We're number two! Microsoft's Edge browser slips past Firefox in latest set of NetMarketShare figures It's official that Edge is number two. At least according to NetMarketShare. The sound of muted rejoicing could be heard emanating from bedrooms and home offices around the Seattle area last week as the internet usage watcher published figures showing that Microsoft's browser had edged (sorry) ahead of Mozilla's Firefox to …
Wasn't this to be expected now Firefox blocks many trackers by default? Usage will look much lower than it really is if many counters can't count any more.
I've always wondered whether this was one of the reasons why Mozilla waited so long before they turned this on by default.
"Wasn't this to be expected now Firefox blocks many trackers by default? Usage will look much lower than it really is if many counters can't count any more."
I like your thinking!!! And, it probably means HIGHER usage for Firefox by the security-minded!
Now if I could JUST get them to ABANDON AUSTRALIS [at least for those of us who HATE it]
{when you can ONLY feed at the pig trough, you feed at the pig trough, but you will RAPIDLY GO ELSEWHERE as SOON as something ELSE is available!}
I don't really see what the fuss is about Chromium-Edge.
So Chromium-Edge was basically an admission from Microsoft that they're bad at making browsers... Then they take another product that's best-in-class (not for me as a firefox user but I know I'm a minority) and start tinkering with it and expect us to think that that suddenly made them competent and somehow the resulting product will be better than the product they're cloning?? How does that logic work?
The engine was never really the problem with Edge anyway. It was just the poor UI and the lack of something it was exceptionally good at. For example: Firefox is really good at privacy, a point Chrome obviously lacked. The key feature for Edge is not clear.
What's the 'new' edge UI like compared with "legacy edge"? Always found the later IEs and legacy edge to be a bit shit; stupid dropdowns, ugly animations, and general cack rendering of widgets.
Don't have a recent VM of Win-DOS to run it on so have never seen it. Have always had this issue where part of me thinks that people who run IE just don't know any better - we forgive them as they know not what they are doing.
"The key feature for Edge is not clear."
Without humor, it is for me. Everytime I wonder if it could be my browser, I'll use edge as a reference because I never use edge. If in such cases it actually works right in edge, I'm in no way feeling better thus edge's key feature is that nothing should ever work right in edge... so...
So Chromium-Edge was basically an admission from Microsoft that they're bad at making browsers...
No, it wasn't. In among all the proprietary Active X crap there was, at least with IE ≥ 9 some reasonable code and the IE team did make some significant contributions to the HTML and CSS test suites, though it didn't seem to want to support SVG or other video formats, that it wasn't in the patent pool for. The problems were not really with the rendering engine but in the fucking brain dead twins of bundling the browser code in the OS file manager (and Outlook), and nurturing privilege escalation attacks through Active X plugins, which were always exploits waiting to happen.
But, developing a browser rendering engine is a lot of work and Microsoft had realised that it could achieve lock-in in other ways. So, by switching to Chromium it could pursue lock-in and sack a load of developers and QA and let Google do the work on the rendering engine, which it now uses for more and more subscription products.
This post has been deleted by its author
I've been using it for many years and love it; mainly for the add-ons like Adblock Plus and NoScript etc. Do people just not care about blocking ads and crap on the internet? Or is it that they have to actually go to the effort of downloading it and that is beyond the average person nowadays?
I tried browsing the internet without an adblocker and it really is a turd fest of irrelevant crap all over the screen. Do people really browse like that all the time? Or can you get adblockers for Edge and Chrome? (I've never used them so don't know)
You can get adblock on Chrome, and plenty of other extensions. It has become a de facto default on desktop and on Android it is the actual default. I think the question you've got to ask is why would the average user look anywhere else?
Firefox is good, but it isn't special. I haven't *liked* a browser since the days when Opera had its own rendering engine and plenty of neat features.
If you use Vivaldi, from the guy who did the original Opera, then its latest snapshot has tracker and ad blocking built in. Being chromium based all the other extensions work as well.
Possibly also related to the slight increase in Chrome figures is that Vivaldi now identifies as vanilla Chrome in the User Agent. Loses its own share in the stats but, as they said at the time, it stops sites serving a different page unnecessarily.
I suspect that most of us who use Firefox (and we are legion, of course) care much more about privacy than people who just drool over the latest shiny metallic thing from GRUgle, and therefore, we are here, but we just sail through invisibly on the breeze and don't show up in the stats spyware trackers?
(It doesn't help that Firefox broke their extensions ecosystem, and (good/usable) replacements for many of the old extensions still don't yet exist (waves sadly at RequestPolicy; uBlock Origin is just too confusing to try to sort of do the same thing))
Try uMatrix, it sounds more like the thing you're looking for. than uBlock Origin.
But they had good reasons to change the extension architecture IMO.
And yes I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people are simply not on the radar because of privacy plugins. And User-Agent headers are a completely broken mechanism of course.
I suspect most of those who use Firefox might be quite interested in privacy, but MORE interested in telling us they use FireFox and how enlightened they are.
FF users are the vegans of browser users. If you want privacy, keep it a secret what browser you use :)
Yes you can get adblockers for those too. Even good ones like uBlock Origin.
For me the plus features of firefox are:
- Truly anonymous and zero-knowledge synchronisation
- Multi-Account Containers - Amazing to keep your cookies separate without having to use different browsers, and really helps in some enterprise usecases too (e.g. logging into 2 different O365 tenants at the same time)
- All platforms (Edge doesn't do Linux so is out)
- Privacy-first and built-in tracking blocking that they're doing now. I do this anyway with addons but anyway...
For me, the biggest plus features of Firefox:
- ability to do some basic customizations like moving buttons around, changing basic behaviour (bookmark links replace existing page or open in new tabs, etc.)
- ability to tweak all kinds of behaviour by using about:config to access hundreds of different default settigs and to change them
I tend to vary browser use by platform. Safari on Macs and iOS, not that you have a choice on iOS. Firefox on Windows and Linux. Occasional use of Firefox on Mac, mostly for sites Apple doesn’t like for some reason. (No, not including El Reg, that works in Safari, usually it’s something technical.) Brave and Vivaldi and Opera for extremely occasional use, I haven’t touched them, except for Brave, in so long that I’m probably a version or two behind. Brave I use for specific sites. Chrome I use for sites which really need it; a lot of sites say stupid stuff about their requirements but work in Safari or Firefox just fine, though I may have to change the user agent. Brave usually works, too, though then there’s moaning about adblockers. Which happens anyway as I stick uBlock Origin everywhere I can. Edge happens on Windows because MS opens certain things in Edge whether I want it or not. I don’t. That MS annoyance means that I do a lot in other OSes.
Similarly, Google trying to pop stuff up despite my pop-up blocker gets dealt with by not going near Google. Because I declined to use Google’s mail app and webmail, Google pouted and decided that I wasn’t me and killed access to two of my Gmail accounts. I have killed off all the other Gmail accounts. I have killed off and/or deleted all Google stuff from all my personal systems, down to Waze and Google Earth. I no longer go to Google anything. No pop-ups, no problems. This is probably not what Google wanted. Tough.
'this'd be so much cooler if you used Chrome' pop-up.
I've never seen one.
Can't recall the last time I used anything other than Firefox.
And I must have used a Google site or two (damn hard to void not doing, and I've avoided a smartphone so far (apart from an N900).
I've used FF since it was Firebird. But in the last 6-12 months, it's really gone downhill. It just crashes on me far too often, several times a day. It wasn't the quantum update, it was something a few releases after that. Something snapped, and it's not been the same since. It does the same on both my laptop and desktop, and my desktop machine has 16 GB ram, so it's not because I have a lack of resources.
I have installed the new Edge, and performance wise, it's a mixed bag. It seems more reliable than FF (not crashing) but switching youtube videos to full screen seems to take several seconds.
And the interface is still the god awful chrome one, where you cannot move buttons, you cannot tweak anything and add-ons are clunky buttons added to toolbar, and that's about it.
For the life of me, I just cannot understand why there are all these Chrome clones around, and they're all shit. None of them provide any differentiation that might be useful, like being able to move the basic browser buttons around, and access some internal behaviour of tabs, etc. with an about:config like feature.
I have used Firefox since before it was called Firefox, yet I gave up on Firefox a few years ago because I didn't care for the direction it was heading.
I now use Pale Moon as my main browser, which is an evolution of 'old-school' Firefox, keeping the powerful XUL extensions and NPAPI support, while cutting the bloat that nobody was using. Because Pale Moon doesn't use the crippled WebExtensions, it can use the more powerful NoScript and uBlock Origin addons, as XUL allows for direct access to a lot of the browser's internals.
Much like many others who are using Pale Moon, Waterfox and similar Fx spin-offs, we like Firefox still, just not this 'Firefox' that Mozilla tries to pawn off as the 'real deal' nowadays. If it wasn't for the fact that Firefox doesn't use Chromium (yet), one might as well just call it another Chromium-based browser. It follows the same APIs as Chrome, after all, to the point where one can install Chrome addons in Firefox and have them work without issues.
So yeah, that's why I'm no longer using Mozilla's Firefox.
Also Google pushed a lot the Chrome installations by asking developer to bundle chrome with their installer, usually for software distributed for free. Google is sometime offering M$ to bundle their browser with the installer for widely-used software (like what happened with VLC). The option to install Chrome and make it the default browser is usually a small checkbox somewhere in the install process, so people less computer literate or who didn't paid attention will leave this on.
Wish works on any terrain were true. FireFox only works on the public internet only. They gave up support usecases like loading off CDs, local filesystem, or local LAN, or local to desktop a long while back. They only support the Internet terrain. Which is where their revenue comes from.
Chromium on the other hand, works on all terrains and this is why its the base for lots of development.
Same can be said for spider monkey, its a bitch to run outside firefox, v8 is a synch.
It says something about Internet Explorer that so many people jumped into Edge from it.
Of course, just because the browser is installed by default with Windows Update it doesn't mean that many people are actually using it.
Or the data could be wrong, or a result of Windows 10 forcing you to use Edge after an update.
For years Google forced Chrome installs on everyone who wanted some freeware by paying for it to be included and installed unless you didn't click custom install. They then bulldozed their way in to the smartphone market with Chrome on every Android Device (and no other allowed, something MS was prevented from doing) so have effectively complete control of the market. They also tied all their services to the browsers and made everyone else's browser run like treacle when accessing you tube or gmail, sometimes wilfully in the case of MS, sometimes by not following standards because Google knows best. Yes they had the performance crown for awhile but boy does it use a lot of resources to do it. Google also tracks your every move, in your browser and on the web under the guise of its analytics stats, but basically Google knows more about you than your mother.
Old Edge was bit clunky but for most part was a lithe and solid browser (Google website aside), New edge is resource hungry, has the default Chromium naff settings and layout but is compliant with the Google Web and sends it's data to Microsoft (don't worry Google still tracks you through the websites and probably the browser too knowing them).
What's not to like? Pretty much everything.
No competition. Google is worse than MS were at their peak in early 2000s hopefully Google's fall will be quicker and the fines even bigger and we can go back to fair competition and proper standards.
Once upon a time, Microsoft were evil and Google were not evil, and we switched to Google to save us. Using IE to download Chrome as its only task became a popular meme.
Now, I use Chrome to download Edge, then wipe Chrome clean off my computer.
Google has become E-Corp, infesting every part of peoples lives and harvesting insane quantities of data which it links together.
I only wish I could de-google my phone.
Google with its anticompetitive practices made sites pretty much unusable in IE, hence one of the major reasons for shifting to Chromium. And even then, it deliberately gimps YouTube if your user agent string is ChromiumEdge.
"Do No Evil". Hah! They've become the monsters they swore never to be.
I just need to get my passwords out of Google and switch away from gmail now. It is ludicrous how much of my data goes through them.
There are several browsers which have about the same measured usage and they are all laggards behind Chrome. I tend not to put much faith in the precise rankings and browsers and OSes by these 'survey' liars. Accurate stats are fairly difficult to obtain and the best you have is an order of magnitude with possibly some sort of accurate trends.
No doubt if MS Edge start to erode too much of the Chrome share from Google, Google will switch Chrome to another rendering engine and artificially make none Chrome browsers slower on Youtube, Gmail, Google docs etc with recommendations to download Chrome for a faster experience. Just like they did in the past.
Although im sure Google are happy with the input from MS and others to the Chromium project they will drop Chromium like a hot potato if it doesn't help them with their privacy slurping and ad flinging goals
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
