15 ms·

Has Chrome fully taken over yet?

100 points by datalist 8y ago

rman666 8y ago
No! Im still lovin’ Firefox:-)
- datalist 8y ago
  We are the minority at this point.
  - setquk 8y ago
    Unfortunately so but I’m happy with it here.
- mattmaroon 8y ago
  How is their Android app? Been debating trying them out again.
  - lettergram 8y ago
    I love their Android app, actually found it better than chrome on Android. Plus they have the same sync features across browsers on different devices. That is honestly the Reason I switched to Firefox about 18 months ago. Chrome at the time (still might), was slower and worked less well on Android.
  - rcMgD2BwE72F 8y ago
    I use Firefox Focus/Klar for everyday Web surfing, and Firefox beta for websites where I need to be logged in (quite rare actually). It's great to know that every site I visit now can't track me (easily). It's like a have a fresh new browser every time. I recommend them both. On Firefox beta, I also have installed uBlock Origin, Cookie Auto-delete, Privacy Badger, HTTPS Everywhere and Decentraleyes. Quite happy with my setup.
  - beatgammit 8y ago
    I use it and like it, and they'll be rolling out an update somewhat soon with a complete makeover of the rendering engine (switching to GeckoView from whatever they have now), so I'm hopeful that rendering will get faster. I like it because: - syncs with desktop Firefox - has extensions (I mostly use Bitwarden and an ad blocker) - interface is nice to use - available in F-Droid It's fast enough for me, though I haven't used mobile Chrome for years, so I guess I don't know what I'm missing.
    - Brakenshire 8y ago
      The switch to Geckoview is for Firefox Focus, which previously used Blink (the Chrome rendering engine). Standard Firefox for Android has used Gecko from the start. It is gradually being upgraded using the Quantum improvements, but the rate of change seems slow. I thought that the emphasis on multi-threaded processing in Quantum would be particularly useful for mobile, because the single threaded processing capability of mobile (and particularly non-Apple mobile chips) is very limited, but there don't seem to have been massive improvements. I think it’s a shame they relegated Servo to a research project, integrating Servo into Gecko has been long-winded, and the most important target of porting a parallel/multi-threaded layout engine isn’t even being discussed. Frankly, given their $500m budget, their core mission of browser development, and the massive importance of mobile, they probably should have pursued both Gecko and Servo at the same time. Even if Servo only supported flexbox layouts it could be very useful as a wrapper while wider compability was being pursued. The emphasis now is on WebVR, which seems not very relevant to the mass market.
      - Yoric 8y ago
        The Servo team is very active. Unfortunately, it's trying to hit a fast-moving target, and that's really hard. Which is the reason for which I believe nobody else is currently pursuing any new web engine.
    - ishitatsuyuki 8y ago
      I also used Firefox on Android for a pretty long period, but to be honest I ended up moving to Brave. I run Nightly so I get the improvements quickly, but even with that Firefox is still far behind Chrome. - Firefox does not have a JIT for 64-bit ARM (AArch64). Didn't benchmark but this does make a difference. - Running a extension based ad blocker seems to degrade performance and the difference visible on a smartphone SoC. I think Brave has it written in native code and deeply integrated, and it seems to perform without making things super slow. - While I can't judge on the UI (actually I miss the tab gestures on Firefox), Firefox often glitches like not loading custom tabs, page search getting stuck and some others. This was quite stressful. - The sync is super glitchy. It can easily be days outdated unless you trigger it manually.
  - subraizada3 8y ago
    I use an Android without Google Play Services. Firefox (Fennec on F-Droid) probably isn't as fast as Chrome, but it's very usable. Being able to use desktop addons like uBlock is great. I haven't found any compatibility issues with the websites I use. In the settings there's an option to add a 'Quit' button to the menu, which will clear all cookies / history / etc. when you quit FF using menu->quit (so your session is still saved if you just go to the home screen and come back later). IMO that's better than Firefox Focus, which has adblocking and ephemeral sessions built in but doesn't let you have tabs.
    - talonx 8y ago
      I use the mobile Firefox on stock Android. There are certain issues like emails from Gmail not showing up correctly. But that's a minor pain compared to the adblockers and other features that I can use.
  - welly 8y ago
    Works very well. I've been using it as my main mobile browser for at least a year now. Latest version is great and I recently noticed it even supports Firefox extensions (at least some of them!), which I don't believe android Chrome does.
  - quantummkv 8y ago
    It's far, far better than chrome. It even has the same extension mechanism so you can get ublock origin on you mobile device as well.
  - jhauris 8y ago
    I also use firefox on android. It's really good.
  - mooreds 8y ago
    Browsing on ff on Android right now. I think its great. Probably once a week I see a site that I have to use chrome for, but other than that small inconvenience, Firefox is great.
  - EwanToo 8y ago
    It's really good, I'm using it now, but Google deliberately cripple the UI on it unless you use a user agent switcher. There's a specific plugin for it, Google Search Fixer.
  - stabbles 8y ago
    I'm using Firefox Focus on Android as my only browser for a year now and it's great!
    - noir_lord 8y ago
      Same and it works with unlock origin. It was a bit tougher a year ago but recent versions are spot on, I've largely forgotten it's not chrome as it just stays out the way.
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    It's very good. Brave Browser is also quite good.
  - cyphax 8y ago
    I have been using it for years, I've never had any reason to use Chrome on Android at all. :)
  - Boulth 8y ago
    Firefox Android is more important than the desktop version as that's the only way to have uBlock on mobile.
- leowoo91 8y ago
  Firefox FTW, since it's completely open source.
- newusertoday 8y ago
  Since no one has mentioned it yet, please also try firefox lite on android its 3.5MB and very usable. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.rocket&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.ro...
  - Wehrdo 8y ago
    Looks like it's only available to some countries in Asia [0]. I've been using Firefox Focus on my phone (uses Webkit under the hood), since regular Firefox is too slow. [0]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/get-started-firefox-lite#w_download-firefox-lite https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/get-started-firefox-lit...
kakaorka 8y ago
I feel like it's scary what we've reached. Giving all our browsing history and activity to a surveillance company.
- datalist 8y ago
  True, once more we have reached and voluntarily embraced browser monoculture.
- gaius 8y ago
  Chrome is a data collection app with a built in browser
- mavhc 8y ago
  Don't enable that feature then
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  Human beings are pretty good, on the whole, about tradeoffs. For most people, the information they're trading away is only theoretically valuable, but the products they receive in return have very tangible value.
  - xg15 8y ago
    I agree - because humans generally seem to be pretty bad at including more than the immediate here and now in their tradeoff calculations. I'd see this as an argument why stuff like privacy can't be left to individual choice.
    - tehduder9 8y ago
      So if I didn't voluntarily giving up my privacy for something (an invaluable product to use) you wouldn't let me? Why? It's none of your business what I desire from my personal privacy.
      - xg15 8y ago
meddlepal 8y ago
I hope not, vive la Firefox! I am disheartened though that I feel compelled to use Chrome now in some cases because Google's UI's are poorly optimized outside Chrome (looking at your GCloud UI and YouTube) and some companies have made a decision to only support Chrome (looking at you Slack voice chat).
- whatshisface 8y ago
  >some companies have made a decision to only support Chrome (looking at you Slack voice chat) Well, there you have it. The beginning of the process that will remind everybody why browser monocultures are horrible things.
  - Zelphyr 8y ago
    How have we not learned this lesson from when Microsoft did it? Believe it or not, there are still companies that require sites built for them to be compatible with IE7 because that’s what they standardized on and they don’t want to go through the trouble of an upgrade. When you hitch your wagon to the same horse you eventually get left behind.
    - nothis 8y ago
      Microsoft was only held back by their own incompetence. GFWL, Internet Explorer, Zune, Windows mobile, the Microsoft Store,... they had all the power in the world to force that upon us but failed because their products were _so_ bad even non-tech people went through the trouble of finding alternatives. Google, however? Their stuff at least works. They never had the luxury to send people through hoops, 3 seconds and people give up on the web. So that’s what makes Google so scary. They’re omnipresent _and_ competent. My only hope ist that, as they grow, their products get worse which empowers better competitors.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - cimmanom 8y ago
weinzierl 8y ago
Has Chrome fully taken over yet? No These 3 brave countries still have managed to resist Google's charm Cuba Liberia Eritrea So, essentially yes. These countries combined have less than 4 million people with Internet access. Most of them are in Cuba. Eritrea is the country with the lowest number of people with Internet access per resident and a rate of increase that is as low as that of industrial nations with saturated Internet penetration[1]. Digging into this a bit deeper on statcounter[2] there are a few other surprises: - Firefox is only number four after Chrome, Safari and UC Browser. - Still Chrome is the market leader in China - by far. - Germany has been a Chrome holdout for a long time, but not any more, apparently. [1] http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users-by-country/ http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users-by-country/ [2] http://gs.statcounter.com/browhttp://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/germanyser-market-share/all/germany http://gs.statcounter.com/browhttp://gs.statcounter.com/brow...
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- asveikau 8y ago
  Sub-100% market share in a populated country still means that a lot of people are using alternatives. That is why it seems absurd to break it down by country in order to declare a "total" victory. I sometimes use Firefox in the US - that fact alone says you cannot say it's "fully taken over" in my country.
danso 8y ago
analytics.usa.gov provides Google Analytics-collected stats of all the users who visit U.S. federal websites, including browser and OS info. As of right now, Chrome is at 46.4%. I couldn't find at the moment a historical dataset > 90 days. The Internet Archive snapshot of the JSON from April 2015 [0] shows Chrome's share at 35.3%. edit: the 2018 vs 2015 numbers for the other browsers: - Safari (iOS and macOS): 28.6% / 19.9% - IE (all versions, but not Edge): 10.9% / 28.2% - Firefox: 4.7% / 11% [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20150412223314/https://analytics.usa.gov/data/live/browsers.json https://web.archive.org/web/20150412223314/https://analytics...
gator-io 8y ago
data on share https://netmarketshare.com/?options=%7B%22filter%22%3A%7B%22%24and%22%3A%5B%7B%22deviceType%22%3A%7B%22%24in%22%3A%5B%22Desktop%2Flaptop%22%5D%7D%7D%5D%7D%2C%22dateLabel%22%3A%22Trend%22%2C%22attributes%22%3A%22share%22%2C%22group%22%3A%22browser%22%2C%22sort%22%3A%7B%22share%22%3A-1%7D%2C%22id%22%3A%22browsersDesktop%22%2C%22dateInterval%22%3A%22Monthly%22%2C%22dateStart%22%3A%222017-11%22%2C%22dateEnd%22%3A%222018-10%22%2C%22segments%22%3A%22-1000%22%7D https://netmarketshare.com/?options=%7B%22filter%22%3A%7B%22...
- shorsher 8y ago
  Am I missing something or is Brave not on this list whatsoever?
  - tyingq 8y ago
    Brave doesn't have a unique User-Agent. "Removed Brave from the User Agent HTTP header to reduce fingerprinting" https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md#090 https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/blob/master/CHANGELO...
haack 8y ago
Having switched back to Firefox and Duckduckgo very recently, I'm feeling much more optimistic about the future of a free web. Both have been on par with Chrome/Google in terms of speed and performance. Now just need to break away from gmail and calendar.
- stabbles 8y ago
  I especially like how relevant the search results in DuckDuckGo are whenever I query `[search term] !g`
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    I have noticed that too :-). That's one problem with Google: On the one hand I think they should be restricted but on the other hand their products are just very good.
  - Theizestooke 8y ago
    sadly that's also my go-to query when using startpage
  - solarkraft 8y ago
    Ddg is worse than Google and Firefox is maybe a little bit worse than Chrome. But it's bearable 90% of the time and that matters a lot.
  - apatters 8y ago
    Nothing beats searx.me - Google's results are good (but slipping), but when you combine Google, DDG and Bing, it doesn't get any better
    - maxxxxx 8y ago
      Never heard of this before but will give it a try.
- mirsadm 8y ago
  Firefox is not on par in terms of performance at all, at least on the Mac. I use it at home and at work but it just uses too much CPU for me to recommend it to anyone.
shubhamjain 8y ago
Are those countries fighting back in any real sense, or it's a consequence of limited internet access? In Liberia, you can only get very limited and slow internet costing as much as $6 / hour [1]. And for Cubans, the problem was severe enough to make an offline version of the internet (a periodically updated hard-disk) be of any practical value [2]. The stats are meaningless without total traffic share of these countries. [1]: https://www.lonelyplanet.com/liberia/internet-access https://www.lonelyplanet.com/liberia/internet-access [2]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/23/cuba-offline-internet-weekly-packet-external-hard-drives https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/23/cuba-offline-i...
- tyingq 8y ago
  "The stats are meaningless without total traffic share of these countries" They do publish the sample sizes per country. I assume the sample size is proportional to traffic share, but it's not stated explicitly. Some of it does look odd...the sample size for Turkey is close to the sample size for the US. http://gs.statcounter.com/sample-size/StatCounterGlobalStatsSep15_SampleSizeCountryBreakdown.csv http://gs.statcounter.com/sample-size/StatCounterGlobalStats...
m52go 8y ago
I think it's hilarious that 2 of the 3 countries hailed as bastions of freedom (by this 1 metric) include Cuba and Eritrea.
- porphyrogene 8y ago
  "Hailed as bastions of freedom" in what way? The only descriptor used to describe countries on the list is the satirical use of "brave".
  - m52go 8y ago
    By resisting Google, which to me implies that they're instead using Firefox. That may not be true, as they may be stuck on IE or dominated by some other browser. I don't know the numbers...it was just a bad attempt at humor.
dpecos 8y ago
Chrome is a really nice browser, but we're creating a monopoly for it, not Google, ourselves. I'm not going to talk about Google being evil or not. But as history has shown, monopolies never result in anything good for the people. That's why I'm choosing Firefox as my day to day browser, not because it's better or free from a controlling enterprise, but because I want to keep the web as an open and diverse system, and for that, we need different players to play in equal conditions. It's up to every one of us to achieve this, and to be honest, what are you missing in Firefox that Chrome does? It's quite a nice and decent browser nowadays.
- ChristianBundy 8y ago
  I love Firefox, but I'd also recommend Epiphany. It's basically Safari but for Linux, maintained by GNOME and integrated with Firefox Sync. Best of all possible worlds. https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Web https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Web
  - LeoPanthera 8y ago
    I use Epiphany on both my desktop (Fedora) and my laptop (OpenBSD). It's nearly perfect, but it's annoyingly crashy. Random web pages (usually news sites, weirdly) will make it bomb right out.
- nothis 8y ago
  It’s our fault? Good luck betting on the general population researching alternatives, then. I use Firefox religiously but have no illusions that it will take over because people’s idealism.
  - ric2b 8y ago
    > It’s our fault? Probably talking about Web Developers, of which there are many here.
- rc_mob 8y ago
  Oh. I just think FF is a better browser. Never liked Chrome at all.
_ph_ 8y ago
At least for me, Firefox has taken over again. I am using it on macOS, iOS and of course Linux. The tipping point for me was the new rendering engine, written in Rust, but I really like features like sending tabs to my other machines. On iOS, I prefer the user interface with tabs shown as small icons to the one of Safari.
sn41 8y ago
I use Seamonkey. I wonder if there are people who prefer Seamonkey over Firefox.
- monetus 8y ago
  How is going for you? I've been curious about how often it has trouble rendering a site.
  - sn41 8y ago
    It renders most websites I visit (reddit, Facebook etc.) fine enough. It takes a long time to start up, however. One really bad point about it is that on MacBooks, it seems to use up the battery charge really fast.
skrebbel 8y ago
Can someone explain to me what those countries do wrt Chrome?
- kristofferR 8y ago
  It's just a listing of countries where Chrome is not the most used browser. I'm guessing IE is more popular in those countries, due to old computing equipment being popular.
  - datalist 8y ago
    For these three countries it is Firefox with the largest market share.
tobyhinloopen 8y ago
Fulltime Safari user here :) Only using chrome for development. I guess even North Korea are active Chrome users? Who would have guessed.
nerdponx 8y ago
Is there a browser with something like uBlock Origin/Matrix built into the browser engine? Something like SELinux for the web. The user should have the option to take fine-grained control over the content in their browser on a site-by-site basis.
rglullis 8y ago
Firefox on Desktop, Brave on Android.
- malikNF 8y ago
  Isn't brave based on chrome?
pictur 8y ago
The chrome is still bad. and Firefox is still and still bad.
ourmandave 8y ago
We could slow down the inevitable if Microsoft makes it so you can't download Chrome using Edge.
xoa 8y ago
Does anyone know what the actual metrics being used for this site are? Maybe it was discussed in a previous HN? I don't see in the present environment how Chrome can ever reach the kind of power IE once had given the existence of iOS if nothing else. It's not just about pure marketshare either, it's about value share (which is often the stat that companies actually care about, with marketshare only being an occasionally useful proxy measure). Even if alternate platform users like iOS/Mac/Linux who don't use Chrome were only 10-30% of users say, what percent of revenue do they represent? It's not a uniform distribution amongst the general population. And while there remain and probably always will be quirks between browsers and standards one implements that others don't yet and so on, I don't think there is anything quite like ActiveX remaining in the modern web.
crazygringo 8y ago
How many countries Chrome is ranked #1 in doesn't matter and is a distraction. Overall market share is infinitely more important. E.g. assuming a two-browser world, it would be drastically more of a problem for Chrome to have 99% market penetration in 98 countries and 49% in the other 97 (so ranked #1 in only half, but still a huge problem)... than it is to have 51% market penetration in 192 countries and 49% penetration in a remaining 3 (so ranked #1 in nearly all, but no problem at all). The real question from a healthy competition standpoint is, what is the market share which we consider to be "fully taken over", where competitors are no longer viable?
- treve 8y ago
  Yea, this statistic is as bad of a representation of marketshare, as democracies without proportional representation.
outside1234 8y ago
If you haven’t switched to Brave yet from Chrome, you should. Great browser built on open source
- timbit42 8y ago
  It's also built on Chrome but BAT will be supported on other browsers soon.
Havoc 8y ago
Switch to FF recently was entirely painless - the seem functionally identically for my usage cases. Probably prefer chrome on the whole but ugh fk google and their stance to privacy
- passthejoe 8y ago
  I switched to Firefox just to have one less Google-y thing in my life, and the FF browser has gotten better and better in recent releases.
mlamat 8y ago
I use Chrome to play mkv videos from my Nextcloud. Firefox doesn't support it.
xg15 8y ago
A lot of comments in this thread seem to argue that the share of countries is less important than the overall market share. I think it's not completely unimportant either. Not everyone uses the same corners of the internet. Yes, many things are centralised but there are still a lot of language/country specific sites around, which will adopt to the specific ecosystem in their country. So if Chrome has 99% market share in a certain country, it's likely that local sites will optimize for it and using other browsers will generally be harder in that country. The other way around, if Chrome is not dominant in a certain country, that might not have effects in other countries where they are. As an extreme example, suppose China and Russia banned Chrome and mandated the use of special domestic browsers - but Chrome climbed to 99% market share everywhere else. Then the global market share would be far below 90%, nevertheless you wouldn't have an actual choice anywhere in the world.
- crazygringo 8y ago
  But a count of countries is a pretty arbitrary way to slice market share, and one of the worse ways in my opinion. If you want to measure the degree of competition in different corners of the internet, then 1) it's still about market share and not about which is top-ranked, and 2) better slices could be market share in desktop vs. mobile, in workplace vs. home, and in something more macro such as "more free" populations (U.S., Europe) vs "less free" populations (China, Russia).
burtonator 8y ago
One of the amazing things about Chrome which is under rated is the ecosystem in Open Source tooling that it's created. Specifically V8, Chromium, NodeJS, and Electron. I've been working in an offline browser and documentation platform named Polar which is based on Electron. https://getpolarized.io/ https://getpolarized.io/ Obviously it heavily relies on Electron + Chrome internals but the fact that I can control the full browser is pretty amazing. This is a hybrid desktop+browser app which allows me to some pretty awesome things. For example, I can inject myself directly into the networking stack in Electron. This is how Polar implements offline browsing. It captures the traffic of a web page you're visiting and then keeps it in a cache for your usage forever. No worrying about the site vanishing or your network going offline. Now I COULD do this with a PWA and service workers, possibly, but I think the main thing I'm worried about is Google's control over the extension install process. I'm anticipating at some point that they might block service workers that essentially register for * ... that actually DOES make a lot of sense to prevent malware - but then I'm not malware.
esotericn 8y ago
It seems to me that the web has split into two. Developers that care are using browsers like Firefox and avoiding websites full of cruft (e.g. GDPR/Cookie/Newsletter/Advert/... popups). The general public is using whatever's preinstalled on their phone to go to whatever websites are advertised to them. There's some overlap (e.g. obviously these websites exist because there are developers that have no principles and design the GDPR banner stuff), of course. I don't know how we break that. I'm not sure if we even should - I can tell my friends and family that they should boycott anti-user practices, but they don't care, and that's as far as it goes. For the general public, computers are toasters. Whatever's marketed most will win. Google has a bigger budget (and greater control over services people use on the web in general) than Mozilla.
MrP 8y ago
Firefox is going to win again, by the way. We are the same intransigent nerds that originally moved to FF over IE6 on principle, only this time also with more disposable income (You know, the people you want to show ads to), on top of technical acumen and prescriptive influence. Chrome is a couple more undeleteable tracking cookies or proprietary languages away from the tipping point.
- rjsw 8y ago
  Firefox keeps getting new languages added to it too. I'm still running Firefox 52 ESR on anything lower powered.
philshem 8y ago
WebUsb is pretty cool https://github.com/WICG/webusb https://github.com/WICG/webusb
redsparrow 8y ago
I've been using Vivaldi for a while and find it performs better than Firefox on my Mac, especially since version 2.0. I prefer the Firefox license, but prefer using Vivaldi.

100 points by datalist 8y ago

rman666 8y ago

No! Im still lovin’ Firefox:-)

datalist 8y ago
We are the minority at this point.
- setquk 8y ago
  Unfortunately so but I’m happy with it here.
mattmaroon 8y ago
How is their Android app? Been debating trying them out again.
- lettergram 8y ago
  I love their Android app, actually found it better than chrome on Android. Plus they have the same sync features across browsers on different devices. That is honestly the Reason I switched to Firefox about 18 months ago. Chrome at the time (still might), was slower and worked less well on Android.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 8y ago
  I use Firefox Focus/Klar for everyday Web surfing, and Firefox beta for websites where I need to be logged in (quite rare actually). It's great to know that every site I visit now can't track me (easily). It's like a have a fresh new browser every time. I recommend them both. On Firefox beta, I also have installed uBlock Origin, Cookie Auto-delete, Privacy Badger, HTTPS Everywhere and Decentraleyes. Quite happy with my setup.
- beatgammit 8y ago
  I use it and like it, and they'll be rolling out an update somewhat soon with a complete makeover of the rendering engine (switching to GeckoView from whatever they have now), so I'm hopeful that rendering will get faster. I like it because: - syncs with desktop Firefox - has extensions (I mostly use Bitwarden and an ad blocker) - interface is nice to use - available in F-Droid It's fast enough for me, though I haven't used mobile Chrome for years, so I guess I don't know what I'm missing.
  - Brakenshire 8y ago
    The switch to Geckoview is for Firefox Focus, which previously used Blink (the Chrome rendering engine). Standard Firefox for Android has used Gecko from the start. It is gradually being upgraded using the Quantum improvements, but the rate of change seems slow. I thought that the emphasis on multi-threaded processing in Quantum would be particularly useful for mobile, because the single threaded processing capability of mobile (and particularly non-Apple mobile chips) is very limited, but there don't seem to have been massive improvements. I think it’s a shame they relegated Servo to a research project, integrating Servo into Gecko has been long-winded, and the most important target of porting a parallel/multi-threaded layout engine isn’t even being discussed. Frankly, given their $500m budget, their core mission of browser development, and the massive importance of mobile, they probably should have pursued both Gecko and Servo at the same time. Even if Servo only supported flexbox layouts it could be very useful as a wrapper while wider compability was being pursued. The emphasis now is on WebVR, which seems not very relevant to the mass market.
    - Yoric 8y ago
      The Servo team is very active. Unfortunately, it's trying to hit a fast-moving target, and that's really hard. Which is the reason for which I believe nobody else is currently pursuing any new web engine.
  - ishitatsuyuki 8y ago
    I also used Firefox on Android for a pretty long period, but to be honest I ended up moving to Brave. I run Nightly so I get the improvements quickly, but even with that Firefox is still far behind Chrome. - Firefox does not have a JIT for 64-bit ARM (AArch64). Didn't benchmark but this does make a difference. - Running a extension based ad blocker seems to degrade performance and the difference visible on a smartphone SoC. I think Brave has it written in native code and deeply integrated, and it seems to perform without making things super slow. - While I can't judge on the UI (actually I miss the tab gestures on Firefox), Firefox often glitches like not loading custom tabs, page search getting stuck and some others. This was quite stressful. - The sync is super glitchy. It can easily be days outdated unless you trigger it manually.
- subraizada3 8y ago
  I use an Android without Google Play Services. Firefox (Fennec on F-Droid) probably isn't as fast as Chrome, but it's very usable. Being able to use desktop addons like uBlock is great. I haven't found any compatibility issues with the websites I use. In the settings there's an option to add a 'Quit' button to the menu, which will clear all cookies / history / etc. when you quit FF using menu->quit (so your session is still saved if you just go to the home screen and come back later). IMO that's better than Firefox Focus, which has adblocking and ephemeral sessions built in but doesn't let you have tabs.
  - talonx 8y ago
    I use the mobile Firefox on stock Android. There are certain issues like emails from Gmail not showing up correctly. But that's a minor pain compared to the adblockers and other features that I can use.
- welly 8y ago
  Works very well. I've been using it as my main mobile browser for at least a year now. Latest version is great and I recently noticed it even supports Firefox extensions (at least some of them!), which I don't believe android Chrome does.
- quantummkv 8y ago
  It's far, far better than chrome. It even has the same extension mechanism so you can get ublock origin on you mobile device as well.
- jhauris 8y ago
  I also use firefox on android. It's really good.
- mooreds 8y ago
  Browsing on ff on Android right now. I think its great. Probably once a week I see a site that I have to use chrome for, but other than that small inconvenience, Firefox is great.
- EwanToo 8y ago
  It's really good, I'm using it now, but Google deliberately cripple the UI on it unless you use a user agent switcher. There's a specific plugin for it, Google Search Fixer.
- stabbles 8y ago
  I'm using Firefox Focus on Android as my only browser for a year now and it's great!
  - noir_lord 8y ago
    Same and it works with unlock origin. It was a bit tougher a year ago but recent versions are spot on, I've largely forgotten it's not chrome as it just stays out the way.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  It's very good. Brave Browser is also quite good.
- cyphax 8y ago
  I have been using it for years, I've never had any reason to use Chrome on Android at all. :)
- Boulth 8y ago
  Firefox Android is more important than the desktop version as that's the only way to have uBlock on mobile.
leowoo91 8y ago
Firefox FTW, since it's completely open source.
newusertoday 8y ago
Since no one has mentioned it yet, please also try firefox lite on android its 3.5MB and very usable. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.rocket&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.ro...
- Wehrdo 8y ago
  Looks like it's only available to some countries in Asia [0]. I've been using Firefox Focus on my phone (uses Webkit under the hood), since regular Firefox is too slow. [0]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/get-started-firefox-lite#w_download-firefox-lite https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/get-started-firefox-lit...

kakaorka 8y ago

I feel like it's scary what we've reached. Giving all our browsing history and activity to a surveillance company.

datalist 8y ago
True, once more we have reached and voluntarily embraced browser monoculture.
gaius 8y ago
Chrome is a data collection app with a built in browser
mavhc 8y ago
Don't enable that feature then
AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
Human beings are pretty good, on the whole, about tradeoffs. For most people, the information they're trading away is only theoretically valuable, but the products they receive in return have very tangible value.
- xg15 8y ago
  I agree - because humans generally seem to be pretty bad at including more than the immediate here and now in their tradeoff calculations. I'd see this as an argument why stuff like privacy can't be left to individual choice.
  - tehduder9 8y ago
    So if I didn't voluntarily giving up my privacy for something (an invaluable product to use) you wouldn't let me? Why? It's none of your business what I desire from my personal privacy.
    - xg15 8y ago

meddlepal 8y ago

I hope not, vive la Firefox! I am disheartened though that I feel compelled to use Chrome now in some cases because Google's UI's are poorly optimized outside Chrome (looking at your GCloud UI and YouTube) and some companies have made a decision to only support Chrome (looking at you Slack voice chat).

whatshisface 8y ago
>some companies have made a decision to only support Chrome (looking at you Slack voice chat) Well, there you have it. The beginning of the process that will remind everybody why browser monocultures are horrible things.
- Zelphyr 8y ago
  How have we not learned this lesson from when Microsoft did it? Believe it or not, there are still companies that require sites built for them to be compatible with IE7 because that’s what they standardized on and they don’t want to go through the trouble of an upgrade. When you hitch your wagon to the same horse you eventually get left behind.
  - nothis 8y ago
    Microsoft was only held back by their own incompetence. GFWL, Internet Explorer, Zune, Windows mobile, the Microsoft Store,... they had all the power in the world to force that upon us but failed because their products were _so_ bad even non-tech people went through the trouble of finding alternatives. Google, however? Their stuff at least works. They never had the luxury to send people through hoops, 3 seconds and people give up on the web. So that’s what makes Google so scary. They’re omnipresent _and_ competent. My only hope ist that, as they grow, their products get worse which empowers better competitors.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - cimmanom 8y ago

weinzierl 8y ago

Has Chrome fully taken over yet? No These 3 brave countries still have managed to resist Google's charm Cuba Liberia Eritrea So, essentially yes. These countries combined have less than 4 million people with Internet access. Most of them are in Cuba. Eritrea is the country with the lowest number of people with Internet access per resident and a rate of increase that is as low as that of industrial nations with saturated Internet penetration[1]. Digging into this a bit deeper on statcounter[2] there are a few other surprises: - Firefox is only number four after Chrome, Safari and UC Browser. - Still Chrome is the market leader in China - by far. - Germany has been a Chrome holdout for a long time, but not any more, apparently. [1] http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users-by-country/ http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users-by-country/ [2] http://gs.statcounter.com/browhttp://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/germanyser-market-share/all/germany http://gs.statcounter.com/browhttp://gs.statcounter.com/brow...

deleted 8y ago
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asveikau 8y ago
Sub-100% market share in a populated country still means that a lot of people are using alternatives. That is why it seems absurd to break it down by country in order to declare a "total" victory. I sometimes use Firefox in the US - that fact alone says you cannot say it's "fully taken over" in my country.

danso 8y ago

analytics.usa.gov provides Google Analytics-collected stats of all the users who visit U.S. federal websites, including browser and OS info. As of right now, Chrome is at 46.4%. I couldn't find at the moment a historical dataset > 90 days. The Internet Archive snapshot of the JSON from April 2015 [0] shows Chrome's share at 35.3%. edit: the 2018 vs 2015 numbers for the other browsers: - Safari (iOS and macOS): 28.6% / 19.9% - IE (all versions, but not Edge): 10.9% / 28.2% - Firefox: 4.7% / 11% [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20150412223314/https://analytics.usa.gov/data/live/browsers.json https://web.archive.org/web/20150412223314/https://analytics...

gator-io 8y ago

data on share https://netmarketshare.com/?options=%7B%22filter%22%3A%7B%22%24and%22%3A%5B%7B%22deviceType%22%3A%7B%22%24in%22%3A%5B%22Desktop%2Flaptop%22%5D%7D%7D%5D%7D%2C%22dateLabel%22%3A%22Trend%22%2C%22attributes%22%3A%22share%22%2C%22group%22%3A%22browser%22%2C%22sort%22%3A%7B%22share%22%3A-1%7D%2C%22id%22%3A%22browsersDesktop%22%2C%22dateInterval%22%3A%22Monthly%22%2C%22dateStart%22%3A%222017-11%22%2C%22dateEnd%22%3A%222018-10%22%2C%22segments%22%3A%22-1000%22%7D https://netmarketshare.com/?options=%7B%22filter%22%3A%7B%22...

shorsher 8y ago
Am I missing something or is Brave not on this list whatsoever?
- tyingq 8y ago
  Brave doesn't have a unique User-Agent. "Removed Brave from the User Agent HTTP header to reduce fingerprinting" https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md#090 https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/blob/master/CHANGELO...

haack 8y ago

Having switched back to Firefox and Duckduckgo very recently, I'm feeling much more optimistic about the future of a free web. Both have been on par with Chrome/Google in terms of speed and performance. Now just need to break away from gmail and calendar.

stabbles 8y ago
I especially like how relevant the search results in DuckDuckGo are whenever I query `[search term] !g`
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  I have noticed that too :-). That's one problem with Google: On the one hand I think they should be restricted but on the other hand their products are just very good.
- Theizestooke 8y ago
  sadly that's also my go-to query when using startpage
- solarkraft 8y ago
  Ddg is worse than Google and Firefox is maybe a little bit worse than Chrome. But it's bearable 90% of the time and that matters a lot.
- apatters 8y ago
  Nothing beats searx.me - Google's results are good (but slipping), but when you combine Google, DDG and Bing, it doesn't get any better
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    Never heard of this before but will give it a try.
mirsadm 8y ago
Firefox is not on par in terms of performance at all, at least on the Mac. I use it at home and at work but it just uses too much CPU for me to recommend it to anyone.

shubhamjain 8y ago

Are those countries fighting back in any real sense, or it's a consequence of limited internet access? In Liberia, you can only get very limited and slow internet costing as much as $6 / hour [1]. And for Cubans, the problem was severe enough to make an offline version of the internet (a periodically updated hard-disk) be of any practical value [2]. The stats are meaningless without total traffic share of these countries. [1]: https://www.lonelyplanet.com/liberia/internet-access https://www.lonelyplanet.com/liberia/internet-access [2]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/23/cuba-offline-internet-weekly-packet-external-hard-drives https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/23/cuba-offline-i...

tyingq 8y ago
"The stats are meaningless without total traffic share of these countries" They do publish the sample sizes per country. I assume the sample size is proportional to traffic share, but it's not stated explicitly. Some of it does look odd...the sample size for Turkey is close to the sample size for the US. http://gs.statcounter.com/sample-size/StatCounterGlobalStatsSep15_SampleSizeCountryBreakdown.csv http://gs.statcounter.com/sample-size/StatCounterGlobalStats...

m52go 8y ago

I think it's hilarious that 2 of the 3 countries hailed as bastions of freedom (by this 1 metric) include Cuba and Eritrea.

porphyrogene 8y ago
"Hailed as bastions of freedom" in what way? The only descriptor used to describe countries on the list is the satirical use of "brave".
- m52go 8y ago
  By resisting Google, which to me implies that they're instead using Firefox. That may not be true, as they may be stuck on IE or dominated by some other browser. I don't know the numbers...it was just a bad attempt at humor.

dpecos 8y ago

Chrome is a really nice browser, but we're creating a monopoly for it, not Google, ourselves. I'm not going to talk about Google being evil or not. But as history has shown, monopolies never result in anything good for the people. That's why I'm choosing Firefox as my day to day browser, not because it's better or free from a controlling enterprise, but because I want to keep the web as an open and diverse system, and for that, we need different players to play in equal conditions. It's up to every one of us to achieve this, and to be honest, what are you missing in Firefox that Chrome does? It's quite a nice and decent browser nowadays.

ChristianBundy 8y ago
I love Firefox, but I'd also recommend Epiphany. It's basically Safari but for Linux, maintained by GNOME and integrated with Firefox Sync. Best of all possible worlds. https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Web https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Web
- LeoPanthera 8y ago
  I use Epiphany on both my desktop (Fedora) and my laptop (OpenBSD). It's nearly perfect, but it's annoyingly crashy. Random web pages (usually news sites, weirdly) will make it bomb right out.
nothis 8y ago
It’s our fault? Good luck betting on the general population researching alternatives, then. I use Firefox religiously but have no illusions that it will take over because people’s idealism.
- ric2b 8y ago
  > It’s our fault? Probably talking about Web Developers, of which there are many here.
rc_mob 8y ago
Oh. I just think FF is a better browser. Never liked Chrome at all.

_ph_ 8y ago

At least for me, Firefox has taken over again. I am using it on macOS, iOS and of course Linux. The tipping point for me was the new rendering engine, written in Rust, but I really like features like sending tabs to my other machines. On iOS, I prefer the user interface with tabs shown as small icons to the one of Safari.

sn41 8y ago

I use Seamonkey. I wonder if there are people who prefer Seamonkey over Firefox.

monetus 8y ago
How is going for you? I've been curious about how often it has trouble rendering a site.
- sn41 8y ago
  It renders most websites I visit (reddit, Facebook etc.) fine enough. It takes a long time to start up, however. One really bad point about it is that on MacBooks, it seems to use up the battery charge really fast.

skrebbel 8y ago

Can someone explain to me what those countries do wrt Chrome?

kristofferR 8y ago
It's just a listing of countries where Chrome is not the most used browser. I'm guessing IE is more popular in those countries, due to old computing equipment being popular.
- datalist 8y ago
  For these three countries it is Firefox with the largest market share.

tobyhinloopen 8y ago

Fulltime Safari user here :) Only using chrome for development. I guess even North Korea are active Chrome users? Who would have guessed.

nerdponx 8y ago

Is there a browser with something like uBlock Origin/Matrix built into the browser engine? Something like SELinux for the web. The user should have the option to take fine-grained control over the content in their browser on a site-by-site basis.

rglullis 8y ago

Firefox on Desktop, Brave on Android.

malikNF 8y ago
Isn't brave based on chrome?

pictur 8y ago

The chrome is still bad. and Firefox is still and still bad.

ourmandave 8y ago

We could slow down the inevitable if Microsoft makes it so you can't download Chrome using Edge.

xoa 8y ago

Does anyone know what the actual metrics being used for this site are? Maybe it was discussed in a previous HN? I don't see in the present environment how Chrome can ever reach the kind of power IE once had given the existence of iOS if nothing else. It's not just about pure marketshare either, it's about value share (which is often the stat that companies actually care about, with marketshare only being an occasionally useful proxy measure). Even if alternate platform users like iOS/Mac/Linux who don't use Chrome were only 10-30% of users say, what percent of revenue do they represent? It's not a uniform distribution amongst the general population. And while there remain and probably always will be quirks between browsers and standards one implements that others don't yet and so on, I don't think there is anything quite like ActiveX remaining in the modern web.

crazygringo 8y ago

How many countries Chrome is ranked #1 in doesn't matter and is a distraction. Overall market share is infinitely more important. E.g. assuming a two-browser world, it would be drastically more of a problem for Chrome to have 99% market penetration in 98 countries and 49% in the other 97 (so ranked #1 in only half, but still a huge problem)... than it is to have 51% market penetration in 192 countries and 49% penetration in a remaining 3 (so ranked #1 in nearly all, but no problem at all). The real question from a healthy competition standpoint is, what is the market share which we consider to be "fully taken over", where competitors are no longer viable?

treve 8y ago
Yea, this statistic is as bad of a representation of marketshare, as democracies without proportional representation.

outside1234 8y ago

If you haven’t switched to Brave yet from Chrome, you should. Great browser built on open source

timbit42 8y ago
It's also built on Chrome but BAT will be supported on other browsers soon.

Havoc 8y ago

Switch to FF recently was entirely painless - the seem functionally identically for my usage cases. Probably prefer chrome on the whole but ugh fk google and their stance to privacy

passthejoe 8y ago
I switched to Firefox just to have one less Google-y thing in my life, and the FF browser has gotten better and better in recent releases.

mlamat 8y ago

I use Chrome to play mkv videos from my Nextcloud. Firefox doesn't support it.

xg15 8y ago

A lot of comments in this thread seem to argue that the share of countries is less important than the overall market share. I think it's not completely unimportant either. Not everyone uses the same corners of the internet. Yes, many things are centralised but there are still a lot of language/country specific sites around, which will adopt to the specific ecosystem in their country. So if Chrome has 99% market share in a certain country, it's likely that local sites will optimize for it and using other browsers will generally be harder in that country. The other way around, if Chrome is not dominant in a certain country, that might not have effects in other countries where they are. As an extreme example, suppose China and Russia banned Chrome and mandated the use of special domestic browsers - but Chrome climbed to 99% market share everywhere else. Then the global market share would be far below 90%, nevertheless you wouldn't have an actual choice anywhere in the world.

crazygringo 8y ago
But a count of countries is a pretty arbitrary way to slice market share, and one of the worse ways in my opinion. If you want to measure the degree of competition in different corners of the internet, then 1) it's still about market share and not about which is top-ranked, and 2) better slices could be market share in desktop vs. mobile, in workplace vs. home, and in something more macro such as "more free" populations (U.S., Europe) vs "less free" populations (China, Russia).

burtonator 8y ago

One of the amazing things about Chrome which is under rated is the ecosystem in Open Source tooling that it's created. Specifically V8, Chromium, NodeJS, and Electron. I've been working in an offline browser and documentation platform named Polar which is based on Electron. https://getpolarized.io/ https://getpolarized.io/ Obviously it heavily relies on Electron + Chrome internals but the fact that I can control the full browser is pretty amazing. This is a hybrid desktop+browser app which allows me to some pretty awesome things. For example, I can inject myself directly into the networking stack in Electron. This is how Polar implements offline browsing. It captures the traffic of a web page you're visiting and then keeps it in a cache for your usage forever. No worrying about the site vanishing or your network going offline. Now I COULD do this with a PWA and service workers, possibly, but I think the main thing I'm worried about is Google's control over the extension install process. I'm anticipating at some point that they might block service workers that essentially register for * ... that actually DOES make a lot of sense to prevent malware - but then I'm not malware.

esotericn 8y ago

It seems to me that the web has split into two. Developers that care are using browsers like Firefox and avoiding websites full of cruft (e.g. GDPR/Cookie/Newsletter/Advert/... popups). The general public is using whatever's preinstalled on their phone to go to whatever websites are advertised to them. There's some overlap (e.g. obviously these websites exist because there are developers that have no principles and design the GDPR banner stuff), of course. I don't know how we break that. I'm not sure if we even should - I can tell my friends and family that they should boycott anti-user practices, but they don't care, and that's as far as it goes. For the general public, computers are toasters. Whatever's marketed most will win. Google has a bigger budget (and greater control over services people use on the web in general) than Mozilla.

MrP 8y ago

Firefox is going to win again, by the way. We are the same intransigent nerds that originally moved to FF over IE6 on principle, only this time also with more disposable income (You know, the people you want to show ads to), on top of technical acumen and prescriptive influence. Chrome is a couple more undeleteable tracking cookies or proprietary languages away from the tipping point.

rjsw 8y ago
Firefox keeps getting new languages added to it too. I'm still running Firefox 52 ESR on anything lower powered.

philshem 8y ago

WebUsb is pretty cool https://github.com/WICG/webusb https://github.com/WICG/webusb

redsparrow 8y ago

I've been using Vivaldi for a while and find it performs better than Firefox on my Mac, especially since version 2.0. I prefer the Firefox license, but prefer using Vivaldi.