Chrome Passes 25% Market Share, IE and Firefox Slip 240
An anonymous reader writes: In April 2015, we saw the naming of Microsoft Edge, the release of Chrome 42, and the first full month of Firefox 37 availability. Now we're learning that Google's browser has finally passed the 25 percent market share mark. Hit the link for some probably unnecessarily fine-grained statistics on recent browser trends. Have your browser habits shifted recently? Which browsers do you use most often?
Chrome - the web browser that's added as bloatware (Score:4, Interesting)
Chrome is added as bloatware to a lot of products which makes it hardly surprising that it gains an advantage in market percentage.
Re:Chrome - the web browser that's added as bloatw (Score:5, Insightful)
Unlike all the others? The most infamous such case was that of Microsoft and Internet Explorer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U... [wikipedia.org].
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Well, yes, it's like I.E. in that respect. Where I work it's now the mandatory browser.
Is that the mantle of praise now?
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I am very surprised to see that IE is still up at 56% while Chrome is at 26%. Seriously, that many people still use IE?!
Re: Chrome - the web browser that's added as bloat (Score:5, Funny)
Most nerds have 2 parents
Re:Chrome - the web browser that's added as bloatw (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, that many people still use IE?!
Why wouldn't they? It's right there, on their computer, the moment they buy it.
Forgive them, for they know not what else they can install.
Re:Chrome - the web browser that's added as bloatw (Score:5, Insightful)
Forgive them for being pragmatic instead of dogmatic. Forgive them for using a perfectly good browser that's preinstalled instead of wading into some obscure nerd-war against Microsoft. In other words, forgive them for being normal people.
Re:Chrome - the web browser that's added as bloatw (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you even know why Microsoft is creating a new browser? I'll tell you: It's because IE has a BIG reputation for being prone to security breach, in addition to being very uncooperative with web standards to the point of very badly breaking them.
Re:Chrome - the web browser that's added as bloatw (Score:5, Insightful)
It's also often a corporate standard, especially for companies and their clients with older, Windows specific software tools. And many proxies are configured to lie about the web client they are proxying for, in order to provide access to upstream websites which demand IE. There are many examples, such as:
http://unix.stackexchange.com/... [stackexchange.com]
everybody who is forced to, that's who (Score:3)
Mordac and his associates as Preventers of IT at my company insists and demands that only an older IE exists on our machines. so half the websites I visit lock the machine up. this is, of course, the usual silliness about keeping creaky old code, as well as the insistance that IE is the only safe choice with all the mayhem out there.
at home, I have given up on resize-happy Firefox and use Chrome exclusively. if Mozilla would fix that freakin' bug, I might reinstall it.
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Although I had Firefox on my computer for many years as an alternate browser, I considered myself a pretty late holdout since I kept using IE as my default for a pretty long time after it seemed most people had opted to move on. But I finally caved when so many websites just stopped working properly with it. I can't remember now what version that was on. So I just had the impression I guess that it was a pretty sucky experience.
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I don't think it's right to call the default browser that comes with a device bloatware.
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It's the default browser on a lot of Android devices though, and I think it's pretty uncommon for people to use other than the default browser on a phone or tablet.
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One of the first things I did when I got an Android phone was disable Chrome and install Firefox.
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Re:Chrome - the web browser that's added as bloatw (Score:5, Interesting)
the browserchoice bullshit in europe expired at the end of last year... so all non-microsoft browsers, like firefox, lost that free exposure... so no os default like windows, no pay-for-installs distribution like chrome, means firefox falls. not surprising
So from a capitalist perspective, Firefox is the number one browser, because Firefox is the most frequently chosen browser for people who on purpose install a particular browser.
Very very very poor multi-tab open (Score:4, Interesting)
Chrome is truly awful at opening multiple tabs at once on my mac. unbelievably slow loading times compared to Safari. And when a page is loading in one tab, other tabs don't continue to update swiftly. I find this really a weirds because chrome uses a separate process for each tab so one would think they would not step on each other. My guess, wild, is that tabs are contending for some resource like network or GPU and actually slowing each other down. In general I much prefer safari or firefox, but I use chrome because I also own a chromebook and I can't run safari on that. Basically, google is doing the same thing microsoft did to make IE dominant by not allowing other browsers on their platform.
Apple chooses not to port Safari (Score:2)
I use chrome because I also own a chromebook and I can't run safari on that. Basically, google is doing the same thing microsoft did to make IE dominant by not allowing other browsers on their platform.
Apple is free to port Safari to Windows or X11/Linux, but it chooses not to. It used to port Safari to Windows but no longer does.
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Apple didn't even have the courtesy to say they were discontinuing Safari on Windows, they just stopped releasing versions. So fuck them.
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#2: You sound like you're assuming that there's a "perfectly good Mac" available, when the earlier AC was complaining about having to pay Apple for hardware to test their software on. I'd assume that in their perfect world, they're running a licensed copy of OSX in a virtualized environment on a Windows or Linux machine.
My company's purpose is to virtualize the OS for development; we don't ca
Re:Very very very poor multi-tab open (Score:4, Interesting)
Chrome has a lot of issues:
1. It's a fucking RAM guzzler. 14 simple tabs eat up 2 GB RAM after 24h of usage. If I leave the browser open for a week, it's going to eat up over 4 GB RAM with the same tabs open, without working with any of them. I inadvertently discovered that when I went vacationing for a week and left Chrome running on my PC. Firefox, with the same tabs, eats 600MB RAM (as reported by Chrome's own about:memory).
2. Opening several tabs at once slows the OS to a crawl until they all load, which could take up to a minute (on a fast PC).
3. Tabs crash suddenly even if they're not used for a while (or maybe because of that).
With that being said, I depend too much of its deep interconnection with other Google services and it's amazingly helpful in managing my data, so I'll keep grumbling about its shortcomings while using it.
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And when a page is loading in one tab, other tabs don't continue to update swiftly.
Chrome lazy-loads pages once the tabs are actually selected. In Firefox, it's an option you can set in the preferences dialog (turned on by default).
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Chrome is added as bloatware to a lot of products which makes it hardly surprising that it gains an advantage in market percentage.
You are taking it wrong.
Chrome is not gaining any advantage in market share. That sad excuse for browsers that compete with Chrome is that are loosing market share.
Since Chrome is practically the only player left that still plays something right, people are going to it by lack of choice.
Re:Chrome - the web browser that's added as bloatw (Score:4, Informative)
It's the default browser in many Android devices, is that what you're talking about?
If so, then he's wrong; the figures referenced here are for desktop browser usage. There are a separate set of figures for mobile/tablet (Safari at 40%, Chrome at 30%).
Re:Chrome - the web browser that's added as bloatw (Score:5, Interesting)
I've seen it included with CCleaner and Avast. It's a plague.
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I've seen it included with CCleaner and Avast. It's a plague.
You're referring to CCleaner and Avast, I assume? The AV industry is certainly a plague on the world.
Anyway, thanks for the specifics. I found some information that says CCleaner's installer asks if you'd also like to install Chrome -- it isn't bundled; it prompts for an additional download, AFAICT. I don't see anything about Chrome related to Avast other than that Avast has a Chrome extension.
Even assuming those are true, are the any other packages bundling Chrome? Is it just AV vendors? The claim is t
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Even assuming those are true, are the any other packages bundling Chrome?
Flash.
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Modern IE is fine. Old IE can be blocked. (Score:2)
yes, i know, about Explorer, the point is that competition does exists now.
Competition also slowly convinced Microsoft to at least try to keep up with the HTML living standard rather than stagnating. Users of Windows 7 are eligible for Internet Explorer 11, which supports new web platform features reasonably well according to caniuse.com. Right now the biggest headache is Internet Explorer pre-10, such as the IE 8 used by Windows XP diehards.
But it might be financially sound to just ignore the market of users of IE on Windows XP. Here's my reasoning: Operating system holes render
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:bad statistics (Score:5, Interesting)
Why is it that when I look at wikipedia [wikipedia.org], they show all the various counters more or less in agreement, except netapplications which vastly overcounts IE and undercounts Chrome, android and safari?
Maybe because Net Applications is the only counter that tries to correct for known skewed sampling. Net Applications uses CIA internet usage data (how much of the population in each country has access to the Internet) to estimate absolute numbers for each country based on the measures distribution and the "Internet" population number. Net Applications is perfectly honest and upfront about this.
The other counters just report whatever stats has been collected. They also are perfectly honest and upfront about this.
Both correcting and not correcting may leave errors. Be your own judge.
But there's a perfectly good explanation as to *why* the numbers seem not to agree: They do not even claim to illustrate the same thing. Net Applications tries to create a number for "true" global distribution (and risk errors), the others do not even claim to compute such a number. In theory you could take the numbers from, say statcounter, by country and extrapolate the absolute number per country, sum them up by browser and calculate a number similar to net app. Could be interesting to see.
Also, be aware that there is also great popential for skewed demographics between the counters, not to mention the fact that Net Applications tries to measure unique visitors (discarding repeat visitors within a month) while most of the others just report page impressions. If for instance users of Chrome are more active on the 'net than users of IE, chrome would have a bigger share of page impressions than they would of unique visitors. There is no "right" in this: It all depends on the question you ask: If the Q is "which browser is the most popular?" you would look at unique visitors. If the Q is "which browser is used the most?" you would look at page impressions.
Why is it that of all the various counters netapplications is the one most often quoted, even though they appear to be using a bad methodology.
Maybe because they use the *least bad* methodology. The others do not even *pretend* to estimate global usage. They may report what *they* see of usage globally, but none of them claim to know how many users there are in each contry.
Re:bad statistics (Score:5, Interesting)
They have to correct for skewed sampling because their sample size is so small, especially for non-U.S. sites. Of the big metrics sites [wikipedia.org]:
StatCounter monitors over 3 million sites (reports page hits)
W3Counter monitors over 70,000 sites (reports unique visitors per month)
Net Applications monitors over 40,000 sites (reports unique visitors per month)
Net Applications is the only one which reports IE still in the lead. Which given the sample sizes I think more calls into question their correcting algorithms than it does StatCounter's sample.
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It isn't just their correction algorithms, it is the whole basis of what they are trying to measure. Consider this.
I probably use IE once or twice a month, but Firefox and Chrome several thousand times in the same period. So far as Net Applications are concerned that counts as one user for each of the three browsers. Meanwhile, over in the Duchy of Grand Fenwick you might have a user who doesn't bother installing Firefox or Chrome because he uses the Internet so little, but who probably counts as several us
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Correction: it seems that Net Applications do count unique users per site, and it is per day not per month, so most of the discrepancy must be due to a different mechanism from the one I described above. Apologies for the belated fact checking.
The figures do count users rather than traffic, and while they claim to weight by traffic, the data source they appear to be referring to is stated in terms of users. If that is so then it would remain the case that they are counting traffic which is not real: users p
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Maybe because Net Applications is the only counter that tries to correct for known skewed sampling. Net Applications uses CIA internet usage data (how much of the population in each country has access to the Internet) to estimate absolute numbers for each country based on the measures distribution and the "Internet" population number. Net Applications is perfectly honest and upfront about this.
And yet if I look at StatCounter's map function, showing the leading browser in each country Chrome leads in most of the world. IE only leads in Japan, South Korea, Swaziland (pop. 1.1mio), Greenland (pop. 55000) and Antarctica (5000 visitors). Firefox has a few strongholds like Germany, Indonesia, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Iran and a bunch of countries in Africa, but the only place IE is ahead of Chrome in second place is Iran (pop. 78mio). With Chrome winning on walkover in Europe, South America, North America
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And yet if I look at StatCounter's map function, showing the leading browser in each country Chrome leads in most of the world. IE only leads in Japan, South Korea, Swaziland (pop. 1.1mio), Greenland (pop. 55000) and Antarctica (5000 visitors). Firefox has a few strongholds like Germany, Indonesia, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Iran and a bunch of countries in Africa, but the only place IE is ahead of Chrome in second place is Iran (pop. 78mio). With Chrome winning on walkover in Europe, South America, North America, Africa and Oceania and taking massive wins in China, India and Russia I don't see how any possible weighting of StatCounter's numbers would put IE on top.
You're right that the country weightings don't account for the difference by themselves, but there is also the difference between counting users versus pageviews, and it would be unsurprising if there were differences between the types of websites sampled by the two companies.
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FTFA:
Net Applications uses data captured from 160 million unique visitors each month by monitoring some 40,000 websites for its clients. This means it measures user market share. If you prefer usage market share, you’ll want to get your data from StatCounter, which looks at 15 billion page views.
So Net Applications counts the number of users who use it, whereas StatCounter counts the number of uses (i.e. page hits). The difference you see with Internet Explorer being "overcounted" shows that it occupies a long tail of many users who don't browse the web very often, whereas heavy web users prefer Chrome so it gets "undercounted".
StatCounter stats are below, for desktop and combined (desktop+phone+tablet+console):
http://gs.statcounter.com/#des... [statcounter.com]
http://gs.statcounter.com/#mob... [statcounter.com]
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The difference you see with Internet Explorer being "overcounted" shows that it occupies a long tail of many users who don't browse the web very often
And the users who occasionally need IE for something specific that still doesn't work in other browsers.
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When I look around me I see the prices of food, electricity, and a whole host of other things I might buy frequently increasing (or the sizes of things like food decreasing while the price stays the same) by many percent a year.
You simply aren't seeing that - instead your wages have been stagnating so the extremely modest inflation we've been experiencing seems increasingly onerous. It's the proportion of your budget these things require has been increasing significantly, not their prices.
Android (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Android (Score:4, Insightful)
I would never use the native browser on Android. That's like just giving up to Google entirely on privacy. I almost always use Firefox and I NEVER log into any Google services on Firefox/Android.
Just cuz my phone resides in the company town doesn't mean I have to be totally locked in.
Firefox (Score:2, Insightful)
It's fast enough. It renders properly. It lets me override font settings.
Chrome's big "death knell" in my books is the inability to override font settings. I don't know why so many web designers use magnifying glasses when testing their pages. :(
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If you have failing sight, you could set your system DPI bigger.
If you're concerned about webmasters using the px unit, consider that CSS defines 1px not as a hardware pixel but as 1/2688 of the distance from the eye to the display [inamidst.com]. This means it'll respect DPI as much as anything else does.
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8 point font on *any* display is unreadable, yet a lot of websites use it to cram more crap on the page. Except for the ads, of course. Those banner print with 24 and 32 dpi fonts. :(
Re:Firefox (Score:5, Funny)
CSS defines 1px not as a hardware pixel but as 1/2688 of the distance from the eye to the display
I just tested this on my system and it didn't work. I backed off from the display about 5 feet and the font did not change at all.
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you need to save the new setting and reboot.
Working around a missing Kinect sensor (Score:3)
Most PCs do not include range finding hardware. If they do include a webcam, it isn't stereoscopic. So you'll need to tell the window system explicitly how far away you plan to sit [pineight.com]. Divide 2688 by your viewing distance in inches (1 m = 39.37 in), increase it somewhat if you have poor vision, and put that into your window system's DPI field.
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Why not just zoom the pages with CTRL+scroll up? I've had slashdot zoomed to 150% for years.
Zooming in causes a horizontal scroll bar (Score:2)
A lot of sites are laid out so inflexibly that zooming in causes a horizontal scroll bar.
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>"A lot of sites are laid out so inflexibly that zooming in causes a horizontal scroll bar."
Bingo, and it really pisses me off. Not because I want to use a huge font, but because I DON'T WANT TO F'ING MAXIMIZE EVERY F'ING WINDOW. I actually do more than one thing at a time and need to see and maneuver through more than one thing at a time.
The other big pisser are all these sites using HUGE unnecessary graphical backgrounds with transparent scrolling and other annoyances that use 10 times the CPU and me
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960x1080 (press Win+Right to use Snap) (Score:2)
In my own testing, I typically assume half screen 960x1080 (press Win+Right to use Snap) and occasionally test on a 10" laptop whose screen has about the same width. The narrower layout works well with tablets as well.
I've switched back to Firefox (Score:4, Interesting)
I switched back to Firefox few months ago.
In Ubuntu, Chrome is a resource hog. I usually have several tabs opened at the same time. Just compared the RAM usage: 7GB in Chrome, 1.1 in Firefox.
Additionally, Firefox is a bit faster (in UI), and it just respects my look and feel (colors, borders, font sizes, etc).
And for address bar searches, Chrome privileges the google search instead of navigation history, which I really don't like (I usually visit the same sites, and even with several hits in a day for the same site starting with the same word, Chrome prefers, for few ones, to search when I type the word instead of display the known URL as first result).
I just changed few settings in Firefox (increased scroll speed, click in URL behaviour to select the entire address), and voilà.
Just annoying that every Google service keep suggesting to use Chrome until you dismiss this message.
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What I need to switch back to Firefox (Score:2)
I abandoned Firefox for Chrome long ago for one reason: I can kill individual tabs with runaway CPU usage without fscking the whole browser.
Mozilla's been working on adding this feature for years, but AFAIK it hasn't yet made it into a stable release: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Elect... [mozilla.org]
Once that makes it into a stable release of Firefox, I'll give it another spin.
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>"I abandoned Firefox for Chrome long ago for one reason: I can kill individual tabs with runaway CPU usage without fscking the whole browser."
The funny thing is that I haven't seen that happen in Firefox (at least not under Linux, which is all I use) for many years. So I don't even think it is an issue.
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I tried switching back last year and had issues with it. I'm the sort of person who likes to keep like 3 browser windows open, each with 20 tabs. So I'm at high risk for one tab going haywire.
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>"I tried switching back last year and had issues with it. I'm the sort of person who likes to keep like 3 browser windows open, each with 20 tabs. So I'm at high risk for one tab going haywire."
Actually, that is how I browse at home with Firefox. Right now I have three windows open, one with 25 tabs, one with 6, and one with 10. I leave everything open and running for several days or weeks. Occasionally I need to log out or the browser sucks too much memory and I restart it.
Firefox - the new UI is killing marketshare (Score:5, Insightful)
.
One would think that the Mozilla developers would take their heads out of their collective arse and look at the reality --- the new UI is little more than a Chrome clone, and a poor one at that. If people wanted the new UI, they'd move to the better implementation of it, i.e., Chrome.
Oh wait, they are moving to Chrome....
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Its not just that - but everything about FF seems to be going the wrong direction... I have a heavy ajax site that uses jquery - it works great in safari and chrome. IE is a little slow at times, but we all know that. But firefox just locks up after less than an hour... yay! Reported it - sits there for weeks now without being assigned or anything else useful happening.
They want to stop supporting http - what an idiotic thing to even talk about. There is lots of valid use for http, including developing some
Integrity (Score:2)
There is lots of valid use for http, including developing something real quick without bothering to get/create an ssl cert for your internal box
The forthcoming Let's Encrypt project will allow "get[ting]/creat[ing] an ssl cert" without any "bothering" beyond an install command.
Things where you just transfer bulk data that is of little value.
Is it really of so little value that you care not a whit whether the data you received is identical to the data that was sent? If so, extract an identical number of bytes from /dev/zero. If not, then you need to at least use signing, and HTTPS does this for you.
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Is it really of so little value that you care not a whit whether the data you received is identical to the data that was sent?
Yes. Take slashdot, for example. I don't give a flying fuck what the server sends, so long as it reads more-or-less like English (no, I am not new here), and is vagualy entertaining. HTTPS would be a waste for 99% of the site.
Firesheep attack (Score:3)
Would you want other users to be able to post as Dog-Cow? Because if you don't subscribe, you don't get HTTPS, and if you don't use HTTPS when posting, others can intercept and clone your session cookie.
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Then stop using jQuery. Your users will thank you.
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>"They want to stop supporting http - what an idiotic thing to even talk about. There is lots of valid use for http"
Yep. Another unpopular move for many people. I don't need Mozilla trying to dictate how I want to use a web browser. No doubt this change will break lots of older stuff WE DON'T HAVE CONTROL OVER and make corporate use of Firefox even that much more difficult. Plus, it will break centralized caching proxies that we use effectively at work to greatly reduce bandwidth usage. And with cen
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Firefox's market share has been dropping ever since the new UI was introduced.
Actually, Firefox's market share has been dropping ever since the Christchurch, New Zealand Earthquake.
Firefox's downward slide... (Score:3)
Is it all post Eich or pre Eich and/or did Eich's departure hasten the decline?
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Miniscule niche spinoff of now-niche browser? (Score:2)
I switched to Pale Moon across the board.
Oh yeah, that's gonna work out well for you. I used to be the biggest Pale Moon booster around (at least in hyperbole-land), promoting it to IRL friends, to thousands of socialmedia follower/friend/stalkers, my wife loved it especially when it came to Linux (she's using Mint).
But then "Moonchild" went off the rails of reality in reaction to Australis, and to and Firefox Accounts replacing the "Sync formerly known as Weave". Pulled the "Firefox" identifiers right out of it, including in the Application ID.
FF (Score:4, Insightful)
>"Have your browser habits shifted recently?
No because
1) I don't want Google even further spying on me or my users.
2) Chrome is not open source, further allowing Google to do who-knows-what.
3) Chromium (which IS open source) apparently has build issues and isn't even in the normal Fedora repos.
4) Chrome is not community driven.
5) I hate the minimalistic UI with zero user control of Chrome.
>" Which browsers do you use most often? "
Only Firefox. It is multiplatform, open-source, community driven, fast, available in every repo, secure, and still has much better addon/customization support. This is not to say I don't have issues with Firefox- them trying to turn it into Chrome and pulling crap like not allowing us to have tabs-on-bottom, having the menus, hiding the URL prefixes, combining the buttons, etc is very irritating (yes, I know about Classic Theme Restorer). And the memory footprint of all browsers is crazy now. I also don't appreciate them throwing unnecessary crap into the browser like the web developer stuff, the "hello" junk, and other things.... all of which should be add-ons.
sudo apt-get install chromium-browser (Score:5, Interesting)
Chromium (which IS open source) apparently has build issues and isn't even in the normal Fedora repos.
Fedora's fault. In Xubuntu, a Debian derivative, all I have to do is sudo apt-get install chromium-browser.
And the memory footprint of all browsers is crazy now.
Is this the fault of the browser or of the sites you visit? Back when sites weren't as image- and script-heavy, like Better MF Website [bettermoth...ebsite.com], a graphical browser could actually fit on a 16 MB machine. Nowadays sites are covered with carousels full of high-DPI photos, plus developers think they still need jQuery [youmightno...jquery.com] and all its bloat just to get the site out the door faster.
I also don't appreciate them throwing unnecessary crap into the browser like the web developer stuff
Browser developers distribute the debugger with all copies of the browser to keep sites from intentionally detecting a debugger's presence and stopping working if one is found. If everyone has a debugger, the site operator can't block people who want to tinker, learn, and make a site more usable without blocking everyone.
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>"Browser developers distribute the debugger with all copies of the browser to keep sites from intentionally detecting a debugger's presence and stopping working if one is found. If everyone has a debugger, the site operator can't block people who want to tinker, learn, and make a site more usable without blocking everyone."
You're kidding? Sites actually do that!? Why? And how are they detecting a debugger and couldn't that be spoofed instead?
Otherwise, 99.9+% of users have no need for debugging and d
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Browsers used to come with a mail client, news reader and webpage composer even though since about 2001 every new internet user uses webmail, USENET has been dead and 99% users never write then host HTML pages.
Netflix disables Chrome developer console (Score:2)
If everyone has a debugger, the site operator can't block people who want to tinker, learn, and make a site more usable without blocking everyone.
You're kidding? Sites actually do that!?
See Netflix disables use of the Chrome developer console [ycombinator.com].
Why?
Ostensibly, protecting inexperienced users from the social engineering exploit known as "self-XSS". Self-XSS occurs when an attacker convinces an inexperienced to paste malicious code into the developer console. This is why Facebook also disables the developer console (though Facebook reportedly provides an opt-out). But the real reason is probably three words: digital restrictions management. It's similar to how Google Play Movies refused to play on [droid-life.com]
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Chromium (which IS open source) apparently has build issues and isn't even in the normal Fedora repos.
Fedora's fault. In Xubuntu, a Debian derivative, all I have to do is sudo apt-get install chromium-browser.
There was a time not very long ago when Chromium was not available in ubuntu official repositories either, and you had to install it yourself or use a PPA... just like Ubuntu you can get chromium running on Fedora. The reason it's not in their official repositories is more an ideological one, supposedly the packaging of customised dependencies rather than integrating more naturally with the ecosystem goes against the ideals of whomever has authority over what does and does not go in the official list.
I like
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The reason it's not in their official repositories is more an ideological one, supposedly the packaging of customised dependencies rather than integrating more naturally with the ecosystem goes against the ideals of whomever has authority over what does and does not go in the official list.
If forking a library for use in Chrome is considered harmful, what is Google supposed to do instead when upstream rejects Google's patches to the library?
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I feel the same mostly, but (repeating myself on slashdot stories) the UI is not so evil as it takes five seconds to get the menu bar back.
I haven't investigated how to get the title bar back under Windows, I think that that is more wrong.
>"Have your browser habits shifted recently?
I have just taken to blocking third party cookies (after running a few days with Lightbeam extension, followed with a hiatus).
The preferences GUI is flawed there, as this is semi-hidden : cookies preferences appear out of not
Chrome is the new IE (Score:5, Interesting)
Some pages only load on it, because startups often require features that are only available on it. The new whatsapp for web comes to mind, at first it was available only for chrome.
Computer manufacturers often bundle chrome preinstalled.
In my country Venezuela few people went to download firefox, but venezuelans love google search, so you see ads to upgrade from your old IE 8 to chrome.
Here are my website's stats (insurance company):
Chrome (55.31%)
Firefox (21.87%)
Internet Explorer (19.00%)
OS:
Windows (89.72%)
Android (4.80%)
Macintosh (2.57%)
iOS (1.54%)
Linux (0.54%)
Windows versions:
7 (60.97%)
XP (29.26%)
8.1 (6.15%)
8 (2.33%)
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Chrome is the new IE: Some pages only load on it...
Chrome is also the new IE because a bunch of other pages don't work on it at all. I just started switching back to Firefox because I was sick of so many compatibility issues with Chrome. (Other reasons like frequent brief lockups on one computer, the non-freeness, and the Eye of Mordor contributed somewhat).
It's not that Chrome got really good... (Score:2)
...is that Firefox is getting really bad.
I just switched to Chrome about 1 month ago, I just couldn't stand Firefox bloat anymore. It's just slow and unreliable (try to open Amazon in Firefox and it slows to a crawl... a page seen by millions of people everyday) (try to open Atom editor Github pages and Firefox crashes more often than not).
Firefox developers really need to get down from their high horse and address the issues with the browser instead of keeping adding bloatware and obscure new codecs that o
Firefox (Score:2)
I will switch to the next browser that's fast and supports tree-style tabs to the left of the window. (No, not in a separate window.) (And Firefox isn't fast.)
Forget teen spirit this smells like desparation! (Score:2)
I thought those numbers were bizarre since I recalled that IE usage dropped had below 50% years ago. Now I see what the issue is. This survey is geared towards desktop usage only, and since the majority of desktops run Windows, and Windows comes with IE, it's no mystery that IE comes out on top. What is surprising is that looking at only desktop usage, IE is only barely a majority and not a slam dunk. That tells you how bad IE must be that people are actively switching away from IE. Hell, Microsoft itself i
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Microsoft itself is ditching IE for a new browser codenamed "Spartan"
I think they just announced that Spartan will be called Edge. </eyeroll>
Have to use too many (Score:2)
I would like to use Waterfox for everything as it is currently the browser that is close to good.
But Google is so bad at programming that their code only works well with chrome so I use chrome for Gmail, Google maps and so on. So I have a chrome window up with 3-4 tabs normally. But as chrome takes so much memory extra for each tab it cannot be used for more uses.
Too many products like old firewalls boxes, Microsoft remote connector and similar require IE. Thus I find myself running it almost every week for
FF better than Chrome on cert exception use case (Score:2)
And finally Firefox is really really bad with bad certificates. I have to often do things like manage networking gear that has expired certificates and similar. Firefox just says "you cannot do that" where with Chrome I can say "yes I know it is insecure, but I really do not care" Thus I have to use chrome almost weekly for such.
Umm, no!
If anything, Firefox (and all FF-based browsers like Waterfox and Pale Moon) are far better for things like self-signed certs, expired certs which you happen to know are still real-life valid because it's your own site. Firefox lets you permanently store the exception so that it doesn't bother you every single time you go to your self-signed Webmin/Virtualmin VPS management page (or in Thunderbird, to your own domain name with TLS on when you don't have a cert under your own domain and mail subdoma
I finally switched from FF to Chrome (Score:2)
I must
Which browsers do you use most often? (Score:2)
The day Chrome reaches 50% of market share... (Score:2)
... will be the first day of the last days of the internet as we know.
I'm pretty scared, by the way.
All of them (Score:2)
Chome for private use, Firefox for work, Opera for communicating with my wife, Safari for the girlfriend on the side, Explorer for the other girlfriend...
Okay, I'm over-exaggerating, but you get the point. There is probably a plug-in for Chrome or Firefox that achieves the same effect, but in practice I find it easier to just use a bunch of different browsers as sandboxes for different situations.
Re:Whichever one . . . (Score:4, Informative)
That'd be FF with a slug of extensions like noscript, adblock, ghostery, refcontrol, betterprivacy, maybe some others.
It's your best bet right now. Not sure if it's still true, but not too long ago the adblock extensions for Chrome would still download the ads, just not display them, which is useless as it still lets the tracking companies see everywhere you go.
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So you work with a browser based on Nexus?
The first web browser was invented in 1990 by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Berners-Lee is the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees the Web's continued development, and is also the founder of the World Wide Web Foundation. His browser was called WorldWideWeb and later renamed Nexus.
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Google's Web Services aren't designed to 'service' the user.
Remember that Science Fiction Story: "To Serve Man"?
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And before you get on me about Chrome not being proprietary I wouldn't consider any program which includes non-free bits free software.
If you're a purist, which PC do you use that has a free BIOS and CPU microcode? Besides, there are other distributions of Chromium Browser without the proprietary parts.
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For instance Chrome and Internet Explorer are both proprietary applications. And before you get on me about Chrome not being proprietary I wouldn't consider any program which includes non-free bits free software.
Who cares? Even Firefox is developed by a tight group of developers who can pour anything in the absolutely massive codebase. I don't think there is any practical difference between free and non-free. That something is proprietary does not automatically mean that the makers want to screw you. I don't know why that attitude is so widespread in Slashdot. Both parties, free and non-free, strive to create a product that works for the users.
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I've been pissed over this same crap for a while now. ever since they tried to do away with the tool bars. What took me over the edge was that fiasco where someone had to resign because of a political donation made half a dozen years ago despite being part of the founding team and no known instances of any discrimination ever happening during his professional career.
Since then, I took a look at chrome and pretty much install it on everything. I don't care so much about being tracked as I do about exploits a
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Re:I would use any browser that offers the followi (Score:5, Insightful)
Adblock Edge, Ghostery, HTTPS Everywhere, NoScript.
That's all I want, and to not have the interface shift around every version.
And a menu bar on the top, please.