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Firefox is losing market share to Chrome
Monday, 09 March 2015
I read with interest an article on Computerworld about Firefox losing market share, wondering what people were using instead. Unsurprisingly, the answer seems to be Chrome: apparently Chrome now has a 27.6% share compared to Firefox's 11.8%. That's quite a big difference.
I checkout out the stats for this site for February 2015, and the figures bear it out: 30.7% of visitors use Chrome vs 14.9% Firefox and 12.8% Safari. Amusingly, 3.1% of visitors still use IE6!
What I did find interesting is the version numbers people are using: there were visitors using every version of Chrome from version 2 to version 43, and the same for Firefox — someone was even using Firefox 0.10! I'm a bit surprised by this, as I'd have thought that users of these browsers were probably amongst the most likely to upgrade.
Why the drop?
The big question of course is why the shift? I switched to Firefox because Internet Explorer was poor, and I've stuck with it, mainly through inertia, but I've used other browsers over the years, and still prefer Firefox. I've got Chrome installed on my desktop, but I don't particularly like it, and only really use it for cross-browser testing. I only really use it on my tablets, where it is the only browser I have installed — I tried Firefox for Android and was really disappointed.
Maybe that's the cause of the shift: everyone is using mobile devices for browsing, and Chrome/Safari are better than the others for mobile.
Which browser(s) do you use, and why?
Posted by Anthony Williams
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Tags: firefox, chrome, browsers
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8 Comments
It seems that this started when Google was popping "Install Chrome" on its pages... Market share has drastically increased for Chrome since then.
Interesting topic, and I have some personal experience to suggest why a lot of folks might be frustrated with FF.
BTW, I still use it, because it is basically the only browser I can stomach, even with its nits. And it works perfectly EXCEPT for this one thing...
It's Flash. For some unknown reason (and I've done a LOT of Googling to try to pin this down), Flash keeps causing the browser to lock up. While it usually doesn't crash it permanently, it does render it useless and unresponsive for tens of seconds at a time, and if I don't want to have to shut it down, I have to wait until *maybe* I can get the offending window (usually Huffington Post, but not necessarily always) to to close.
There are all sorts of "solutions" posted out there, but they don't work for me. I try not to leave Huff Post open in a tab, because that's begging for the issue to arise. I do like to browse Huff Post, I just have to remember to close the tab when I'm done or else I'll find FF hung up some minutes later.
I would think this issue alone would be enough to get many people to give up on FF in exasperation, but I still like everything else about FF so much that I'm choosing just to live with it.I use Firefox. I can live with Chrome, but I just don't like it; and when I need to use something like Firebug, I really like Firebug.
I use Chrome on my desktop and Firefox on my Android. Chrome for Android is really slow, crashes, etc. Firefox there is so much better.
I haven't given a try to FF on the desktop yet, I'm really happy with Chrome there.
I prefer IE again. I switched to Chrome's dev channel early in its life, but I have a Surface Pro now, and IE 11 has *way* better touch screen support. IE 11 kind of gets a bad rap from Old Microsoft. It's actually quite good these days.
I use Chrome, Firefox (aka Iceweasel on Debian), Epiphany (aka Web) but for different things so as to get different histories. Your site will have me as a Chrome user, other sites will have me as a Firefox user.