It's disturbing to see how widespread Google's monopoly is.
Oh my god, it's like the New Zealand maps but even more insane lol
And that's because DPRK uses Ask Juche
But for real, they actually use Google and a custom branch of Firefox
Everything is chrome in the future. Screw the Simpsons, SpongeBob was the real oracle of our times.
This is one of those things that blows my mind because it snuck up on me so bad. When I first found firefox, it was relatively popular and all through the years I've used it I always assumed it was more or less the same. Yeah it was less popular but it was still a contender, right? Then one day a few years ago someone poked fun at me for using firefox like it was some kind of niche thing. I realized after that, everywhere I looked it was chrome all the way down.
i was firefox mid-late 00s, went full NPC using chrome for about 5-7 years, went back to firefox
I mentioned Firefox to a friend that is fairly tech savvy, builds his own PC's, he had never even heard of it.
I was a big Firefox person for over a decade. And then at some point maybe 3 or 4 years ago, the mobile browser became shitty, and I kinda just stopped caring and started using safari and chrome because they'll just work and I can pick up any computer or phone anywhere and most likely have a familiar experience.
I'm just really annoyed with mobile Firefox for how it used to be (mostly) compatible with desktop addons but now it only has the dozen or so really popular ones available
Still much better than Chrome.
Mozilla also faces the obstacle that most (86% as of 2020) of its revenue comes from Google for making them Firefox's default search engine. New stuff like their VPN shows potential to offset that in the future, but for now, their reliance on Google is very real.
Firefox doesnt destroy your ram unless you use a google website that intentionally sabotages firefox and the ram usage is orders of magnitude higher than that of chrome. For example gcp console on chrome 900mb usage. Firefox 4gb and constant crashing and hanging.
It's absolutely insane how many countries just allowed western tech companies into their countries via the internet. Facebook is so popular around the world too. You'd think they would take digital sovereignty more seriously, especially in countries like Russia and China. Google Chrome phones home to Google for a dozen different services. Firefox does quite a bit too. But they're essentially allowing these western companies to surveil their populations, which is of course what the whole intent of the internet was and is what it's used for by the US government. These countries should at least have a fork of Firefox with most of the services turned off. Like can't they just have some local companies develop a version of Firefox?
It's also just an extremely unfair playing field considering these western companies and organizations are the ones that develop the standards that they then implement in their browsers that web developers then use. It just drives me crazy that non-aligned countries don't get together to develop another set of standards where western companies don't have such a leg up.
At least in a lot of countries web browsers may be less useful just because of bandwidth and such. China's WeChat is supposedly extremely widely used in China and has its own ecosystem.
I think the recent westoid sanctions tantrum is going to send the message of the importance of digital sovereignty to the rest of the world. The tech world is going to be multipolar as well.
While I don't doubt that lame-ass Chrome has dominance, there's also something tricky to remember here. Browser dominance is measured through sites logging the relative number of 'User-Agent' headers that come their way, but for an increasing number of major sites (Steam store comes to mind), browsers such as Firefox and Opera as default behaviour will actually spoof being a Chrome user-agent, because otherwise the site won't actually work properly. I do wonder if we're really gathering the metrics here in an accurate way.
I never realized how big Kazakhstan is. It's huge. It looks smaller next to Russia and China, but it's almost the size of continental Europe (minus Russia and Scandinavia), or like 2/3rds the size of the contiguous US.
For me this comes down to the fact that Chrome felt quicker originally, I think I remember seeing comparisons that showed it was quicker too.
Now they feel about the same but Chrome has nicer design and uses up less screen space with tabs and bars.
Getting people off Chrome will require a functional reason to do so. People don't move unless something is an obvious improvement in their active usage.
Nah, Edge is still just chrome. Shout out to Greenland for using Safari instead.
Is chrome actually the most popular browser in China? I would think China would surely have its own browser, no?
360 browser, QQ browser, 2345 browser, UC browser and Sogou browser comes to mind. All of them are based on Chromium with adware & bloatware added.
Most of their users are unfamilair with computers and ends up installing them by accident because they forgot to untick a check box while installing a PDF reader or something. Some of these would also automatically install more software with ads(media player, pc cleaner, file compressor etc.) and replace your default ones without notice.
The software scene in China is terrible, FOSS is near nonexistent. Nearly all software either aggressively push for payment or push ads. Famously, a company bought distribution rights of Flash Player in china from adobe and bundled it with adware(named "Flash Helper" to disguise itself). The only way to get Flash without an pop up ad every few days is to look for an offline installer from other countries. Even adobe's official online installer, once detecting a chinese IP, would download the version with ads.
One of my friends had adwares mysteriously show up and his home page redirected despite him installing the OS just a few days ago. I thought the windows iso he used had ads but nope. Turns out the software he used to make a windows installation USB drive would automatically inject adware into the system during installation. There's a reason most power users in china actively seek out software developed abroad instead of the commonly available ones in china. It's just hard to trust any of them.
Probably means chromium although idk why Edge is separate in that case.
