Firefox vs the world
Chrome widely dominates the browser market. According to the latest data from Statcounter, it maintains a 64.06% share between mobile and personal computers, while Safari has a 19.22% that drops to 9.81% if we only count desktop users.f
The rest of the contenders hardly make an appearance in that particular market share ranking, but they remain brave in the fight. There are Microsoft Edge, Opera, Vivaldi, Brave and of course Firefox. Except for the latter, on Windows they all hide the same under the hood. They are all Chromium based.
It is something that we have been seeing for a long time. The last fall came from Microsoft Edge, which after a very discreet start had to surrender to take the loss and reinvent itself, but this time based on Chromium.
That certainly worked well for Microsoft, which now is no longer considered a joke among internauts, even though it tries to force its use in highly debatable ways.
Others had done it before, and in the end, we have a situation in which the alternatives to Chrome are not actually alternatives, mainly because they share a common engine, which is the Open Source Chromium browser.
Big companies usually outsource their developments or just based their apps on already established engines. From that base each development has its strengths (and weaknesses), but the truth is that by using Chromium they avoid doing a very heavy job: creating a really solvent rendering engine is a very complex task, and it is no less important to discuss web standards, if they are adequate and if it is decided to implement them.
As the programmer Bozhidar Batsov, who was bringing us this reflection recently, said, the situation is somewhat encouraging. There are only two major Open Source projects, and one is controlled by Google that has been making a move for some time to become a comfortable and wonderful platform but with a certainly questioning side.
For Batsov Firefox “is the only alternative to the complete hegemony of Chrome”, above all for being totally Open Source, for developing its own rendering engine, called Gecko, and for its track record in defending and protecting users.
The truth is that Firefox has been alone against the world for a long time, and it does not stop trying to convince more and more users that they offer a valid alternative. At the end of 2017 they made a right turn with Firefox Quantum (its version 57), which made huge improvements in the performance of its rendering engine and its JavaScript engine. Also, they tried to decrease memory consumption, one of the usual complaints of this browser (and others).
Browsers are today used for much more than just surfing the web or conducting research; they are also used for leisure, such as streaming movies or playing online games; in fact, you can now play online casino games using your browser without having to download anything. South African gamers have been using websites like Casinos.co.za, which were put together by a team of pros, to find safe and secure online casino operators in South Africa. Each casino is reviewed in detail, as well as gambling recommendations. Players may play their favorite games with ease and pay with their preferred payment methods in a safe network environment thanks to comparison sites like this and the features given by modern browsers.
The reality is that all these efforts do not seem to be helping much, and although there are many statistics from services such as Statcounter or NetApplications, one of the ones that have been collecting that data the longest is W3Counter, which shows how in July 2010 Firefox got to have a share of 34.1%, but today it has dropped to 3.2%.
The truth is that others are not doing much better, and while Firefox is trying to push itself up advocating for security, other Chromium-based browsers focus even more on that. The best example is the terrific Brave browser, and Firefox users are becoming more and more hemmed in by those who take advantage of Chromium-based browsers, with Chrome clearly leading the charts.
The situation is certainly worrying, especially because Chromium, which is certainly an Open Source project, has a problem: it is becoming more Google property and less “open”, especially since decisions about the direction that this development takes are increasingly in the hands of Google, but also of other large companies such as Microsoft, Samsung, Intel or ARM.
Unfortunately, for us users, we are running out of alternatives and the situation is closer than ever to a duopoly that has Chrome and Safari as the main protagonists, but that is almost a monopoly if we exclude Apple computers and mobile devices. “Firefox is our only real alternative,” Batsov concluded. “Remember that the next time you say that you don’t care that Chrome is slowly eating the web.”
