11 February 2012

Browser trends


An article at Extreme Tech proclaims "The Death of Firefox":
It doesn’t look good for Firefox: Almost every month for the last three years, Firefox has lost ground to Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Safari. For most of 2009 the trend was fairly straight as it fended off Chrome and nibbled away at IE, but between 2010 and today Firefox has lost a third of its market share, from a worldwide peak of around 30% down to 20%...

Compounding Firefox’s losses is the stark reality that it’s unlikely to make any gains. Google has obviously spent a lot of money advertising Chrome, but there’s no way that ads brought it nearly 30% of the web’s two billion surfers. People are migrating to Chrome because of word of mouth: Geeks and power users picked it up first, and they’ve been installing it on the computers of friends and family ever since. Microsoft, too, is using a dollar bill tourniquet, and when Windows 8 tablets roll around with IE10 as the default browser, you can be sure that its market share will climb...
More at the link.  Out of curiosity, I looked this morning at my Google Analytics to see which browsers readers coming here used during the past year -


The distribution is quite different from the national numbers cited above - many more Firefox users here, many fewer IE.  I don't know why.

And I don't know what difference it makes.  I use Firefox, but not for any particular reason.  I'm an English major with a biomedical background stumbling my way through cyberspace as a hobby, so if anyone wants to offer advice, or pimp/diss a browser in the comments, please feel free to do so.

23 comments:

  1. Other than the paucity of visits I see these days (I suppose it would help if I posted regularly), I see a decline in Firefox usage but not as precipitous as the graph up top.

    What might be more illustrative is the rendering engine used: Chrome and Safari both use Apple's Webkit while Firefox uses Mozilla's Gecko. That puts Apple's technology, if not their brand, firmly in the lead.

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    1. Just to clarify WebKit is not Apple's technology. It is an open source project free to all. It originally appeared in the Konqueror browser in the KDE environment on Linux.

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  2. Trouble with Chrome is it won't let you do stuff you want to do. For example, I prefer tabs opened with a middle-click to be in focus immediately. While you can do this with Chrome you have to hold down Shift while clicking to do it, which means putting down my coffee.
    OK, so this is also the default for FireFox, but there's the difference, FF allows you to modify it, Chrome makes no such allowance - or didn't when I evicted it in disgust at the absense of any of the features I've found so useful in FF.

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  3. I love Firefox. Mainly for some specific add-ons (ad block plus, download helper, down them all, several memory saving & style apps) that I simply couldn't live without!

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  4. I find the ad block in FF works best. And I don't trust Google/Chrome not to sell my info.

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  5. Firefox has slowed down a lot through the years, so I've been slowly migrating to Chrome: much faster, same applications. I use StumbleUpon at home and that app is funky with Chrome, which is why I didn't jump on the Chrome bandwagon earlier.

    Through the years the only time I switch up search engines or browsers has to do with speed: slow down and you get dumped. Mosaic > Navigator > IE > Firefox > Chrome

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  6. I guess the main reason I hold onto Firefox is that I prefer the open source mindset of Mozilla to the authoritarian stances of Google, Apple, and Microsoft.

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  7. I like Firefox for the extensions, but they do occasionally get in the way of my browsing. For example, I have to switch to Chrome (via the excellent "Launchy" Firefox extension - http://gemal.dk/mozilla/launchy.html) to enter this comment.

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    1. ??? I enter comments everywhere straight from Firefox, always have...

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  8. Yah. I've tried'em all. But I continue to use Firefox. Mainly for Brief. I HATE. HATE. HATE. Google Reader and like Sue said above, I just don't trust Google not to sell my name. And as misplaced as my loyalty likely is, I have a soft spot for Mozilla.

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  9. I wonder how these stats would break down on a "per OS" basis. Could Firefox be maintaining or increasing its share on Mac or *NIX systems, but show an overall decrease because Windows has such a large share of the market?

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  10. I use Firefox because of the way it handles feeds (displaying a list of recent posts). Safari needs at least three more clicks to actually see the titles, and I've never been able to get a feed I like from Chrome. Chrome also inserts an annoying "FLASH" of white between sites. Firefox won't allow me to make comments on your posts, however. It isn't a blogger thing, it is the comment scheme you have chosen- I think it is based on OpenID which never worked for me.

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  11. I'd say the high IE count from the first statistic comes from the simple fact that many computers sold have Windows and thus IE pre-installed. This, combinded with IE still being the major browser in many offices, makes it a popular browser and also explains why the distribution for your blog is different. People are (hopefully ;)) more likely to browse your site in their free time, not from work. And people who do not know much about computers/the internet, tend to work with what's available and not care for installing something else, so they use IE, but additionally usually have a very narrow internet experience (as in, they use their email/webmail, maybe facebook and a newssite, maybe youtube, but hardly look beyond that).

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  12. I design web sites. I have installations of Firefox, IE, Chrome, and Opera so that I can test my designs for compatibility. That said, I work primarily in Firefox, and ONLY use Firefox personally. Firefox is by far the most configurable and user-friendly. It comes down to what you like, I guess.

    (If everyone based their browser choice on what was the best combination of speed and rendering quality they'd use Opera, in my opinion.)

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    1. Haha, wow, I had to go this far down to even see a mention of Opera. :)

      I have used Opera for years, I had a woefully incompetent machine at work and became a memory usage Nazi. I knew exactly how much of my precious 512 babies were being used by each program.

      Every Microsoft product is riddled with memory leaks, leave it open, even if doing nothing and it will eventually use up more and more memory. Multi-tabbing with Internet Explorer, forget about it. My machine would be trashing the hard-drive in no time (memory full). And the worst thing about Microsoft products is that they hide their memory usage. It will report one thing in Task Manager, but I could see it was using a much larger number based on overall usage. It hides these numbers in services or multiple entries.

      Firefox was a major memory hog, I did not keep it more than a day. Chrome hides its memory usage among many, many, many entries in Task Manager.

      Opera on the other hand was beautiful. It did not hide memory usage and was completely and clearly using less resources than any other option. I can open up the browser (which saves your tabs until you close them, by the way) with 10+ tabs open and it will use 300-500 mb depending on what's in the tabs. That is what IE will use sometimes browsing in ONE tab.

      Opera is the winner for me. By the way, it's what the government decided to use in their handheld devices that needed minimal system usage. And it's used in many cell phones.

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  13. There remains the possibility that a portion of that IE "traffic" is coming from bots using Microsoft's browser libraries - if you've ever worked with spam prevention, it's fairly obvious that spammers are making heavy use of Microsoft's libraries in tools like XRumer, and spammers run that crap all day (and all night) against a variety of sites.

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  14. I use everything except IE, which I loathe. I like the speed of Chrome and Opera, the extensions and open source of Firefox. I use Safari occasionally.

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  15. I use the poweruser software called Mozilla Seamonkey. Presumably one of the "Mozilla-compatibles" on the chart. Based on the old Netscape platform. It's faster than Firefox, far more protected, being very obscure, and uses a third of the system resources . . . usually. (Depending on what websites are open and for how long, oddly.) Half the system resources Chrome uses. And it's fully hackable (good-hackable) and customizable, which Chrome is not. I use Firefox when I want to download videos via the excellent DownloadHelper plugin. Otherwise, Seamonkey.

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  16. Why would power users prefer Chrome? It's even more simplistic (Google's trademark) and unmalleable than Internet Explorer. It's perfectly fine if you're a normal person who simply wants a relatively light internet browser that just browses the internet without a surplus of confusing user settings (at least this is what I've gathered from my limited use of it).

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    1. A staggering number of computer people seem to have switched to it and use it exclusively. On a powerful computer, it is, frankly, a little faster than anything else. I haven't delved into it enough to see whether there are any real advantages other than that.

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  17. Personally I am a Firefox user. I could see myself switching to Chrome, but I have come to rely on a small number of Firefox plugins to keep me safe on the web (NoScript, AdBlock+, Ghostery).

    I check back periodically to see if Chrome has equivalent plugins, but obviously Google has a vested interest in tracking me and advertising to me so they never seem to be at the top of their to-do list.

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  18. I have a Mac and run Windows 7 in a virtual environment. On the Mac side, my default browser is Safari but I use Firefox for "StumbleUpon" with no other saved login information and Chrome for an alternate Google login. On the Windows 7 side, Firefox is my default and I have Chrome installed; I rarely use Windows 7 for browsing but I do need the web access for Microsoft Office purposes.

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