Er, dieing. Sorry. Gregg Keizer has a good look at the rapid decline of the IE (+ Edge) hegemony. Even though IE showed an uptick in usage last month,
[See the full post at: Keizer: Microsoft’s browsers are dying]
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Keizer: Microsoft’s browsers are dying
- This topic has 38 replies, 18 voices, and was last updated 7 years, 3 months ago.
AuthorViewing 14 reply threadsAuthor-
When I got my laptop with Windows 8 (now 8.1), IE was upgraded to 11 in desktop & tiled (Metro? UWP?) modes. IE 11 had some cool features in tiled mode, but it was irritating when it switched to desktop mode because tiled couldn’t do something. Then Windows 10 with its “new” Microsoft Edge browser was announced. Hip! Cool! Yeah, not so much when Edge developed bugs & we found it wasn’t “new”, but based on Internet Explorer. “Edge” sounded cooler than “IE 12”.
Bought a refurbished Windows 10 64-bit, currently updated to 22H2. Have broke the AC adapter cord going to the 8.1 machine, but before that, coaxed it into charging. Need to buy new adapter if wish to continue using it.
Wild Bill Rides Again...1 user thanked author for this post.
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Correct. I didn’t realize you were aspiring to emulate His high standards of literacy.
(But his minders corrected Him.)
1 user thanked author for this post.
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LOL!
Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server1 user thanked author for this post.
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Microsoft hard-coded IE4 into Windows back when Netscape announced that Microsoft would never beat them. They did it so that they couldn’t be accused of dumping IE4 into the market for free so as to kill Netscape, because once they did that, IE became an integral part of Windows rather than being a separate product.
For the newbies here, Microsoft killed Netscape with this action.
Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server3 users thanked author for this post.
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@ wdburt1
IE and Edge cannot be uninstalled from Windows. Technology-wise, a browser should not be integrated into an OS. A browser can be preinstalled together with the OS, but not integrated into the OS. This may be a sign that the OS company was up to no good.
Seems, the US courts only gave M$, a US tech giant, a slap on the wrist for bundling IE with Windows, whereas the European courts gave M$ a slap on the face for bundling Windows Media Player with Windows.
The dissenting states regarded the settlement as merely a slap on the wrist. Industry pundit Robert X. Cringely believed a breakup (of M$) was not possible, and that “now the only way Microsoft can die is by suicide.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp._(2001)
When you have the kind of market share that IE had during the peak of its popularity, the supposedly agreed-upon standards of the W3C (of which MS was a member) aren’t the real standards. The real standards are whatever the market leader wants them to be. If that market leader also happens to sell web page authoring software (FrontPage) or server software (IIS) that just happen to support those proprietary standards in a way that nothing else can, that can benefit them greatly.
Browsers were just the means to that end for Microsoft. They were never the end in and of themselves… it was about being able to write the standards that define the entire web in a way that benefits Microsoft alone.
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As usual round this time of year it was time for Firefox’s annual test and the first time in years the latest Quantum x64 offering has proved up to muster and has been elevated to keeper status. Yes a bit rough round the edges but fast, reliable, flexible and with the promise of tweaks and customisations to come.
Edge, well cant say I didnt give it a fair “shake of the stick” as I have percivered. Its been around for nearly 3 years and its still rough round the Edges. It seems that M$’s (Thx @ch100 for the saying) “School project” browser is nothing more than just that, development is painfully slow to none existant, and, although a forlorn hope, just waiting for a Power Shell script to get it out out of there.
IE11 yeah you still do the business like a reliable trusty old friend but your starting to look dated now with more than the odd passing exploit targeted at you that requires constant patching, and slowing down in comparison to some of the other Browser’s alas.
Do M$ bother with browsers any more or have they just given up on them like the ill fated Phones? If they have, could they not do the decent thing and not bother bundling them with an OS any more. Would seem to be the way forward.Interesting: Microsoft has abandoned their tried-and-true Windows model for the new Windows-as-a-Service model. And they did the same with their industry-leading browser, IE, abandoning it for Edge. In both cases, they abandoned success for an uncertain hope. In my opinion, they will lose in both cases.
Firefox is my primary browser; Opera is my secondary browser. On occasion there is a website which doesn’t work well with either of those, so for those websites I use IE.
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with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server5 users thanked author for this post.
Not unexpected news. I’ve been happy with Chromium or Chrome as a browser and now as Chrome OS for awhile now, and have seldom looked back. Firefox Quantum may be worth a try, but only when they get a better handle on those Web Extensions. Not all devs over there are onboard yet.
BTW, I am finding that working on a Chromebook with an adequate keyboard is pretty nice, although to be honest, I use it with Fedora 27, Xfce spin, installed with chrx with a firmware (mrchromebook) mod most of the time, unless I’m on the road.
Fedora needed a few tweaks, but now that the keys are (mostly) remapped Fedora seems right at home on the ASUS flip c302 Chromebook. There was a Chromebook firmware update which required a Powerwash, and Fedora and the Legacy Boot options didn’t even blink. Cool, very cool!!
-- rc primak
I think Edge was never a serious contender and IE is well and alive in Windows 10 used in Enterprise in the same way in which was used in Windows 7.
However I find more and more that due to public pressure, Chrome tends to find its way in Enterprise as well, although there is resistance to change and Chrome is seen more like a last resort solution when nothing else works.
Unfortunately Firefox seems to have lost the competition at this level.-
Can you fill online forms in the PDF Reader implementation of Chrome?
If you cannot, then you need Adobe Reader for something which is more or less a regular task.
I keep using Flash in full without warning on Firefox. Not recommending it either way, but I still find it useful.
Except for a very limited number of web sites using Java, I don’t find a use for the plug-in. I stopped using Java for browsing long time ago, although there are few products which I use and which come with their own JRE.2 users thanked author for this post.
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Some government sites in the US require Adobe Reader to fill in forms.
5 users thanked author for this post.
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I swear, I am unable to write a short post to save my life. Here’s another one that started small and ended up being massive.
I still have one site I visit that requires Java. It’s a banking site, and the whole reason I bank with them is that I am able to deposit checks by means of a PC and a scanner rather than a smart phone and its built-in camera (which nearly every bank now can do via an “app.”). I don’t have a smart phone, and my Android tablet’s camera is a very basic fixed-focus model that can’t focus on the check when I fill the frame with it as the bank app wants me to. I’ve actually had some degree of success by placing a pair of cheap over-the-counter reading glasses on the tablet, with one of the lenses over the camera, but it is still a hassle.
The bank I now use uses a Java applet to access the scanner, and it makes it fast and easy to deposit the check. The problem has been everyone else deciding for me that Java is dead!
Waterfox, my main browser, does not have the Java plugin blocked, but it doesn’t work. Since it is exclusively a 64-bit browser, it needs the 64-bit plugin, and the bank applet will not work with it. It warns me when I start the applet that the applet requires 32-bit Java, and I choose the option to ignore the warning… but it can’t find the scanner. Hmph.
Getting it to work in Windows was pretty easy. I just downloaded Firefox ESR 32-bit and installed the 32-bit Java runtime, and voila! Works.
Linux, though, wasn’t so easy. The same scanner that works flawlessly with Windows Firefox ESR 32-bit, and that also works flawlessly in Linux, won’t work with the Java applet running in Firefox in Linux. The Java applet wants to access the scanner via WIA or TWAIN. WIA is Windows-centric, while TWAIN is supported by Mac and Windows, while Linux uses SANE. It turns out that the delightfully cross-platform Java applet only works properly in Windows.
I tried to use WINE to run a Windows browser (I tried Pale Moon this time, which has a 32-bit version that still works with Java), but while the browser ran perfectly in WINE, I could not get the Java runtime installer to work. On the WINE site, someone wrote that they got it to work via a silent install, and I tried it… it appeared to work, with the Java plugin appearing in the plugin dialog of Pale Moon, but it was not to be– the bank applet would not run.
So, Virtualbox was up next. The version in the Ubuntu repo was too old to work with the kernel, and would only cause a hard lockup if it was tried. (Ask me how I know that.) So I grabbed the new Virtualbox from the PPA, and it worked fine as far as installing Windows, FF ESR 32 bit, and Java runtime, but none of the USB devices (including the scanner) would appear in the filters list (candidates for being passed through to the guest, in other words). I learned that I had to manually add my username to the virtualbox group in order for that to work… but once I did, it worked, and I was able to scan from virtual Windows without further issue. It will be a piece of cake from now on.
I’d only done virtualization with Windows as a host machine until then. I’d expected to do it in Linux someday, and now it’s someday.
As far as the bank using Java… what is there that could replace it, technologically? Is there some web technology like HTML5 that has an API for the scanner that would allow it to be accessed in a better way than Java (ie, abstracted rather than through WIA)? I am no web developer; I really don’t know. It could be that Java is the only reasonable way to do this!
I don’t want to rattle the bank’s cage too much, as they may just decide that too few of their customers even care about using PC to deposit checks and just terminate the service completely– I’ve had a number of different providers of various services decide to end whatever service it was rather than fix problems with it that I’d brought to their attention. It works, even if I have to keep an entire virtual Windows installation around to deposit checks every now and then. The security issues with Java runtime don’t really matter as I only use that virtual browser for that one purpose. It doesn’t go to any other site but the bank’s, and if my bank is serving up malware, it’s already in trouble. Any browsing other than the bank is done in the Linux host, of course.
I also have Windows installed natively on this machine in a dual-boot setup, but I wanted to see if I could do it without using Windows directly. I’m trying to simulate having migrated to Linux full-time, to see how feasible it is, and rebooting into Windows when I need it is still using Windows even if I am in Linux 99% of the time. So is using Windows in a VM, of course, but that’s an acceptable level of Windows usage. I always expected to end up having a Windows VM; now I actually do.
Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11) -
Ascaris, I know long posts might be tedious (ask me how I know that 🙂 ). But when I find one of yours, it is worth the effort. What you write in detail often cannot be written more succinctly without losing meaning.
What you have written here, while familiar from other discussions, mirrors what happens with me so often; it is really nice to read others wrestling with the issues of peripherals in Linux. Stolen from Steve Smith, stage name Red Green, a comedian who had a Canadian TV show called creatively enough Red Green: “Keep your stick on the ice. I’m pulling for ya. We’re all in this together.” Enjoyed it rebroadcast on local PBS.
Glad you found your solution. And that it advanced you another step along the way.
2 users thanked author for this post.
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Thanks for the kind words!
Linux for me has been good at getting hardware working. Everything works on my Linux machines, including the laptop’s extra buttons like Wireless and Bluetooth on/off, and their status LEDs. Mint immediately recognized and enabled my gigabit and wireless NICs too, with the internet being instantly available, and my Windows shares immediately showed up in Nemo (the Mint Cinnamon file manager) without me having to do anything at all, which is how it should be with my network configuration.
Out of the box (so to speak), Mint immediately recognized my discrete nVidia GPU and installed the Nouveau open-source driver. The driver manager shows the nVidia proprietary driver as available and marks it as recommended; all I have to do is select the radio button and hit Apply and it installs it, then prompts to reboot (this is one of the rare times that Linux actually has to reboot to install a driver).
That’s better than Windows, in this particular case. The laptop in question has a transplanted GPU that was never factory installed in my model of laptop (MXM II format card with the Asus “flip”). The vendor and product codes for the new card are correct, but the subsystem ID is still what it was when the original card was installed. The combination of the new device ID and the old subsystem ID never existed in “nature,” so the nVidia driver installer for Windows fails, stating that there is no supported card on the system. Doing the installation manually from the Device Manager isn’t any better.
To fix this, I have to go into one of the driver’s .inf files and either delete the subsystem ID or change it to match my hardware. This breaks the driver signing, so I have to first reboot and set Windows to disable driver signature enforcement, then run the nVidia installer with the modified .inf. It pops up that nasty-looking warning that the driver is unsigned and I should only do this if I know where the driver came from, and after reassuring it that everything’s going to be fine, it installs the driver and reboots to load it. Once it’s installed, there is no further hub-bub about it being unsigned.
In Linux, all I had to do was click a radio button, hit apply, and then reboot to load the new driver.
Similarly, I’ve found the Bluetooth software in Linux (Blueman frontend and Bluez backend) to be far easier to work with than in Windows. I wish I could use Blueman with Windows!
Linux Mint also recognized the touchpad on both of my laptops and installed the touchpad settings applet, which enables the two and three finger gestures and such things on my new laptop. My old laptop only supports single touch, but Linux Mint knows this already and only presents options that are relevant for my hardware. To get that level of function in Windows, I have always had to go get the Synaptics driver and install it myself, but Linux does it right out of the box– even the live session fully enables the touchpad.
My Microsoft GPS receiver that came with Streets and Trips works fine in Linux too, and so does Streets and Trips itself, as a WINE application. It has some glitches that don’t happen in Windows, but they are tolerable and can be worked around.
My Canon scanner/printer also works flawlessly in Linux, in both print and scan modes. The problem I had with the scanner was getting it to work with Virtualbox… it worked fine in Linux applications that have scanning available.
There have been some annoying issues with Linux, but I’ve most definitely had them with Windows too. Recently, when Woody gave the green light for the January updates, I think, I had Windows 8.1 malfunction when the update replaced two of the three .dll files that have to be modified (either permanently or once they are loaded into memory) to convince Windows to let me use my own theme. I’d used the patcher rather than the service (that patches them in memory rather than on the disk).
A theme does not contain executable code, so there’s no valid reason to be so stringent with which themes it allows (only the handful of Microsoft themes work normally), but that’s Microsoft. The only explanation I can think of is that MS wants Windows to look like Windows as they define it. This is important enough to them that they would actively try to thwart their own users from customizing their own PCs.
I can’t handle the white backgrounds that are everywhere these days… if not for a custom theme, my retinas would sizzle just trying to use Windows at all, since all the themes (except high contrast, which is awful in its own right) in Win 8.1 have the hardcoded white backgrounds.
So Windows replaces two of the three patched files as part of the update. At the next boot, it can no longer load the theme I have set, since the theme signature check has been restored, and my theme was not signed by Microsoft. So what does it do when it can’t load the theme specified? Load the default Windows theme? Um, no… it just shows a black screen, with the mouse pointer being the only thing I can see. Safe mode isn’t any better. Windows 7 at least would load the Classic theme in this case, but 8.1 just fails.
I got it working again, but that’s something I would not have had to do in Linux. There’s no one trying to prevent me from making my own computer look the way I want it to there… the theme files are easily editable with a simple text editor (whereas in Windows I had to buy a theme editor). Not only that, but GNOME, the project that wrote the themes in the first place, has tutorials online to help people learn how to modify the theme files!
Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11) -
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I use Firefox mainly, and sometimes Tor. The real reason for the move to Firefox was to take advantege of strong adBlocking extensions and HTTPS everywhere as well as NoScript, which were not available or not as effective for IE. I want to try Palemoon and Waterfox.
I mainly left IE due to the inability to control Flash and scripting.
I have used Chrome on the Win10 organizational laptop, but did not like the interface and the Google slurp. I also used Edge there but it was disappointing to say the least, and used Firefox there also.
Since the laptop has now moved to strictly airplane mode only to prevent upgrades from trashing the system that is dedicated solely for one main production activity, I have not seen the ‘new features’ of Edge.
I have Safari on my phone and iPad, and really dislike it, but suffer through the infrequent use on the phone. I have grown use to largely ad free browsing and using Safari on iOS is like wading in a litterbox of ads. I have yet to try the iOS version of Firefox on the iPad.
1 user thanked author for this post.
Waterfox is my main browser. 95% the speed of Firefox Quantum, by my most recent Speedometer 2.0 tests, but with all of my “legacy” addons still working.
I appreciate the speed improvements Mozilla has made in Firefox as part of their Quantum project, but for my money, the best Firefox in recent memory was the one right before the official release of Quantum– Firefox 56. It had nearly all of the speed improvements from Quantum checked in, but the legacy addons had not been jettisoned yet. This release forms the base of Waterfox (with the security fixes from later releases backported).
Mozilla makes it seem like the abandonment of the powerful addons was necessary for the performance gains they wanted by comparing the slow, pre-Quantum Firefox 52 to the fast, post-Quantum 57, and framing the debate as “speed vs. your old addons, which do you want” appears to have worked. Everyone’s talking about how fast Quantum is, with many saying they miss their old addons, but that the speed increase makes it a tolerable loss. Would it still be a tolerable loss, though, if they knew that the last pre-Quantum Firefox has nearly all of the performance gain (versus v52, the version they picked for comparison) AND the legacy addons?
As far as memory usage… I’m only aware of that if I open the task manager. Are people running into issues from high RAM usage with Firefox? I typically leave my Waterfox open for days, weeks even at a time (I don’t shut it down; I use standby/sleep), and being the lazy loafer I am, I usually just keep opening new tabs for new stuff and letting the old ones scroll off the tab bar to the right. When I finally do shut down Waterfox for some reason, it’s not uncommon for me to have accumulated hundreds of tabs… I even hit a thousand once (and I wasn’t trying to just to do it). It’s still just as responsive as ever with all those tabs open, and that being the case, I don’t have any reason to worry about the RAM usage.
It has not always been that way. Before e10s was ready for prime time (e10s=electrolysis=multiprocess Firefox), I was just as lazy as I am now, and in time Firefox (I was using official Firefox x64 then) would start to slow down. I’d check into it and notice that it was pummeling my Windows page file… it’s on a SSD, so it’s a lot more responsive than it would have been on a rust spinner, but still it was noticeable. I’d close most of the tabs, but only part of the ram would be released, suggesting a memory leak. Disabling my addons to see if they were the cause proved ineffective; the leak appeared to be in FF itself.
Firefox (and Waterfox; I am using the two semi-interchangeably here since the two are very close siblings; what affects one affects the other, usually) recently is far better. E10s is mainstream, and it works; the memory leak has not been a problem in quite some time. This was all part of the lead-up to Quantum, so I can’t really say I dislike everything about Quantum– a lot of the underhood stuff that landed as a part of the Quantum project was really, really good. It’s just the abandonment of the powerful addons I don’t like, along with a few other minor issues (like not being able to set the new tab page to a site of your choosing or a local file by normal means). The new UI is pretty abominable too, but then so was Australis.
That, for most people (including Mozilla itself) is what defines Firefox Quantum. Legacy addons in Mozilla’s repository are marked “Not compatible with Firefox Quantum,” so clearly, Quantum is the Firefox that doesn’t accept the old addons, even though FF 56 and 57 are very, very similar in code base. Waterfox dev MrAlex94 even remarked that it was quite easy for him to get Firefox “Quantum” 57 to work with the legacy addons. There’s a lot of Quantum in FF/WF56… just not the two distinguishing features: the new UI and the lack of support for the old addons.
In a lot of ways, the Edge vs. IE schism mirrors that of Firefox legacy vs. Quantum. Edge is a minimalist browser, lacking many of the features of IE. One of the reviewers of Quantum similarly praised its “even more minimalist [than Australis] UI,” as if that was a measure of its goodness. Chrome has always been designed around minimalism, and it seems everyone’s trying to copy them with their own “me too” de-featured versions. “Hey! Look, everyone! I have a minimalist browser too, and this one has even less features than Chrome! Come check it out!” Can you imagine?
Of course, one thing Edge does not have in common with Firefox is that it doesn’t work on any desktop OS I intend to use anytime soon. Firefox works on everything; it’s open source, so you can compile it for whatever platform you wish, and official releases are available for nearly every OS you could want.
Edge only works on Windows, and even then only on one version of Windows. If it was decent and if it had a version that would work on Linux, I’d certainly give it a fair shot. I have nothing against using a MS browser now that the MS browser juggernaut is decidedly over, but even if it was not for the “only on Win 10” limitation, nothing I have read would suggest that Edge would be even close to what I want in a browser. I’m more or less looking for an old-school, heavyweight, fully-featured browser with a traditional UI that is able to twist and bend the web to my liking. Minimalist won’t cut it. I want maximalist (is that even a word?)!
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