Chrome swallows more share

[steven36]

Its biggest monthly user-share gain in three years pushes Google’s browser ever closer to the 70% mark.

 

 

 

Chrome again jumped in user share, adding the most in a single month since its 2016 heyday, when Google took advantage of a disastrous Microsoft decision to claim the top spot.

 

According to web analytics company Net Applications, Chrome's July user share climbed by 2.3 percentage points to end the month at 68.6%, a record for Google's browser. The month's increase was the largest since August 2016, at the tail end of an eight-month tsunami that swept Microsoft from its decades-old perch.

 

In five of the past seven months, Chrome has held more than two-thirds of global browser share, a statement to its grip on the market. The only extant browser that has accounted for such a large portion of the world's web activity? Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE), which a decade ago was as dominant as Chrome is today.

 

But Microsoft deliberately pulled the plug in the IE bathtub and within months watched its lead swirl down a drain. In mid-2014, the Redmond, Wash. company told Windows users that they would have to upgrade to the newest-available IE for the OS running their PCs. The order scratched a year of support from IE7, four years from IE8 and IE9, and seven years from IE10. (At the time, IE8 was the most popular version of the browser.) Only IE11 survived with support intact.

 

But if Microsoft expected an uptake of IE11, it was sorely disappointed. After the mandate went into effect in January 2016 — when more than half of all those running a Microsoft browser were forced to switch — a stunning decline began. In the first eight months of 2016, Microsoft's global browser share plummeted 16 percentage points, representing a loss of about a third of its total. During the same stretch, Chrome gained 21.6 percentage points, sprinting from 32% to 54%. Computerworld has long maintained that when faced with an upgrade of one sort or another — IE8 to IE11 or IE to Chrome — millions upon millions picked the latter.

 

In any case, IE never recovered, and Chrome has never looked back. Instead, Google's browser has angled to eat the world. According to its 12-month average user share change, Chrome will account for more than 70% of all browser share by the end of the year. By the end of 2020, that number will approach 75%.

 

Firefox feels like it's slipping away

Firefox shed user share again in July, making for the third consecutive month of losses. Mozilla's browser dropped half a percentage point, falling to 8.3%, a mark not far above its record low of 7.7%, which it recorded three years ago.

 

Although Firefox has had several three-month periods where it lost user share, the 1.9-point total decline of the latest was the largest since a 2.3-point drop between November 2017 and January 2018.

 

As Computerworld has pointed out before, Firefox has had a tough time the last two years. Every once in a while, the browser posts a positive number, but those gains are always erased. Over the last 15 months, for example, Firefox reached 10% or more just twice, most recently in April. But then May, June and July came and washed Firefox near the 8% bar.

 

Firefox's prognosis remains dire. In the last six months, the browser gave up 1.9 percentage points of user share, a depressing amount for an application that has no fat to begin with. Computerworld's latest forecast puts Firefox under 8% by October and contends that the browser will flirt with a sub-7% share by July 4, 2020.

 

Mozilla has banked on privacy as Firefox's edge over rivals. But it's also recently trumpeted enterprise manageability, likely hoping for some adoption in organizations apprehensive about Chrome's connection to Google, and the latter's reputation as a data collector and monitor of online behavior. Something had better work for Firefox, or it could easily become a boutique browser forever stuck in the low single digits.

Good luck with that Edge thing

Meanwhile, Microsoft's browsers — IE and Edge — were also down for July.

 

The combined user share of IE+Edge slipped by one-tenth of a percentage point to 13.2%. Over the past several months, Microsoft's browsers have alternately climbed and fallen, often taking one step forward followed by two steps back. Over the past six months, for example, Microsoft has added seven-tenths of a point to its user share bank; but during the past 12 months, it was down 2.1 points.

 

The July downturn was on Edge's shoulders: Microsoft's newest browser lost two-tenths of a point, slumping to 5.8%. Only a curious increase in IE by about three-fourths that amount kept Redmond's losses down. (At this point, how is IE collecting new users?) Amazingly, IE, with a user share of 7.4%, continued to tally more user activity than Edge.

 

Edge — the current Edge — accounted for just 11.9% of all Windows-based browsing activity, a significant slip from the month prior, caused by Edge going down and Windows 10 going, well, up in spades.

 

Neither of Microsoft's browsers are going to set any growth records. In fact, by the IE+Edge 12-month average, they'll continue to contract. At the end of 2019, the combined user share will have dropped to 12%; a year from now, they could account for just 11% of all share.

 

Microsoft has its work cut out for it in reclaiming Edge from the morgue.

 

Elsewhere in Net Applications' numbers, Apple's Safari grew by a tiny tad to 3.4% and Opera Software's eponymous browser slid a small bit to 1.4%. The only silver lining for either was Safari's share of all macOS-powered personal computers — 37.9% — ending up setting a three-month record.

 

Net Applications calculates user share by detecting the agent strings of the browsers people use to reach the websites of Net Applications' clients. The firm tallies visitor sessions to quantify browser user activity.

 

Source

[Ryrynz]

Mozilla should've switched to Chromium when it had the chance if it wanted to stay relevant..

[steven36]

5 hours ago, Ryrynz said:

Mozilla should've switched to Chromium when it had the chance if it wanted to stay relevant..

What do you be smoking ? All  Chromium browsers expect for Google  have less users than Firefox now .

 

At  statcounter it says just about the same thing except for Chrome already past the 70% mark and Safari  is ahead of Microsoft

 

 

Switch over to all platforms it knocks Microsoft out the picture

 

Witch is everyone that uses browsers  .

[RejZoR]

21 hours ago, Ryrynz said:

Mozilla should've switched to Chromium when it had the chance if it wanted to stay relevant..

 

Nonsense. Browser engine absolutely has NOTHING to do with market share.

 

So many people use Chrome because:

- it's made by Google and people think everything Google makes is the best shit ever (hint: it's not)

- is shilled and sponsored by Google on all frigging ends even through installers as preselected option (avast! for example was doing that and people had Chrome installed because of it even though I installed Firefox to all of them)

- Google purposely makes things run badly on anything but Chrome which has been proven many times and dumb people just switch to Chrome coz they think everyone else is bad as a result (and they do it in such a way it's then called "a glitch")

 

I've tried Chrome when it came out and I wasn't impressed. Dumb GUI design, absolute lack of any kind of features and extensions were of really poor quality. And the ever hyped "speed" thing, majority of speed and time is wasted on waiting stupid trackers and ads to load from overloaded servers anyway. And most people aren't even using adblockers. For everything else, Firefox is absolutely not any slower. I'm using Firefox on 3 segments of devices. Very low end Intel Atom based hybrid netbook which is many slow because of eMMC storage. Works perfectly fine otherwise. Then it's Ryzen 2500U based laptop. Firefox works pretty much exactly the same as it does on overclocked Intel Core i7 5820k system with shit ton of RAM and fast SSD. So, I really don't know where people are getting the bullshit "Chrome is fast". Yeah, cool, so is Firefox. Which is open source and doesn't hoard everything about you like Chrome does. But people don't care about that. They want Google, coz Google is the shit. They just don't know what is "the shit" when you ask them.

 

And if you absolutely have to use Chrome based browser, why use Chrome itself when Opera and Brave are billion times better? I just don't get people at all.

[Karlston]

1 hour ago, RejZoR said:

. And the ever hyped "speed" thing, majority of speed and time is wasted on waiting stupid trackers and ads to load from overloaded servers anyway.

 

Mozilla also has a speed obsession. For example, Firefox 69 will by default not load UserChrome.css and UserContent.css because it will improve launch time. How many picoseconds will that save?

 

One other important difference is Firefox’s superior customisability. With Firefox I have multi-row tabs, tabs located below the address bar, and custom tab-width. I can’t see me doing that with Chrome.

 

 

[Ryrynz]

5 hours ago, RejZoR said:

 

Nonsense. Browser engine absolutely has NOTHING to do with market share.

 

 

Absolutely nothing to do with market share? Are you high?
Wait until Edge Chromium is released and watch it's fucking market share... LOL.

Come back to this post in two years time after it's stable release, also you can look at Firefox probably dropping another 0.5% maybe more

People USE IT because it's good, plain and simple you don't get to what.. it's about 70% depending on the metric used.. by just being average.

Firefox is basically done and dusted, a nice prolonged and uneventful death that if you haven't noticed has been happening for the last ten years.
It's only going down, it will NEVER go up again. Safari will have more market share at some point. Maybe when they hit 5% they'll change to Chromium or just eventually die off, I don't give a fuck which.

It's just a browser TRYING to stay relevant and obviously failing, that you cannot argue.
 

 

[steven36]

6 hours ago, Ryrynz said:

Wait until Edge Chromium is released

People USE IT because it's good, plain and simple you don't get to what.. it's about 70% depending on the metric used.. by just being average.

Even if that browser ever gets any marketshare it want be because it's good it will because it's more  monopolyware that comes shipped in Windows . Microsoft  got away with it for years  with IE tell they got sued for it in a Antitrust case. when i 1st came on the net  IE dominated the web because it was monopolyware that's how they beat out Netscape was by baking in IE and won the 1st  browser war  .The only reason  people use other browsers in Windows today is Microsoft was forced to ship in Windows  were you could install other browsers . 3rd party browsers  had no success against IE tell people was made aware of them. Google makes Chromium that means Microsoft has lost the 2nd browser battle and building upon someone else's code .  New Microsoft was too incompetent to make there own code successful so they had to resort to open source  and be just another Chromium clone. You don't need EDGE to use Chromium so it never will impress me because they many Chromium spins open source and closed source . So the Chromium market is really fragmented and the ones that ever been successful porting it is Google because they make the Open Source version as well.  Firefox has always been a 2nd and 3rd place browser  but it gives users a choice to use something besides Chromium.

[DKT27]

Complete monopoly is always bad for consumers and users I think.

[FaeGiN]

I love my Firefox v 48.

They can do what they like. 

I keep the latest version also in case a site demands it but I just love dem addons to behow I had it back in the good old days! Unfortunately got to go back a lot of versions to make em all work. 😎😂