Article seems pretty flawed. Relevance is a vague metric, and the author relies pretty heavily on data related to government site visitation, which seems subject to bias toward certain types of users.
Market share is likely still incredibly low, but Firefox’s relevance should be spiking right now due to Google’s shenanigans with Chromium. The fact that like 90% of revenue for its for-profit wing is from Google is still troubling.
Any alternative views out there?
For an article that tries to push a groupthink narrative to work, the people using the “discouraged” product need to believe the “encouraged” one has feature parity with zero downsides.
I guarantee that no one is accidentally using Firefox because they’re unaware of the alternatives.
I don’t think the zdnet article adds much but it does link to https://news.itsfoss.com/firefox-continuous-decline/ which gets it about right. If anything has changed since it was written, evidence of it has not yet reached me.
Our telemetry shows 80% of users never install any add-ons” i.e. the telemetry that any tech savvy person immediately turns off because they don’t want their browser spying on them and about which we have also complained numerous times.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
Users that use Firefox are unlikely to show up in data used for these kinda articles I’d think
Use any metric you want. StatCounter, Wikipedia… They all show Firefox at around 5% globally and still dropping. It’s a very real alarm signal and there’s no time to waste in denial.
Ironic that ZD-Net is speaking of relevancy. Ha
the problem with firefox is that chrome’s marketing is just too prevalent among the general population; it’s built into their gmail, their phone, everything that they use.
as a flutter dev it’s especially frustrating since debugging on the web requires chrome (please help boost this issue in the issue queue: https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/55324)
on the other hand they also reached their goal of over $3m grassroots donations in 2023, which goes a long way to scaling back on the reliance of google donations.
you also have to remember that web statistics are largely done by third party sources - like google analytics - or through telemetry. in the first case, many firefox users or those with adblockers will disable that. in the second case, this is exactly why i implore people to not disable telemetry in firefox since it’s necessary for bug testing and usability studies but also for determining reach of software.
personally i prefer firefox but still use a mix of google products, including maps, youtube premium/music, and drive (which i pay for). i also have a monthly donation to mozilla and thunderbird. it’s not much but every little bit helps - even $5
Before the new year, I donated 25€ for Firefox, my long-time companion to #degoogle Grapheneos and Linux. Although Google is introducing DRM, I don’t think anything is so important in this life that I have to use Chrome or IE, I will adapt to the situation and instead of worrying about DRM (of course, for the public Internet, this seems like a total violation of users’ rights, for safety 🤣🤣🤣, really?) I will try to be more social, but not in the sense of social networks, but hanging out with friends or listening to music or running or a good book… I definitely don’t want this big corporation near me, which we are more and more they control… (google,ms,apple,amazon…) Firefox probably missed by not insisting on FirefoxOS (phones), but it has a great agenda - privacy and simplicity. I look forward to many years of using FF!!
The problem is, you can’t donate to firefox. Only to the mozilla foundation which spends it on other stuff.
theres a difference between the mozilla foundation - the non profit - and the mozilla corporation - the for profit.
Yes exactly, that’s what I mean. Firefox is from the for-profit and you can’t donate to that. I think they did that because of the google deal but it also means they locked themselves out of a sustainable donation model.
The non-profit is just running some BS side-projects now.
firefox foundation is literally what you donate to when you donate to firefox.
gives us a running count of the last 90 days of US government website visits. That doesn’t tell us much about global web browser use, but it’s the best information we have about American web browser users today.
Lmao article itself saying it’s a steaming pile of chrome
ah zdnet, a waste of CO2 if there ever was
Market share doesn’t equal irrelevance as others have said. I use Librewolf and without Firefox it wouldn’t exist. It likely wouldn’t exist at the quality it is without Mozilla taking Google Cash either. But it’s super important to have an alternative even if most people don’t use it. It DOES provide a limited check and balance against google doing whatever they want with the web because if the right people make the right noise then people will move over to something that’s easy, convenient, and free of whatever pain in the butt google puts in chrome that sends people over the edge. See Linux desktop and Valve for an example of how a software with very few users comparatively can force a larger company to play ball. Remember in Windows 8 when MS basically banned 3rd party software stores on the OS… or tried? And Valve made the “Steam Machine” and SteamOS? Everyone says the steam machines failed but they 100% did everything Valve wanted them to do. It was enough to have MS go back on their walled garden and allow Steam to keep operating as it had been. And now we have the steam deck on top of it.
So, it’s ok if Firefox has a small market share as long as it remains a worthy competitor.
Firefox is far from irrelevant. Pure stupid click bait. Market share of courses is a sad thing and may lead to irrelevance when most web sites stop supporting. In the late days of Netscape and the early days of Firefox that was the case… lack of website support. I am just starting to see that again.
Manifest V3 will force some people to go back to Firefox.
I wish so too, but I think you’re overestimating people.
I only use FF in Linux, I tried on Android but it’s somewhat bad 😔
I use Firefox on all my devices and couldn’t be happier with it. I especially love how sync works: there’s options to both pull tabs from other devices, and push to them. Quite frequently I’d be just browsing on my phone and send a tab over to my laptop to deal with/read/act on when I’m sitting down at a bigger screen.
I’ve found the reason it’s not great on mobile is because even if you tell your android phone to use Firefox as default it simply ignores it and uses chrome anyways
Edit: I was able to get it to work properly as my default browser but I had to disable chrome in the app settings. Now it’s great
Opposite of my experience, FF + uBlock Origin made browsing the web on my phone enjoyable because the filtering of ads makes page layouts readable.
What’s bad about it? It’s the only way to use an ad blocker on mobile
The day Firefox shutters its doors is the day the internet truly dies. Almost every “alternative” browser is chromium under the hood. Google’s next big plan is basically constructing a walled garden around the internet (at least the HTTP part) via complex DRM. Eventually, if you want to access an actual web page, it’ll have to be via a Chromium browser. Hell, even today a shitload of websites I visit on FF just don’t fucking render correctly and I’ll have to fire up a chromium instance just to access them. That’s only going to get worse with time.
Hell, even today a shitload of websites I visit on FF just don’t fucking render correctly and I’ll have to fire up a chromium instance just to access them.
Can you link to an example? I remember this from years ago, but haven’t encountered it for a long time.
I mean, you can argue that Google actually has a monopoly on web browsers right now. iirc Firefox takes a ton of money from Google, so if the choices are “Google’s proprietary browser” or “a non-Chromium browser backed by Google” (EDIT: unless you’re on Apple hardware and use Safari), then Google comes out on top either way.
Wish we could get another good browser engine that isn’t Chromium, WebKit, or Quantum.
I’m fighting the good fight by using Safari to browse and Kagi to search. I have effectively eliminated Google from my life and I could not be happier about it.
Signed, a former Google fan who got tired of being the product for their ever shittier services.
Apple and Google deserve about the same amount of trust. I don’t know that Safari is any better than Chrome other than keeping a large portion of users in a secondary browser. I guess it all depends on whether uBlock Origin is able to be loaded on it along with other useful extensions. I’m a Firefox fan though.
I wouldn’t nominate either one for sainthood, no argument there. I walked away from Google because they are an ad company that makes devices and software - that has become increasingly more apparent in the last several years, I’m sure it was always true but less obvious in the early days.
I’m still sad about the day the real Opera with the presto rendering engine died. And while Vivaldi is getting many of the features and functionality, it’s still a chromium rebuild. I guess it just takes too much money to build your own rendering engine anymore.
Ehh
There’s a clear difference between accepting money from an entity and letting it control things and make decisions. Pushing for a full and clear separation from any potential conflict of interest (while noble) is how projects die.
I’d love for Firefox to be fully funded through small anonymous public donations in an ideal world. As it is, I don’t see an issue from taking Google’s money to do something that most users would want anyways.
If the default search wasn’t google, I’m certain even more users would bail on Firefox. Anyone who does want an alternative search engine is capable of clicking on it during installation.
Firefox might be able to survive on donations, if Mozilla’s CEO stopped giving herself raises
They don’t even want our money. They just let you donate to Mozilla foundation, which does other projects.
Firefox is developed by Mozilla corporation which is funded by the google deal.
I donate to several FOSS projects including monthly to KDE but I won’t donate to Mozilla until I can actually make sure my money goes to firefox. And ideally not their overpaid CEO either, no.
The day Firefox shutters its doors is the day the internet truly dies.
*the web
The internet has so far been doing a much better job surviving as a proper decentralized system than the web.
Really? What’s left of the Internet beyond the web?
How many people use Usenet today, rather than forums or social media on the web?
How many people use IRC, rather than Slack? (Either on the web or in a Chromium-backed desktop app)
How many people use an email client, rather than webmail?
Some non-HTTP(S) Internet stuff:
Email is transferred to its destination (where, sure it might be accessed through a Web UI) via SMTP. Even where things like Slack are used internally, email usage between organisations is still extensive, due to effectively being a federated lowest-common-denominator system that’s not completely at the mercy of a single vendor.
VoIP, which increasingly underlies telephony/mobile networks, uses things like SIP, RTP and RTCP - even if, again, it might be accessed via a Web UI, it doesn’t have to be, and there are dedicated clients.
SSH is widely used for remote system administration. SFTP, built on top of SSH, is used to transfer sensitive data, e.g. (in the US) medical records covered by HIPAA.
SNMP is used for network device management, sometimes doing so via the Internet.
Don’t confuse certain end-user applications with the Internet more generally.
Back in the day I used IRC but prefer Signal and Matrix now. I, also, use an email client.
I know I’m an outlier, but I prefer text mode IRC, then slack, and then all the other shit (telegram, signal, discord, teams, etc) fall way behind. “Everything is a walled-off app” is a horrible way to communicate. I get why these companies do it, and I also even understand the headache over maintaining useful open APIs, but honestly, they drop that ASAP because it doesn’t make them money.
curl -k IP_Address
Open in notepad.
Read.
“Oh, an empty HTML tag and 2Mb of JavaScript!”
I use Firefox on Linux, Windows (at work), and Android, and I like it.
I will be honest. I didn’t read that article because it’s too click-baity. Using https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/ I see that Firefox is about 3% of 5b users. Not insignificant.
That 3% is about 150mil users. IMO, less than it should be. Google has great security, but terrible privacy. I switched middle of last year, from brave to FF for reasons I won’t get into here. Suffice it to say, they are numerous.
It truly is troubling that they don’t have independent funding. I, for one would pay $10/y for this service. Maybe I could donate?
Anyway, it’s a superior product in many ways.
users can modify their useragent string, and sometimes they have to because some webdevs are morons.
some browsers actually default to using chrome instead of its own.
using a browser-reported useragent string to count marketshare itself is flawed from the start, using a very narrow and limited scope of web sites to measure it–even more so.
if i counted my own clients: home, soho and small business end users… it’s about even between chrome and firefox on windows (chrome users doing so on their own, as we highly recommend firefox, and vivaldi over chrome for a chromium-based solution) with edge trailing far behind; and about 3 to 1 android (chrome) over safari on mobile with (so far, but soon to change) very few mobile firefox users.
