Edge beats Firefox to become second most popular browser | Hacker News Reader

Edge beats Firefox to become second most popular browser

bleepingcomputer.com

31 pointsme551ah28 comments

As expected, we're approaching a web browser monoculture. When you have an open platform where only one company controls it, it fails to be open any more. I'm sincerely worried about an ad company controlling the largest source of information on Earth.

Today I was setting up a spreadsheet in google sheets using Firefox. When I would hit backspace while editing formulas, it'd occasionally but frequently reinsert the deleted character half a second later

I'm not too worried to be honest. IE almost completely dominating the market didn't prevent it from being completely overtaken by newer, better tech. And this time with Chrome being open source it would be even easier for a competitor to emerge if chromium becomes the new IE. if it doesn't and it stays better than the competition, what's the problem? The better product dominating the market makes sense. You don't even have to ever touch a google service to use chromium

It's not a browser monoculture, it's a browser-engine monoculture. I for one welcome our new overlords.

I think it's great to have diversity in a browsers; one browser might focus on being light weight, while another might have a new spin on the UI.

But I do NOT want diversity in how different browsers render a table.

Problem is, there are limits to how different browsers using the same engine can be, especially when it comes to matters like efficiency. At some point you’re going to have to start modifying the engine and eventually, fork it due to divergence becoming unmanageable — this is why Blink was spun out of WebKit.

You must have missed the 90s. When a single vendor mandated every new technology in the browser space. ActiveX and other pleasantries came out of those times.

I remember the 90's. It was the era of "Best viewed in X version Y".

I'm a firefox user myself, and am slightly angered by this news, but at the same time, the good news is that because most of these users are upgrading their copy of windows, which means fewer people using IE11! The death of IE11 can't come soon enough, at least there's a silver lining to this cloud.

Firefox had been a bad browser for years, the only people I ever meet who use it heavily are tech enthusiasts and privacy activists. If nobody is choosing your browser for practical reasons then you've failed to make a useful browser but pointing this out only ever results in jeering and being told some token line like "Compromise means the erosion of privacy!". This is what that philosophy gets you and down the line I expect the real situation will be Firefox in 4th since Brave has been gaining momentum too.

Edge, IE and Safari have their shares because they are the default already installed browser on the main OSes, used either because people like them or are too technically illiterate to install a potentially better browser.

Chrome has a huge share because it is heavily advertised on some of the most used websites in the world.

The others like Firefox, Brave, etc have almost zero advertising budget and rely on word of mouth and third party kindness to be known. The fact that millions to hundreds of millions of people use them, despite knowing the alternatives, is testament to how good they are.

55% of traditional PCs have Windows 10 on them [1], yet Edge only has a 7% share of the browser market specifies how good Edge is.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_10#Market_share_and_sa...

> If nobody is choosing your browser for practical reasons...

Is that really the case or is it marketing and network effects. For a time IE had a majority share and it took a while for superior browsers to overcome that.

There is also marginal utility in switching as all browsers converge on the same set of user-visible capabilities.

Products require marketing to succeed, the only exception is when there is a massive utility gap like there was when Firefox started to displace IE. Not every browser needs to be a top 3 mainstream browser but you don't get to say that you're a browser for the masses and then go cheap on marketing without having some incredible utility gains in development. Firefox currently does not have the same utility advantage over its competition that it did when it went head to head with IE.

> Firefox had been a bad browser for years

Honestly I have no idea how someone can honestly arrive at this conclusion. I have been continuously using both Chrome and Firefox and I'm yet to notice any practical difference between them.

I'm curious, in your opinion what's the worse thing about Firefox?

Sure. Firefox doesn't work with acceptable universality first and foremost, I'd never use Firefox to take an online test at University for example because the one in a million chance it has a hiccup isn't worth the risk when using Chrome or Edge is riskless. The way that situation arise may not be Mozilla's fault but it doesn't change the reality. There are ways to make Firefox more reliable in terms of hiccups on websites but we're past the point of asking users to do extra work being acceptable if they're not your employee.

Perhaps relatedly, Firefox's features for syncing across devices are unappealing because there aren't terribly many Mozilla products that I care about whereas most people have a Gmail and many also have Microsoft accounts. I can't imagine the circumstance that would lead me to have a Mozilla account already and so it's just one more thing to have to think about in an ecosystem where I have other options.

Extension support is stronger in Firefox but most users aren't heavy extension users and if they are it's probably an adblocker. Ad-blocking is a lot less special now since most of the competing browser's have acceptable adblock options whereas once upon a time Firefox was the only choice if you wanted a not awful internet experience.

Edge pays you to use it, Brave does this too but have yet to see the growth of Edge yet I feel it's worth acknowledging because this might just be the cost of trying to genuinely compete with Chrome. Chrome doesn't pay but it has little reason to since it's Chrome.

Finally, Firefox's mobile browser is terrible. Chrome is similarly terrible in terms of UI but Edge and Brave are light-years ahead in terms of having a layout suitable for a mobile device. It's worth noting this might change in the future since Firefox Lite and Firefox Focus both have much better UIs for mobile than the flagship mobile browser but until the flagship catches up those are just novelties for alternate markets.

I'm sure Firefox is still the 'ethical' browser and it runs fine for non-critical web usage, but the market is past that being enough to make a web browser stand out in the mainstream. Nobody wants to manage two web browsers when they could make due with one and so it makes the most sense to just use the critical task browser for eveything. Related to this, most people don't have the extreme outlook on browser ethics that the privacy movement does and so Firefox doesn't offer them anything in that regard anyway. It flies on hacker news to handwave this part as a matter of normies just not knowing better (informed consent arguments) but the reality is that no one has made a convincing argument for demonstrating how all of this is actually damaging the mainstream users and the topics are old enough that there's been plenty of time to come up with persuasive arguments

Summarized, Firefox's strengths are things that mainly appeal to particular ideologies. For people who don't share those ideologies it doesn't offer anything over the other browsers and I've seen little that suggests Firefox will be able to overcome this hurdle since its identity these days is built on being the private/ethical browser.

> I'd never use Firefox to take an online test at University for example because the one in a million chance it has a hiccup isn't worth the risk

You're not complaining about Firefox. You're complaining about how the guys who developed the online test failed to put together a standard-compliang app, and instead opted to develop a bug-ridden platform-specific web app.

This argument is a tired old throwback from the 90s internet. Have people learned nothing?

Whether Mozilla or the test designers are at fault does not change the situation as it stands. You can call the argument tired if you want but that doesn't suddenly imbue Firefox with more compatibility compared to their Chromium competitors.

Sorry to say that, but...you use a lot of words and in the end you say nothing...

Some points are just personal preference (like mobile UI) and ecosystem(I really like the function to send a tab to my mobile...can't remember that chrome had it at least I never used it in chrome)

And other points are just wrong/not true ... or missing proof for your strange assumptions...

Mobile UI is far from preference in the browser examples I used. Menus and interactive elements at the top of the screen are holdovers from the desktop. Bottom screen menus are vastly easier for exclusive thumb use. Considering that both Focus and Lite adhere to this, I suspect Mozilla knows it as well.

At best your complains boil down to subjective and highly exaggerated and outright nonsense nitpicking.

The only thing that Firefox mobile has at the top of the screen are the URL bar, which automatically hides when the user scrolls down, and a couple of buttons piggy backing to save on screen real estate.

And complaining about these UI elements in Firefox mobile while boasting Chrome mobile as the best is something that makes absolutely zero sense, as Chrome mobile has the exact same UI elements at the exact same position.

It seems you are desperate to both find reasons to criticize and justify your complains at a rational and factual level.

4 years ago or something I changed to chrome..because firefox did only strange stuff (changing the UI with every update etc.and mad it worse)

But 1 month ago I switched back to ffx. It is easy to use and a lot of stuff improved in the UI and is better than in chrome. Privacy topics were only the "icing" on the cake...but also a very good direction

And last but not least...don't believe these numbers from single source...

For me it is the SVG rendering, I do a lot of d3 work, and it just isn't all that fast.

I have to say I wouldn't have thought it but I really like Microsoft's take on Chromium. It seems at least for some reason faster and more responsive than Chrome although it's built on pretty much the same base.

The "reader view" is quite nice and the text to speech feature is great, the quality is really good. It also seems to be getting vertical tabs pretty soon. For now I'm only using it on windows though, it'd be great if there was a linux version at some point.

It is also very responsive in Android. I use FF in the desktop but in my phone and tablets it is practically unusable. Switched to Edge there a couple of years ago and it was a smooth transition and has some good configuration options, like blocking ads.

Maybe it was in the article and I missed it, but has Edge started to eat into Google Chrome's marketshare at all? Or Safari's? (Yes, I know, Safari's marketshare is less than 4%, but it's been consistent.)

why are folks sad about this? Edge is great. It doesn’t make firefox any less great.

really strange how fast people forget what kind of company microsoft is...

so: F*CK MS! Viva la revolucion!! (somebody has to say it) :)

Everyone is talking about compliance and risk management and all that blabla, but the most obvious and highest risk (and btw not compliant to GDPR) of a quasi monopolist (with closed source), is not being taken into account...

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