seen from United States
seen from Italy
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Philippines
seen from Germany
seen from China
seen from Canada
seen from Poland
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How many tabs do you currently have open in your usual internet browser (NOT counting empty tabs)?
None– just the default tab (empty or homepage) when the app/browser first opens
1
2–9
10–24
25–49
50–99
100–199
200–349
350–499
500–699
700–999
1000 or more
Answer based on whichever device you use the browser on most frequently.
–
We ask your questions anonymously so you don’t have to! Submissions are open on the 1st and 15th of the month.
Interesting Update on Firefox
So Firefox has introduced Terms of Use.
Hot off the back of its recent leadership rejig, Mozilla has announced users of Firefox will soon be subject to a 'Terms of Use' policy — a
Of note:
This was pointed out updated in the Privacy Policy:
We use technical data, language preference, and location to serve content and advertising on the Firefox New Tab page in the correct format (i.e. for mobile vs desktop), language, and relevant location. Mozilla collects technical and interaction data, such as the position, size, views and clicks on New Tab content or ads, to understand how people are interacting with our content and to personalize future content, including sponsored content. This data may be shared with our advertising partners on a de-identified or aggregated basis.
Additionally, you can have a look at their Github changes here, which shows something else interesting:
Mozilla has deleted the lines "Does Firefox sell your personal data? Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy. That’s a promise.
Another commit shows another removal of a line that notes that Firefox doesn't sell personal data
bedrock/firefox/templates/firefox/faq.html Old: Yep! The { -brand-name-firefox-browser } is free. Super free, actually. No hidden costs or anything. You don’t pay anything to use it, and we don’t sell your personal data. New: Yep! The { -brand-name-firefox-browser } is free. Super free, actually. No hidden costs or anything. You don’t pay anything to use it.
Scrolling further down, you can see a response to a comment questioning it
Strap in.
It's been a while since I did one of my needlessly long and elaborate posts. This changes now. I have been in the ggplot documentation and found this site to get some csv files to play with like dolls. Today we are talking about internet company monopolies with data visualisations. I've never been so Admiral Crow.
We begin with web browsers.
Using the Oct 2025 data, although using a different month wouldn't do much other than wiggle the numbers after the decimal point a little, I can show you a very simple chart: (everything is percentages)
Over 70% of the global web browser share is chrome. Not chromium. Google branded full fat chrome. That's a lot a lot. What about everything that isn't chrome?
This is zooming in and rescaling, so the percentages here are of the 26.83% that is not chrome, bear that in mind. Half of not chrome is safari. Between them, the chrome-safari-edge triumvirate have over 90% market share. It's only when we zoom in on the other wedge of the other wedge that some diversity appears:
This data is across all platforms, which explains why samsung internet gets its own wedge. We finally have Firefox appearing, with an absolute share of 2.2%. I'm not entirely clear what "Android" includes, probably mobile companies redecorating chromium to run on their version of android. UC is big in the mobile market in India and Indonesia. "Other" here includes sogou (China); whale (Korea); yandex (Russia) a 0.09% absolute share for internet explorer, and a column just called "Mozilla" that I assume covers Zen, Waterfox, LibreWolf, Icecat, etc; although Pale Moon gets its own entry.
Search engines
If you thought google was monopolising browsing, wait until you see the search engines!
90% share for google search. The fact that google pays apple huge amounts of money to keep google as the default engine for safari is no doubt doing a lot of heavy lifting for this statistic. Please take a minute with this before we move on.
Bing comes second, not a surprise given the dominance of windows, which ships with edge/bing as the default combo. However, remember this is zoomed in, and this represents a 4.31% absolute share.
We then have yandex, yahoo!, and DuckDuckGo at around 1% absolute share each. Yandex is Russia's in-house one-stop-shop for internet things in the same way you can do all your internet without ever leaving the google software ecosystem in the west - and from these data, lots of people do. I'll be honest, it was a surprise to see yahoo! still hanging on to such a relatively large share.
One more zoom in:
Baidu is Chinese; naver Korean. Ecosia comes in with a 0.15% absolute share. Other here includes sogou again, as well as hausou & shenma also out of China. Czechia makes an entry with seznam. Petal search looks to be a huawei front end for the bing api for android. A Vietnamese browser/search engine combo called Coc Coc (with apologies for the missing diacritics) has 0.06% of browser share and 0.11% of search. More anglocentrically, AOL joins yahoo in the "You're still here?" club with a 0.02% share of search, and my weapon of choice, Qwant, has a 0.03% market share of the search engine space.
So what have we learned?
Google is fucking massive, for one thing. We all knew that, but those big red wedges really hammer it home. I learned some things about making pie charts in the process of doing this, and it was really interesting to have a peek outside my English-speaking bubble - I'd never heard of UC before doing this, and some browers that seem relatively big in my mind like vivaldi and Zen are relegated to the "other" column with percentages of percentages.
Thank you for reading my deeply nerdy ramble.
wdym I can make omori my default browser, how would that even work
HEY, SO. GOOGLE CHROME JUST INSTALLED ITSELF ONTO MY LAPTOP??????
i haven't used chrome as my browser in years. i've mostly used firefox and opera. but today, after i closed the game i was playing i realized that i suddenly had a shortcut for google chrome on my desktop.
my laptop did not have chrome prior to this. i have factory reset it a couple times and it never came with chrome pre-installed or anything; it only has microsoft edge.
i asked my sister about it and when we checked, she ALSO had chrome suddenly installed on her laptop, even though she deleted it a long time ago.
i've heard that Google is trying to subtly install an AI model into people's computers and i think this has something to do with that, but i'm not entirely sure. just in case, i deleted it as soon as i could and i urge you to do it as well if it happens to you.
DuckDuckGo is giving users strobe when opening new websites!!
I’ve been experiencing it myself, it’s particularly terrible on Ellipsus and Reddit, but bad everywhere. A few other users have reported it (1) (2, strobe will be played upon clicking this one). The devs are aware of it but haven’t fixed it. Will turn reblogs off when it’s fixed. Consider using Waterfox or Startpage or a similar browser in the meantime. Thank you!!
Help a girl out ~ How to research?
Studying law in 2025 2026 is difficult. I'm new to academics, and every search engine I've ever known is full of AI bullshit and tells me to consult a lawyer if I need something more specific. Because I haven't studied academically in a while, I was wondering if there's a trick I'm missing? A search engine, a website, or even just how to use what I have. I have access through my university to WestlawUK and Lexis, but I'm stumbling in the dark (no pun intended) trying to figure out their more complex functions. What do I do when I get an assignment question looking for me to research the specifics of law that apply to a situation? How do you break the question down to find the relevant topics to search? And how do you phrase those searches? Any sort of guidance would be helpful, since this has been bothering me through my latest round of assignments and I feel like the enshittification of Google is holding me back. Thanks x PS. I am willing to use more advanced tech solutions or paid services for my research. Any suggestion is welcome at this point.
ai-less browsers
sooo lots of people are looking for alternatives now that mozilla announced firefox is going to intregrate ai so here are some options
vi mucha gente mal por lo de que firefox se va a llenar de ia también así que les traigo alternativas !!!
1. Vivaldi:
this is the one i personally use and i loved it. i was a previously opera user and had to move when they started putting some crypto shit, and it didn't disappoint. it's pretty customizable, it can be as minimal or complete as you want it, it comes with ad block, tracker blocks and proton vpn (tho you can easily take it off). openly spoke about ai not being needed everywhere and very privacy friendly. they're still chromium based so you can use any extension that works on chrome
2. Waterfox
open source fork for firefox for those who want to keep using firefox extensions and functionalities. you can look around the code and modify it even if you're tech savvy. they also stated having no intention of including ai in the browser and are very privacy focused.
3. Hellium
another chromium fork, open source and pretty new. it's still in beta but it has gained attention for being minimalistic and private. it's very light and only includes an adblock, also focused on being as free of bloat as possible. it still doesn't have an android ver and tho it seems promising we can't be sure they wont include ai in the future, but it's worth to give it a try!!
