg, but I’m not giving up!)

Firefox HAS been making poor decision of recent, IMHO. One of these days I may have to jump ship if I can find another robust and customizable browser — but I honestly don’t want to touch anything ‘google’.

I’m also wondering how much of Chrome’s market share has to do with the huge increase in Android smart phones. It would be interesting if the data could be sorted out by device: smart phone, tablet, laptop, desktop.

Win10 Pro x64 22H2, Win10 Home 22H2, Linux Mint + a cat with 'tortitude'.

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Been mentioned many times before but the only reason why Chrome has such a huge market share is because of all the ‘bundling’ they’ve been doing with other software for the past few years.

Hard to find anything these days that doesn’t include Chrome (which, of course is always ticked to install by default). Even motherboard driver discs include Chrome.

Wonder how many people have Chrome installed and don’t even realize it because they’ve just ‘clicked through’ the install procedure for whatever software they’ve downloaded/bought without reading anything.

A friend of mine asked me a few years ago “what’s that and how did it get on my computer?” when I pointed out the Google Chrome icon on his taskbar that he hadn’t even noticed for goodness knows how long.

I’m sure Firefox (or any other browser) would have the same market share as Chrome does today if they’d had the money to do what Google has done with Chrome.

Myself, I use Pale Moon after I got fed up with the direction Firefox started taking a year or two back. Used Firefox for nearly 12 years prior to that.

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