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I didn't see any indication as to their methodology for how they're calculating these stats. It's probably been said a zillion times before, but if it's JavaScr

I didn't see any indication as to their methodology for how they're calculating these stats. It's probably been said a zillion times before, but if it's JavaScript-based you can safely assume that they are incorrect as it's likely there is a large intersection between people browsing with an ad-blocker, private browsing, or with content blocker and those people using Firefox.

jopsen 8y ago
Does it matter? Even if the measure is somewhat flawed it's hard to argue that drop isn't related to a drop in the underlying number of users. Mozilla is awesome, but growing Firefox is an uphill struggle.
- kibwen 8y ago
  > it's hard to argue that drop isn't related to a drop in the underlying number of users We would need more data to determine that. What the site here is showing is a decline in the percentage of marketshare, which is a relative measure, not an absolute one. Even if Firefox were seeing a net gain of users, if it's doing so at a slower rate than the market is growing overall, then that would be reflected as a decline in marketshare.
  - fabrice_d 8y ago
    According to Mozilla's own data (https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity) they went from 303M monthly active users at the end of Nov. 2017 to 277M this year. This is a serious drop.
    - kibwen 8y ago
      Very interesting link, thanks! Frankly, I'd much rather see that submitted to HN than a site like netmarketshare, who are known for applying opaque weights to their data in an attempt to normalize regions.
- godelski 8y ago
  Probably. Mozilla getting funding would depend on these numbers. And one of the most common addons is user agent switcher. For awhile Netflix allowed Chrome on linux and not Firefox (even though they assured me that wasn't the issue). But I could get around it by doing a user agent switch. People do this for fingerprinting too. I'm sure there are plenty of people that always have it on and set to Chrome. Also, Mozilla higher ups might be using these statistics to see how worthwhile the new features and work they have done.
  - pas 8y ago
    > plenty of people that's probably a drop in the bucket. really at best a few tens of thousands of people.
- LamaOfRuin 8y ago
  In addition to the higher prevalence of privacy (/ad blocking) conscious users on Firefox, Mozilla has also been aggressively making it easier to enable tracker blocking natively, and turning it on by default in certain cases. This has been happening with progressive versions as they're more confident it won't break large numbers of sites. Rollout of those features does actually mean this type of data needs to be interpreted differently depending on methodology.
chrisseaton 8y ago
It probably almost doesn't matter if they're wrong - if they see this decline in users, true or not, then so will people monitoring users to their websites, and they will be likely to stop testing their sites on Firefox. Also it's a drop - do you think the number of people turning off JavaScript has gone up since Quantum? Why would that be? It's either that or less Firefox users.
- rocky1138 8y ago
  It's not so much that users have turned off all JavaScript but blocked tracking elements. Take a look at Content Blocking (formerly Tracking Protection): https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection. It makes it dead simple to enable and disable for an average user and blocks tracking elements like Google Analytics, etc.
nerdbaggy 8y ago
Seems very flawed. They say: "...widely distributed over thousands of websites." https://netmarketshare.com/methodology https://netmarketshare.com/methodology Looking at netmarkshet website and web requests it seems this pulls from gator.io for metrics. Looks like 3k-4k websites have this data which lines up with the previous statment. https://publicwww.com/websites/%22gator.io%22/ https://publicwww.com/websites/%22gator.io%22/
PurpleRamen 8y ago
Chrome has adblocker too and I's say the number of people using them there is similar or even bigger. On the other side is the number of peiple actually using privacy-related addon very small. Even on Firefox it seems to be something around 5%. Though, Firefox now has some blocking-mechanisms on it's own. Not sure if they are activated by default, but it would be interessting to see how they influence such usage-collecting scripts.

jopsen 8y ago

Does it matter? Even if the measure is somewhat flawed it's hard to argue that drop isn't related to a drop in the underlying number of users. Mozilla is awesome, but growing Firefox is an uphill struggle.

kibwen 8y ago
> it's hard to argue that drop isn't related to a drop in the underlying number of users We would need more data to determine that. What the site here is showing is a decline in the percentage of marketshare, which is a relative measure, not an absolute one. Even if Firefox were seeing a net gain of users, if it's doing so at a slower rate than the market is growing overall, then that would be reflected as a decline in marketshare.
- fabrice_d 8y ago
  According to Mozilla's own data (https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity) they went from 303M monthly active users at the end of Nov. 2017 to 277M this year. This is a serious drop.
  - kibwen 8y ago
    Very interesting link, thanks! Frankly, I'd much rather see that submitted to HN than a site like netmarketshare, who are known for applying opaque weights to their data in an attempt to normalize regions.
godelski 8y ago
Probably. Mozilla getting funding would depend on these numbers. And one of the most common addons is user agent switcher. For awhile Netflix allowed Chrome on linux and not Firefox (even though they assured me that wasn't the issue). But I could get around it by doing a user agent switch. People do this for fingerprinting too. I'm sure there are plenty of people that always have it on and set to Chrome. Also, Mozilla higher ups might be using these statistics to see how worthwhile the new features and work they have done.
- pas 8y ago
  > plenty of people that's probably a drop in the bucket. really at best a few tens of thousands of people.
LamaOfRuin 8y ago
In addition to the higher prevalence of privacy (/ad blocking) conscious users on Firefox, Mozilla has also been aggressively making it easier to enable tracker blocking natively, and turning it on by default in certain cases. This has been happening with progressive versions as they're more confident it won't break large numbers of sites. Rollout of those features does actually mean this type of data needs to be interpreted differently depending on methodology.

chrisseaton 8y ago

It probably almost doesn't matter if they're wrong - if they see this decline in users, true or not, then so will people monitoring users to their websites, and they will be likely to stop testing their sites on Firefox. Also it's a drop - do you think the number of people turning off JavaScript has gone up since Quantum? Why would that be? It's either that or less Firefox users.

rocky1138 8y ago
It's not so much that users have turned off all JavaScript but blocked tracking elements. Take a look at Content Blocking (formerly Tracking Protection): https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection. It makes it dead simple to enable and disable for an average user and blocks tracking elements like Google Analytics, etc.

nerdbaggy 8y ago

Seems very flawed. They say: "...widely distributed over thousands of websites." https://netmarketshare.com/methodology https://netmarketshare.com/methodology Looking at netmarkshet website and web requests it seems this pulls from gator.io for metrics. Looks like 3k-4k websites have this data which lines up with the previous statment. https://publicwww.com/websites/%22gator.io%22/ https://publicwww.com/websites/%22gator.io%22/

PurpleRamen 8y ago

Chrome has adblocker too and I's say the number of people using them there is similar or even bigger. On the other side is the number of peiple actually using privacy-related addon very small. Even on Firefox it seems to be something around 5%. Though, Firefox now has some blocking-mechanisms on it's own. Not sure if they are activated by default, but it would be interessting to see how they influence such usage-collecting scripts.