Don't call it a comeback

It's a little hard to believe now, but there really was a time when Mozilla's Firefox web browser was revolutionary.

Microsoft, having monopolistically driven their biggest competitor out of business (seriously, they lost the antitrust case after that one), was ruling the roost with Internet Explorer. Crucially, IE hadn't achieved market dominance by being a better product, and it actually wasn't that good; but Microsoft had successfully leveraged desktop OS dominance into a dominant position in the web browser business, and since IE's rendering engine was designed to be incompatible with other browsers, its dominance seemed to have achieved a self-sustaining state, sustained by web designers who were building web pages specifically for IE. The experience sucked, but there were no other options for Windows users, i.e. almost everybody. At one point, IE accounted for 95 percent of browser usage.

But then came Phoenix. Rising from Netscape's ashes, and bursting with innovative features like tabs and add-ons (yes, really), this early iteration of Firefox was simply better and more useful than Internet Explorer, and quickly converted a multitude of fans... to the tune of 32% of the browser market. Changing web standards, like HTML 4, spelled the end of IE-specific web page designs, and Microsoft was eventually forced to actually improve IE in response. It was too little, too late, though; the revolution had come, Microsoft's stranglehold on the PC web browser market was over, and it was Firefox that fired the first shots.

It would not be Firefox that reaped the revolution's richest rewards, though. Having made their name with breakthrough innovations, Mozilla... kinda stopped innovating. Google, meanwhile, having learned from Firefox's example, was bust building their own, innovative, new web browser. Early Chrome was not as good as the version of Firefox which was available at the time, but Chrome got better, fast, while Firefox stayed more or less the same. And now Chrome is 59.57% of the desktop browser market, and equally dominant on mobile, while Firefox holds only a 12.32% desktop share and 0.56% of the mobile market. Mozilla's former CTO declared the browser wars to be over, and Google to be the winners.

But that was way back in June, and this is August, and apparently Mozilla's current leaders are plotting a comeback, according to this piece on c|net:

Hundreds of Mozilla employees met a very different version of the Firefox mascot this June as they packed into a Hilton conference room in San Francisco for an all-hands meeting.

Gone was the blazing-orange fox snuggling a blue globe, the image that’s represented Mozilla’s scrappy browser since 2003. Instead, Firefox Senior Vice President Mark Mayo opened the event with a drawing of afox in menacing mecha armor, named Mark 57 — the same way ever-improving Iron Man suits are named.

The message isn’t subtle: Firefox 57, a massive overhaul due November 14, is ready for battle. Its main rival is Google’s Chrome, which [...] lured tens of thousands of us away from Firefox after it debuted in 2008.

But Firefox 57 could be the version that gets you thinking about returning — and maybe about saving the web, too. Mozilla began testing Firefox 57 on Wednesday, the culmination of more than a year of engineering work.

[...]

The top priority is speed. We all get subconscious pleasure with a browser that’s fast and smooth at loading websites, clicking buttons and opening and closing tabs. If your browser stutters while scrolling or makes you wait a long time for a page to appear, you’re more likely to dump it. Speed improvements in recent months already have had an effect, Mozilla says, stopping a steady stream of defections from Firefox to other browsers.

It’s too soon to tell how much faster Firefox 57 will be, but in one broad browser test called Speedometer, Firefox performance jumped significantly. Comparing the June 2016 version of Firefox with the version expected this August, Firefox performance increased 38 percent on MacOS and 45 percent on Windows, says Jeff Griffiths, Mozilla’s Firefox browser product leader.

So, that's the hype. Now for the reality check.

I have both Chrome and Firefox installed. So, out of curiosity, I tested both browsers, with the following results.

Google's Chrome:

Mozilla's Firefox:

Now, I'll admit that this is hardly an exhaustive or especially rigorous testing process, but even so... if this is 45% faster than Firefox used to be, then I hate to think how slow it used to be. With this much of a performance gap, Firefox would need to be three times faster to be worth making the switch from Chrome.

Worse yet, Firefox 57 will undermine one key feature that helped put it on the map: extensions. Again, quoting the c|net piece:

But another change in Firefox 57 will break a venerable part of Firefox — the extensions technology that lets you customize the browser. For example, with extensions you can block ads, protect your privacy, download YouTube videos, translate websites and manage passwords. Extensions were a key advantage back when Mozilla first took on IE in 2004, but Mozilla is switching to Web Extensions, a variation of Chrome’s customization technology.

The change paves the way for real improvements like a snappier response when you click your mouse or close a tab. But thousands of extensions will be left behind unless their authors build new versions for Firefox’s new foundation.

“This transition is very painful for extension developers, and many existing extensions won’t take this hurdle,” says Wladimir Palant, a developer with Firefox’s most-used extension, AdBlock Plus. Programmers had to start working with Firefox’s replacement before it was mature enough to use, he says.Google’s Hangouts extension is another casualty.

So, Firefox 57 is unlikely to be significantly faster than Chrome, it will have no mobile presence at all, and not only will it have no features that Chrome lacks (and that people want), Firefox will be actively undermining the one competitive advantage that it does have, namely its large library of available extensions. Instead, they'll allow Firefox to use Chrome's extensions, an obvious concession to Google's dominance in the browser marketplace... but if Chrome's extension library is better than Firefox's, why wouldn't users just stick with Chrome?

Seriously, with this as the pitch, how is Firefox supposed to mount any kind of a comeback?

Sorry, Firefox fans, but their former CTO was right. Barring some sort of miracle, the browser wars really are over, Google Chrome really has won, and neither Mozilla's Firefox nor Microsoft's Edge have any chance of changing the browser landscape.

Adobe's Flash is mostly dead, and its remaining days are numbered.

The terminal prognosis comes from Adobe themselves.

From ZDNet:

Adobe finally has drawn a line in the sand, noting that Flash will no longer be supported after 2020.

Microsoft officials said they'd do their part to wind down Flash support in the company's Internet and Edge browsers, so that Flash support will be entirely removed from Windows by the end of 2020, as well. [...] Google, Mozilla and Apple also are committing to dropping Flash support by 2020 in their respective browsers. 

Adobe Flash was once the way that video played on the internet, including sites like YouTube, but HTML5 has been displacing it for a while now - most of the sites that I visit on the regular don't use Flash for anything except ads, which I mostly block. Still, after so many years of ubiquity, I'll admit that it's a little strange to see Adobe themselves finally pulling the plug on Flash.

Fare thee well, Adobe Flash! I won't exactly miss you, but it's going to be a little strange not having you around anymore.

In other news, Edge is still losing to Chrome.

Windows 10 isn't the only Microsoft product struggling to increase its market share - the Edge browser, which comes bundled with the OS, is also stagnant, according to stats from both NetMarketShare and StatCounter.

From NeoWin:

It has been almost two years since the release of Windows 10, which came with Microsoft Edge by default, but it appears that the browser just isn't gaining traction among users. As Neowin's Senior Editor Andy Weir pointed out, there are a number of features missing from the browser, one of them being extensive support for extensions.

According to NetMarketShare, Microsoft Edge only commands a market share of 5.65% - which is an increase of only 0.02 percentage points compared to last month. It is interesting to see that the browser was at 5.09% exactly one year ago, which means that it only grew by 0.56% year-over-year. On the other hand, Google Chrome has continued its dominance with a market share of 59.49%. As a point of reference, this is a sizeable growth of 10.84 percentage points year-over-year.

Meanwhile, Internet Explorer fell to 16.84%, while Mozilla Firefox and Apple's Safari grew to 12.02% and 3.72% respectively. The "Other" section also showed a slight increase, and climbed to 2.29%.

Data from another firm, StatCounter, depicts an even more depressing situation for Microsoft. According to the report, Edge sits at 3.89%, however, this is an increase of 0.15 percentage points compared to the previous month. That said, when viewed in a broader perspective, this is still a minor 1.14 percentage points year-over-year growth.

Chrome is the king of all browsers according to these statistics as well, with a market share of 63.21% - a decrease of 0.14 percentage points compared to last month. Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari command 14%, 9.28%, and 5.16% respectively.

It probably shouldn't be a surprise that Edge isn't thriving, since it's exclusive to Windows 10 which has also stalled, but it's important to note that these numbers are only for desktop browsers. Chrome has 55.55% of the mobile market, too, a market where both IE and Edge don't even register. Safari is the the #2 mobile browser, at 33.17%, followed by the built-in Android browser (5.40%), and Opera Mini (3.18%), with every other browser failing to reach even 1.00% share.

It's nice to see Firefox regaining some lost ground, though. I've been giving Firefox another try lately, myself, and have been pleasantly surprised by how quickly it starts, and by how much it's improved. I don't know that I'd describe it as better than Chrome, but it's definitely as good as, and will import your bookmarks and such from Chrome as well, making switching a snap, and choosing between the two basically a coin flip decision. Edge can't say the same; two years after launching, Edge is still suffering from a poverty of quality extensions, and from Microsoft's determination to push their Bing search platform as the default search choice on both Bing and Cortana. And it shows; even the "Other" category is growing more quickly than Edge.

Microsoft's strategy seems to rely heavily on monopolistic tactics: giving Windows 10 away for free was supposed to garner a dominant share of the OS market, and bundling Edge with the OS would have leveraged that into browser dominance, too, driving adoption of Bing in the process, and effectively stealing the core of Google's business out from underneath them. It's a strategy that Microsoft have employed before, effectively killing Netscape's Navigator (and resulting in a costly antitrust suit in the process), but things seem to be playing out very differently this time. The market is speaking; whether Microsoft are listening is anyone's guess.

Chrome crushes Edge while IE and Firefox fade

How's that for a hype title?

From HotHardware.com:

Despite all the effort Microsoft is expending in getting Internet users to try out and stick with its Edge browser, Chrome continues to the popular choice. Even worse for Microsoft, Chrome's popularity is growing—it now accounts for more than half of all desktop browser usage and has nearly double the market share of Edge and Internet Explorer combined.

Market research firm Net Applications has Chrome sitting pretty with a 54.99 percent share of the desktop browser market, up from 31.12 percent at this moment a year ago, while Internet Explorer and Edge combine for 28.39 percent and Firefox stuck at around 11 percent. Even more interesting is that when Windows 10 launched to the public at the end of July 2015, Chrome had a 27.82 percent share of the market while Internet Explorer still dominated the landscape with a 54 percent share. Now the script has flipped.

Well, I guess we now know why Microsoft has switched from soft bribery to something a little more in-users'-faces. Seriously, is any part of their Windows 10 strategy going to plan, or is it a total fiasco? Because if there is some of part of this strategy that's actually working as intended, I'd really be interested to know which part.

Firefox tops Microsoft's browser in market share

I thought that this had happened a while ago, but apparently I was thinking of Chrome, which still holds 60% of the browser market share. IE & Edge, together, held the #2 spot, though, until five minutes ago:

Firefox has gingerly pulled ahead of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Edge browsers for the first time across the globe.

Mozilla’s Firefox grabbed 15.6 percent of worldwide desktop browser usage in April, according to the latest numbers from Web analytics outfit StatCounter.

However, neither browser threatens the market leader—Google’s Chrome continues to command two thirds of the market.

StatCounter, which analysed data from three million websites, found that Firefox’s worldwide desktop browser usage last month was 0.1 percent ahead of the combined share of Internet Explorer and Edge at 15.5 percent.

[...]

“Microsoft might have expected a boost to its overall browser share as the result of the launch of the Windows 10 with Edge but it hasn’t happened to date,” said StatCounter chief Aodhan Cullen.

This probably has very little to do with the quality or features of Edge, which, by all accounts, is essentially as good as Chrome or Firefox. But Edge isn't a better browser than Chrome or Firefox, and apparently it's not shiny enough to sell the new OS, because even with since Microsoft having stopped supporting IE, and everybody now having to switch their browsers, the trend so far is one of people switching to Edge's competitors, rather than switching to Windows 10.

GG, Microsoft. GG.