6 ms·

On the one hand developers have one less engine to worry about. On the other if it becomes a chromium monoculture then Firefox loses.

mcny 8y ago
On the front page, I saw another headline that said Firefox desktop market share is below nine percent.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- nerdbaggy 8y ago
  And nobody knows how that’s calculated. If the implementation is done via JS we can assume a good portion of all the browsers usage % is incorrect.
  - leeoniya 8y ago
    here are some actual metrics from our ecommerce site (US, home remodeling / DIY): if you look at desktop traffic only: Nov 2015: 16.01% Nov 2016: 13.27% Nov 2017: 10.33% Nov 2018: 8.14% Desktop IE in Nov 2018 was 11.37%, Edge 15.65%, Chrome 52.74% and Safari 11.65%. if you include mobile traffic (where Firefox is basically non-existent), then Nov 2018 is closer to 3.5%. talk about bleak :(
  - fabrice_d 8y ago
    The absolute number is not that important, the trend is. That's clear even in Mozilla's own data: https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity shows they went from 303M monthly active users at the end of Nov. 2017 to 277M this year. This is a serious drop.
    - ngokevin 8y ago
      Even greater in the US, from 50M to 40M.
    - nerdbaggy 8y ago
      Not sure if I trust these metrics They say: "...widely distributed over thousands of websites." https://netmarketshare.com/methodology https://netmarketshare.com/methodology Looking at netmarkshet website and web requests it seems this pulls from gator.io for metrics. Looks like 3k-4k websites have this data which lines up with the previous statment. https://publicwww.com/websites/%22gator.io%22/ https://publicwww.com/websites/%22gator.io%22/
      - ngokevin 8y ago
        He linked to Mozilla’s own public data set though. I think other data sets corroborate decline. The 9% might even be optimistic.
h1d 8y ago
No, there's now more reason for gecko to survive. Can't have single engine dominate the web.
- Osiris 8y ago
  But if that engine is open source, isn't that a good thing? There's a single standard but anyone can contribute patches for increased performance, new features, etc?
  - kibwen 8y ago
    All commits to the Chrome codebase are gated through Google, an ad company whose driving motivation is in delivering value to shareholders, not to improving the web. Once the web becomes a Google monoculture, I won't be holding my breath to see any features land on the web that could threaten Google's bottom line.
    - Osiris 8y ago
      I know what Google is. Aren't changes to many open source projects gated, like the Linux kernel? On a serious note, doesn't the license allow forks? Couldn't a large company just fork it and make changes without Google's approval? Once it becomes "de facto", couldn't one argue to setup a foundation outside of Google's control as is done in many other open source projects? I get that people hate Google but why bash on the project being open source; is it not open "enough"?
      - kibwen 8y ago
        > Aren't changes to many open source projects gated, like the Linux kernel? All projects gate commits somehow. It's not about the gating, it's about who is allowed to make the big decisions and how much buy-in they need to seek from other stakeholders before they're allowed to proceed. It's also about incentives; if Linus were, say, a Verizon employee and if the Linux Foundation were a Verizon subsidiary, people would feel much differently about the governance of the kernel. Likewise if the kernel were permissively licensed rather than GPL'd. > On a serious note, doesn't the license allow forks? Couldn't a large company just fork it and make changes without Google's approval? The thrust of the point here is that forking the codebase is no good if you can't convince people to install the browser and for websites to support the browser. It's a social problem. > is it not open "enough"? It's not. Open source gives users the freedom to fork. When forking isn't enough to preserve user freedom, the next step is open governance, which involves delegating decision-making power to users (with many interesting structural varieties to choose from). Amusingly, I gave a speech on this topic at All Things Open just a month ago.
TheCoelacanth 8y ago
Except that we will probably have to support Edge for another 5 years for the people who refuse to upgrade, so in reality, it will be one extra unsupported browser that we have to write hacky workarounds for.
ngokevin 8y ago
Honestly, I think it’s a monoculture already and the fact that multiple engines exist puts up an illusion of competition. Google controls where the Web goes today, and that there is an oligopoly is a false symbol. At least Chrome gets more dominance, we can no longer pretend Google doesn’t already own the Web.

mcny 8y ago

On the front page, I saw another headline that said Firefox desktop market share is below nine percent.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
nerdbaggy 8y ago
And nobody knows how that’s calculated. If the implementation is done via JS we can assume a good portion of all the browsers usage % is incorrect.
- leeoniya 8y ago
  here are some actual metrics from our ecommerce site (US, home remodeling / DIY): if you look at desktop traffic only: Nov 2015: 16.01% Nov 2016: 13.27% Nov 2017: 10.33% Nov 2018: 8.14% Desktop IE in Nov 2018 was 11.37%, Edge 15.65%, Chrome 52.74% and Safari 11.65%. if you include mobile traffic (where Firefox is basically non-existent), then Nov 2018 is closer to 3.5%. talk about bleak :(
- fabrice_d 8y ago
  The absolute number is not that important, the trend is. That's clear even in Mozilla's own data: https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity shows they went from 303M monthly active users at the end of Nov. 2017 to 277M this year. This is a serious drop.
  - ngokevin 8y ago
    Even greater in the US, from 50M to 40M.
  - nerdbaggy 8y ago
    Not sure if I trust these metrics They say: "...widely distributed over thousands of websites." https://netmarketshare.com/methodology https://netmarketshare.com/methodology Looking at netmarkshet website and web requests it seems this pulls from gator.io for metrics. Looks like 3k-4k websites have this data which lines up with the previous statment. https://publicwww.com/websites/%22gator.io%22/ https://publicwww.com/websites/%22gator.io%22/
    - ngokevin 8y ago
      He linked to Mozilla’s own public data set though. I think other data sets corroborate decline. The 9% might even be optimistic.

h1d 8y ago

No, there's now more reason for gecko to survive. Can't have single engine dominate the web.

Osiris 8y ago
But if that engine is open source, isn't that a good thing? There's a single standard but anyone can contribute patches for increased performance, new features, etc?
- kibwen 8y ago
  All commits to the Chrome codebase are gated through Google, an ad company whose driving motivation is in delivering value to shareholders, not to improving the web. Once the web becomes a Google monoculture, I won't be holding my breath to see any features land on the web that could threaten Google's bottom line.
  - Osiris 8y ago
    I know what Google is. Aren't changes to many open source projects gated, like the Linux kernel? On a serious note, doesn't the license allow forks? Couldn't a large company just fork it and make changes without Google's approval? Once it becomes "de facto", couldn't one argue to setup a foundation outside of Google's control as is done in many other open source projects? I get that people hate Google but why bash on the project being open source; is it not open "enough"?
    - kibwen 8y ago
      > Aren't changes to many open source projects gated, like the Linux kernel? All projects gate commits somehow. It's not about the gating, it's about who is allowed to make the big decisions and how much buy-in they need to seek from other stakeholders before they're allowed to proceed. It's also about incentives; if Linus were, say, a Verizon employee and if the Linux Foundation were a Verizon subsidiary, people would feel much differently about the governance of the kernel. Likewise if the kernel were permissively licensed rather than GPL'd. > On a serious note, doesn't the license allow forks? Couldn't a large company just fork it and make changes without Google's approval? The thrust of the point here is that forking the codebase is no good if you can't convince people to install the browser and for websites to support the browser. It's a social problem. > is it not open "enough"? It's not. Open source gives users the freedom to fork. When forking isn't enough to preserve user freedom, the next step is open governance, which involves delegating decision-making power to users (with many interesting structural varieties to choose from). Amusingly, I gave a speech on this topic at All Things Open just a month ago.

TheCoelacanth 8y ago

Except that we will probably have to support Edge for another 5 years for the people who refuse to upgrade, so in reality, it will be one extra unsupported browser that we have to write hacky workarounds for.

ngokevin 8y ago

Honestly, I think it’s a monoculture already and the fact that multiple engines exist puts up an illusion of competition. Google controls where the Web goes today, and that there is an oligopoly is a false symbol. At least Chrome gets more dominance, we can no longer pretend Google doesn’t already own the Web.