35 ms·

Firefox on the brink?

• smegger001 3y ago
  The problem Firefox has as far as I can tell is that the people in charge of the Mozilla organization would rather it be a social justice philanthropic foundation than a web browser and mail client maker and thus neglect their main product. And those they do have working on Firefox seem to want to remove features and play with UI.
  • wolpoli 3y ago
    For whatever the reason, Firefox does seem to enjoy playing with colors of the season more than trying to figure out where to take their rendering engine.
    • smegger001 3y ago
      The thing that gets me about Mozilla is they were doing thing with xulrunner years ago that WebKit is being used for now with electron apps. But Mozilla didn't develop it. There were crossplatform apps being built with gecko.
      • wolpoli 3y ago
        I recall that Xulrunner, similar to the Firefox UI back in the day, hesitates just a little bit before responding to events. Perhaps xulrunner was too early in relations to computer performance back in the day, or they simply made a technical error when designing Gecko.
  • orbital223 3y ago
    > and thus neglect their main product Neglect would be a step up. It feels like they are actively trying to antagonize existing users.
  • shiroiuma 3y ago
    >And those they do have working on Firefox seem to want to remove features and play with UI. This seems to be all that most software developers can do these days.
• roody15 3y ago
  Firefox went from focusing on browser technology and privacy to strange political theatrics on divisive social issues. Think the company needs new leadership and streamlined and simplified focus on building the best browser. Way too much wasted resources on strange side projects … that never resonated and seemed to come out of nowhere.
• pm2222 3y ago
  I just switched to ff two months ago and it’s fine.
• ksec 3y ago
  > as observed by analytics.usa.gov. On the assumption that Desktop also includes Laptop, ~25% of the are on Mac. Nearly ~65% of Mobile users are on iOS.
• ksec 3y ago
  Off topic question >Analytics.usa.gov is migrating to a new web analytics platform. >Real time data is currently unavailable. What analytics platform do they currently use and where are they moving to ?
• fud101 3y ago
  I wont use firefox because it doesn't do saving my shit in the cloud. I would switch at a heartbeat if they stopped with the stupid sync on another device thing. Fu
• nbittich 3y ago
  I have switched to Firefox in 2022 as I was tired of Google acting like assholes. I didnt see a single broken website since then. I believe more and more people will do that in the future, maybe not switching to firefox but something less ad-focused and more privacy focused. I'd rather use netscape communicator and only be able to visit 0.000000001% websites than going back to google products.
• devilsAdv0cate 3y ago
  [dead]
• metadigm 3y ago
  The only thing keeping me from switching to Firefox is the fact that you can't customize keyboard shortcuts. https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/customizable-hotkeys/idi-p/4979 https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/customizable-hotkeys/id...
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• collinmanderson 3y ago
  Nice. I totally noticed that FireFox was nearing 2% rule a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36776603 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36776603 Glad this is getting more exposure. In my opinion 2% is probably too high. "There were 5.40 billion sessions over the past 90 days.". 2% is 108 million sessions in the last 90 days.
  • brycewray 3y ago
    Author here. Yes, finding your comment during a search on HN for Firefox-related refs was what tipped me off to the issue.
• timkofu 3y ago
  Firefox is not on the brink.
• alfredol 3y ago
  It's worth nothing perhaps that Firefox is widely used outside the US. Monthly active users worldwide are about 200 million, of which about 10% are in the US. https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
• pjmlp 3y ago
  Yes, the Web has turned into ChromeOS, with the help of many folks that used to bash IE.
  • dartos 3y ago
    There’s still safari at 34% usage. :badpokerface:
    • irrational 3y ago
      Only because of iOS, I assume. But it looks like Apple might be forced to open things up and allow other browsers to run on iOS. If that happened, I'd expect Safari to drop like a stone.
      • jonhohle 3y ago
        Until people find they can’t get to lunch without having to charge their phones.
      • jml78 3y ago
        Crazy thing is that I know a few Linux users that would love to have safari on our Linux machines for syncing. Firefox on iOS is a horrible experience. My desktop I have switched to Vivaldi so I can easily sync tabs between desktop and phone. I don’t love Vivaldi but the overall experience is superior to Firefox on both. Would prefer safari on my Linux desktop and use it on my phone
        • lambda_garden 3y ago
          I'd rather have proper Firefox on iOS than Safari on Linux.
      • DrBazza 3y ago
        And MacOS. And I hope Apple doesn't manipulate the "power usage" data that always claims Safari is the lowest-power best-battery-saver browser on their platform. I run Safari on MacOS for only that reason, that it allegedly gives me an extra hour or so out of my laptop vs. Chrome or Firefox. Of course, I should actually benchmark myself and find out.
• nequo 3y ago
  I want Firefox to not be on the brink. I have had no problems with it on Linux over the last few years since I switched from Chrome. I do not wish to touch Chrome with a ten-foot pole.
  • dartos 3y ago
    Firefox regularly crashes for me on wayland. It slows down my whole system when it tries to load a page in first boot (but librewolf doesn’t for some reason) the HID and webgl/webgpu support is bad… It’s just not a very good browser compared to chrome forks or webkit based ones.
    • resonious 3y ago
      Huh... I've exclusively used Firefox on Wayland for a long time now due to good fractional scaling support (unlike Chrome which took ages to stop using x11 by default). I agree that the webgl/webgpu support is bad but haven't seen the whole-system slowdown.
    • BossingAround 3y ago
      Sounds like a configuration problem. Firefox on Fedora/Wayland is very fast, haven't had it crash in a long time.
      • red-iron-pine 3y ago
        Same. About the only thing that's stable on F37. Updates to the kernel and other things have been giving me headaches, but FF and Steam are still solid.
    • bryanlarsen 3y ago
      I had that problem, too. It went away when I replaced my Nvidia card with an AMD one.
      • dartos 3y ago
        I’m using an amd card :(
• sergiotapia 3y ago
  >Firefox peaked at 31.82% in November, 2009 — and then began its long slide in almost direct proportion to the rise of Chrome. It will be a sad day when Firefox is truly dead. But what did Mozilla expect? They spent so much time and energy on activist bullshit that doesn't really matter for THE BROWSER.
  • malermeister 3y ago
    The browser itself is good these days. All these complaints are themselves activist bullshit that doesn't really matter.
    • sergiotapia 3y ago
      Is it? Firefox has had this sheen of "jank" for the past 6 years.
      • irrational 3y ago
        Have you used it? I've used it as my primary browser for both personal use and web development for years and it has not been janky, at all.
      • jandrese 3y ago
        I don’t know where that comes from, Firefox has worked just fine for ages. The only place it sucks is on iOS.
      • FourHand451 3y ago
        What exactly do you mean?
      • hooverd 3y ago
        I use Firefox as a daily driver and it just works.
    • jacquesm 3y ago
      Well, yes and no. It does matter because if they had spent that money and effort on the browser and made it possible to donate directly to the browser project then there is a fair chance that those numbers would be better.
• lxgr 3y ago
  > I am personally unaware of any serious reason to believe that Firefox’s numbers will improve soon. Hopefully the DMA can help? I’m not using Firefox on iOS mainly due to a lack of extension support.
  • dartos 3y ago
    I don’t think there is one. Chrome got big bc it was radically different than IE and Firefox jumped on the lightweight trend far too late.
    • lxgr 3y ago
      I’m pretty sure the billions of marketing budget (for a while there was a Chrome billboard on every other bus stop in my city), aggressively installing it as part of Windows freeware etc. has at least as much to do with its popularity. Maybe Chrome got the first 10% of its user base on its merits (that’s how I installed it at least); the next 30% definitely include a lot of people that don’t know what a browser is and got it via some other deal.
• tommica 3y ago
  What could get people to move to firefox? Is the only way really to have have your browser be popular is to have it either be installed by default, or being advertised on a page that people use daily? Would be crazy if facebook had a banner stating "switch to firefox now" suddenly
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • jandrese 3y ago
    Maybe if Google started messing with ad blockers in Chrome?
  • isolli 3y ago
    A lot of developers I know have moved to Firefox recently because of containers. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-use-firefox-containers https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-use-firefox-contain...
    • nstart 3y ago
      I literally could not switch away even if I wanted to because no other browser has anything close to container tabs. My workflow is built around it
  • franczesko 3y ago
    Firefox would need to win mobile. This is where action takes place.
    • antiframe 3y ago
      Well there isn't much browser action on iOS, so nobody but Apple can win that.
      • eviks 3y ago
        They still have a browser there, and its UI was worse, so there is that
• tokai 3y ago
  This article is like 6 years too late. The drop has happened, there's not really anything to base an "continuing free-fall" on. Even the articles own data show that Firefox usage has flatlined.
  • nequo 3y ago
    The article is specifically about US government guidelines for browser support.
    • tokai 3y ago
      I know. That doesn't change that there is no basis for claiming that there is a "continuing free-fall" for firafox usage. I might fall further, under 2%. But free-fall is misrepresenting the usage data.
    • kemotep 3y ago
      But their chart shows Firefox reaching above 3% usage in the past 12 months. It’s pretty consistent in the past few years being above that government support cut off. And that’s really just support. If people follow web standards Firefox will continue work. I mean it has been a steady decline but parent comment was suggesting that Firefox is probably near the floor of their market share.
• BossingAround 3y ago
  With Google trying to cripple adblocker extensions, I hope users will find their way back to Firefox.
  • unglaublich 3y ago
    Google cripples adblocker extensions because users won't find their way back to alternative browsers anymore.
    • LegitShady 3y ago
      like chrome it can change over time if the value proposition changes.
    • BossingAround 3y ago
      Google cripples adblocker extensions because of high interest rate and investor unease over the stock. If FF's market share was 50%, they'd still try to cripple adblockers. Once people start hitting two 30s unskippable ads on every song they want to listen to on YT, they'll start searching on how to fix that. FF could capitalize on this trend.
    • ravenstine 3y ago
      They know their average user in 2023 is not the type to be cognizant that they're even using a "web browser" when opening an app like Chrome. I think it's really up to geeks like we to install Firefox on our moms' computers and inform them on why they should try it. That's how I got my mom to try Firefox with ad blocking around 15 years ago; otherwise she either wouldn't have known about it or she might have thought ad blocking was something nefarious. We just can't act as if we build it then they will come.
      • trealira 3y ago
        I don't know if that's still true. I have no data, but just anecdotally, I'm pretty sure almost everyone knows what a web browser is and what an ad-blocker extension does nowadays.
• tiahura 3y ago
  I just wish they’d hire the guy that reversed engineered Grand Theft Auto to optimize the loading code to do something about the memory leaks.
  • fifteen1506 3y ago
    I think Firefox no longer has memory leaks. I just which they'd follow Brave's BAT idea, or something along those lines. Brave's BAT, while feeling kludgeful, is the only innovative idea in terms of funding sites nowadays. Micropayments => dead Coil => dead (sorry, on a open stewardship) Flattr => unknown, guessing dead So I want to block ads but I ain't depriving the websites of a way of earning money. If they want they can get my money -- but usually only that which was earned by wasting time to look at an ad.
    • creatonez 3y ago
      I want there to be a proper micropayments system (hopefully something supporting fiat money instead of just cryptocurrency) but this functionality doesn't belong in the base browser, browser extensions are a much more appropriate place to put this functionality.
      • fragmede 3y ago
        Unfortunately the Visa/MC duopoly isn't incentivized to create a micropayments system, so using a third party technology aka cryptocurrency seems to be the only way forwards for now.
      • fifteen1506 3y ago
        Then you'll have to use Firefox because it's the only currently supporting extensions on mobile. Still, I disagree. Extensions can be bought and sold. It's difficult to track those things. I believe micropayments mechanisms should be integrated in the browser -- even if the provider can be changed.
• slavoglinsky 3y ago
  As somebody developing websites, I always find myself on the edge of ugly internet with Firefox. I like it's disturbing monopoly, but it's rendering makes my life harder
• GeekyBear 3y ago
  My anecdata shows that Google's recent decisions on the direction of Chrome and changes at Youtube have technically savvy users abandoning Chrome for Firefox,
  • Finnucane 3y ago
    Yes, every day Google seems to be doing things to drive people away, but it's not really moving the kinds of numbers that are going to make a difference. Also, some of those users will move to Chromium-based alternatives like Brave and Vivaldi, which might blunt some of the worst abuses but doesn't help ecosystem on the whole if you want a browser engine to exist that isn't controlled by Apple and Google.
    • GeekyBear 3y ago
      Alternately, the technically savvy users understand that allowing Google's control of Blink to replace open standards with whatever implementation details Google prefers is to be avoided at all costs. It's just a repeat of the IE 6 debacle.
      • Finnucane 3y ago
        Yes, which took years and years to resolve. And only because in the end developers refused to play along. If the people creating web sites decide collectively to support only open standards, then Google has less leverage. It kinda worked with Amp, so it's not impossible.
        • GeekyBear 3y ago
          Given Google leveraging their control of the browser to go to war against ad blockers, I would expect to see movement much more quickly this time.
• robin_reala 3y ago
  It’s not on the brink, it’s that Firefox shims GA[1] with Enhanced Tracking Protection, which is on by default.[2] analytics.usa.gov uses GA. So you really can’t rely on usage figures that don’t represent the truth of your situation. [1] https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/blob/413b88689f3ca2a30b3c49465730c0e7d40f9188/browser/extensions/webcompat/data/shims.js#L394-L405 https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/blob/413b88689f3ca2a30b... [2] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-now-available-with-enhanced-tracking-protection-by-default/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-now-ava...
  • throw10920 3y ago
    The US government's page it uses to track web browser usage uses an analytics engine made by a company that makes its own web browser? That sounds like a pretty big issue!
    • mavhc 3y ago
      Weird that no one checks their own logs any more
      • ksherlock 3y ago
        I would guess lots of people no longer have access to the log files -- because the cloud is somebody else's computer (GitHub pages, etc) or because you're web scale and run your web server in docker so log files are ephemeral or maybe you're web scale so the only logging is dumping status messages to a background screen session.
    • dreamcompiler 3y ago
      It's also a company the US government is presently suing for antitrust violations. That seems like an issue too. https://www.npr.org/2023/09/12/1198558372/doj-google-monopoly-antitrust-trial-search-engine https://www.npr.org/2023/09/12/1198558372/doj-google-monopol...
  • Chabsff 3y ago
    Per the article, this is irrelevant. The case being made is that the figure seen by the government falling under 2%, which it is getting close to, will trigger a chain-reaction of consequences that will dramatically hurt Firefox, and it's not clear if Mozilla, the organization, could weather that. It doesn't particularly matter whether or not the figure is accurate in that context. Maybe that can be fixed easily by having Firefox contextually relax tracking a bit or by having the government change how they perform the tracking, but the status quo is not really sustainable. And that's really all the article is saying at the end of the day.
• loganmarchione 3y ago
  Mozilla also just posted their State of Mozilla 2022 (this includes financial statements). From what I've read, it seems that expenses are up and revenue from search deals is down. https://stateof.mozilla.org/ https://stateof.mozilla.org/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38530382 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38530382 https://www.ghacks.net/2023/12/05/mozilla-earned-close-to-600-million-in-2022/?amp https://www.ghacks.net/2023/12/05/mozilla-earned-close-to-60... Firefox's market share has been on the decline since 2010. https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-200901-202311 https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-2009... Genuine question. What is justifying Mozilla Corporation CEO Mitchell Baker's salary? - 2022 - $6.9m/yr - 2021 - $5.5m/yr - 2020 - $2.6m/yr - 2019 - $3.0m/yr - 2018 - $2.4m/yr - 2017 - $2.2m/yr - 2016 - $1.0m/yr - 2015 - $997k/yr
  • ekianjo 3y ago
    > Mozilla Corporation CEO Mitchell Baker's salary? What a ridiculous question. Obvious the chief captain on the Titanic is not responsible for the Iceberg jumping at the boat.
    • munk-a 3y ago
      I think it's a pretty reasonable question when the salary is so incredibly out of line with what developers make. Is the CEO singlehandedly responsible for productivity equal to that of sixty or so developers?
      • ekianjo 3y ago
        Did I need to append a /s for people to get my comment?
        • munk-a 3y ago
          Unfortunately yes - this view isn't so out there that it's not inconceivable that someone would genuinely express it.
• rsaz 3y ago
  Is this bad for Google too? I thought Chrome needs Firefox to be somewhat successful so competition exists and the browser space doesn’t become a monopoly. Does the rising popularity of Safari and Edge negate this?
  • troupo 3y ago
    Yeah, they can now pretend that Edge is a different independent browser
• sunng 3y ago
  Like linux, most firefox users has tracking protection so data is not collected for them.
• lucasRW 3y ago
  I am shocked to realize that Firefox is that close to 2%, I thought it was way above that level. Google monopoly is to be avoided at all costs.
• coconut08 3y ago
  Mozilla has been a horrible steward for their project. They receive hundreds of millions of dollars a year and I have no idea where this money goes. It also doesn't help that their organization is full of purity testing and social activism nonsense that has nothing to do with making a good web browser. At this point I'm convinced that the reason that google is paying them so much is because they actually know that firefox is a failed project and keeping it alive as a zombie project actively protects them from anti-trust violations.
  • phendrenad2 3y ago
    True. What are you going to do about it? I wish 1% of the effort denouncing FF because of the poor management were put towards forking it with better management.
  • ekianjo 3y ago
    They do a lot of PR campaigns and pay their execs well
  • IggleSniggle 3y ago
    This rings true.
  • BossingAround 3y ago
    MS is investing hundreds of millions of dollars in Windows as well and yet I have no idea where that money goes. It's not like you can see all of the investments in mature products...
  • tiahura 3y ago
    Mozilla is the Washington Generals to Google’s Harlem Globetrotters.
  • nvm0n2 3y ago
    It gets spent on awards and grants to non-browser related things that please the CEO and board: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-we-fund/ https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-we-fund/
• theboywho 3y ago
  A lot of people around me are switching back to firefox as chrome is showing signs of cracks, especially with the Youtube/ad-blocking saga on chrome. Also, I don't think the US govt guidelines are going to have a dramatic worldwide impact on firefox numbers, the US is no longer the major online player it once was.
  • jillesvangurp 3y ago
    Yes, people that believe that Google will forever own the web are the same people that used to believe that Microsoft would forever own it. MS got arrogant and lost. Google looks like they are repeating that mistake. A few things that could go against this: - If enough people use Firefox, no commercial business in their right mind will tell these people to "please leave, we don't serve your kind". Seems to be true for obscure versions of internet explorer still in use. Definitely true for Firefox for some time to come. - Legislation might force the market to open up on mobile. Right now Apple is blocking the Chrome and Firefox rendering engines (well they allow similarly named shells around safari). And Google of course "owns" the search and browsing experience on Android by default and twists every OEM into signing a restrictive licensing deal. At least you can install firefox on Android. There are some signs this might start changing. A lot of outrage around privacy and ad blockers might speed this up. - People can still vote with their feet. If you watch Youtube on a laptop and you don't have an effective ad blocker, Firefox is blocking them very nicely. I watch a lot of youtube and 100% ad free, just saying.
    • beej71 3y ago
      > Yes, people that believe that Google will forever own the web are the same people that used to believe that Microsoft would forever own it. MS got arrogant and lost. Google looks like they are repeating that mistake. I don't believe Google will forever own the web. But, like Microsoft did, I believe they will cause us a lot of pain before they're through.
  • worik 3y ago
    > especially with the Youtube/ad-blocking saga I am afraid to say in my world if Google degrades Firefox for YouTube most people I know will switch to Chrome I have had success persuading people to switch to FF (I am one of those people) but a degraded YouTube- even the outright criminality that involves - would be a deal breaker The ad blocking blocking will work the other way.....
• bee_rider 3y ago
  The government should really have a requirement to support at least one fully open option. I don’t care about the secondary effects; I’m happy not to use sites by lazy devs who can’t support two JavaScript engines. But there aren’t many alternative providers for government services.
• ndriscoll 3y ago
  Why is the US government even supporting specific browsers? It should support a standard like HTML 4 with no CSS or JS required. i.e. make the actual functionality on their sites simple to reduce the chance it doesn't work somewhere. They're not Spotify. They're not trying to growth hack. They don't need to look pretty and have fancy animations and match some designer's dream down to the pixel. They can add CSS etc. to make things a bit nicer, but government sites should work with as simple of a browser as possible. Highly regulated critical infrastructure like banks should be required to do this too.
  • DrBazza 3y ago
    > It should support a standard like HTML 4 with no CSS or JS required. i.e. make the actual functionality on their sites simple to reduce the chance it doesn't work somewhere. You're right of course. It's not really a case of 'supporting' browsers, it's a case of testing their sites against other browsers in case developers have accidentally written some non-portable Chrome only code. This was very much the case in the IE6 era. Developers wrote and tested their sites for and with IE6, and were then surprised they rendered (in)correctly on Firefox and looked wrong. At least these days there are shim libraries, rather than having to explicitly rely on things like the box-model hack.
    • ndriscoll 3y ago
      > Developers wrote and tested their sites for and with IE6, and were then surprised they rendered (in)correctly on Firefox and looked wrong But that's the point: rendering shouldn't really matter. For things that are important like government systems, we should treat web "apps" much like TeX encourages: you specify the semantics, and let the rendering engine do what it will. Don't try to precisely control it. You can and should assume that users can totally override rendering with a custom agent, that browsers will disagree on default rendering, and that they may ignore your CSS instructions. Like if someone wants to use a browser that always renders h1, h2, p, etc. with specific fonts and colors, totally ignores any CSS, and adds buttons to each table column header to sort on that column, that should all just work. Or if you want to use a braille output or screen reader. For important tools and information, not entertainment/shopping, functionality should trump all other concerns. My bank and now my power company have issues where I need to use chromium to fill out a form, and I don't understand it. I know Firefox supports forms. For whatever reason, javascript is loading the thing and screwing up somehow. I don't see why js is even involved, but frankly it screams incompetence to me. The easiest thing in the world to build, and they've broken it trying to make it look nice. I don't go to my power company website for fun. I'm there to pay a bill. I need a form with 5 inputs and a submit button, and that's it. The rest of the screen can be plain white for all I care. Literally something I could put together in 2 minutes when I was 11, and it does not work. Paper should not have a better UI than a website. Incidentally, this is why I'm not too worried about AI. If companies wanted cheap/easy/reliable systems, that's been doable on the web the whole time. People can't resist making things difficult for themselves, and they'll pay very good money to do it.
• fishpen0 3y ago
  The main issue is every startup and small business ties themselves to the gsuite apps and ultimately falls down the path of using and then requiring gsuite auth and often chrome as a whole for all work browsing. It is quintessentially the new IE. almost all my browsing during the day has to be chrome whether I like it or not and that has been true at my last 4 organizations. Three of which are multi billion dollar companies and two with tens of thousands of employees
  • JohnBooty 3y ago
    We're pretty GSuite/GAuth-oriented too but the parts we use work just fine on Firefox. What parts of that are forcing you guys to be Chrome exclusive?
    • fishpen0 3y ago
      If your organization uses beyondcorp for zero trust among several other Google products, they only work in Chrome. Many MDM solutions also only do hardware verification through chrome during the auth loop for gsuite and not other browsers. My current organization blocks the installation of other browsers in their jamf configuration as well, so it wouldn’t matter even if beyondcorp did work in another browser
    • timw4mail 3y ago
      IT staff browser management
    • jeromenerf 3y ago
      Some google meet features are chrome only (background blur, picture in picture). I can't say I have noticed much else, so I use chrome for gsuite and firefox for everything else ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
      • aembleton 3y ago
        > Some google meet features are chrome only (background blur, picture in picture). They work for me on Firefox 120 on Gnome 45.2.
• busterarm 3y ago
  I'm not sure anymore that "The Web" is worth saving anymore. I find myself browsing less and less original content. The content that dominates is polarized between Internet Hate Machines on one extreme and Corporate Astroturfing on the other. A lot of the interesting people I follow are already using Gemini (though I remain unconvinced that that's a way forward).
• rjprins 3y ago
  Can recommend Firefox for android, and as a bonus it supports many plugins.
• K0nserv 3y ago
  Two things about this: 1. Firefox blocks various analytics and tracking quite aggressively by default. Additionally, users of Firefox are, by and large, privacy minded and will have further mitigations. Any count of Firefox users is likely to be undercounting. 2. For the kind of basic web stuff(simple pages, forms etc) that USWDS supports it shouldn't matter greatly if Firefox is not supported. Theses standards are mature and Firefox supports them well, most thing should just work. Now, if websites go out of their way to block Firefox users that's a different problem.
  • slig 3y ago
    FF is at 4% usage on Cloudflare Radar [1] which doesn't use JavaScript to measure usage. [1]: https://radar.cloudflare.com/adoption-and-usage https://radar.cloudflare.com/adoption-and-usage
    • athrowaway3z 3y ago
      I use Random User-Agent (Switcher). --- But i doubt that will drive the numbers. On a side note, I think percentages will overstate firfox's decline. The number of devices with browsers per person will influence it heavily and that number is ever increasing. I think the average person in my circle has more than 3 and many have more than 4 devices with they use to visit .gov sites (i.e. ipads, phones, laptops, but not including the fridge, car, tv, etc)
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• bouncycastle 3y ago
  And yet, Mozilla earned close to $600 million in 2022 https://www.ghacks.net/2023/12/05/mozilla-earned-close-to-600-million-in-2022/ https://www.ghacks.net/2023/12/05/mozilla-earned-close-to-60... Surely enough funding to keep going?
• aio2 3y ago
  The article is quite pessimistic, example being that the FF usage graph has flatlined. It's not going down soon. I understand things are bad, but this is a little too dramatic.
  • RyanHamilton 3y ago
    If that graph was your annual income would you feel the same? I'd be very very worried, upset and considering drastic action.
• jdlyga 3y ago
  Firefox needs to focus all their effort on making a good web browser first. If the browser is slow, has a clunky interface, or lags behind on features, then people won't use it. Mozilla focus way too much of their attention on privacy and non-browser related projects. Look at how much attention that The Browser Company has gotten for their Arc browser on Mac. Their primary focus is great UI and making an excellent browser for their users. What has Firefox been doing with all their money and time?
  • sp332 3y ago
    Firefox is fast though.
    • trealira 3y ago
      Yeah. Although I'm not trying to discount what others experience, I'm always confused to hear that Firefox is slow, because it seems just as fast as Chromium on my computer.
      • Filligree 3y ago
        It uses a lot more CPU on Youtube than chrome/safari, and seems laggy there.
        • mrinterweb 3y ago
          There was some recent concern that Youtube may be slowing down FF https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/17z8hsz/youtube_has_started_to_artificially_slow_down/ https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/17z8hsz/youtube_ha...
          • Filligree 3y ago
            I believe that. But the simple fact they're cheating, doesn't make FF viable for watching youtube on my laptop.
    • 3y ago
• cwales95 3y ago
  Something has to change. Firefox is a GREAT browser. I think a lot of these things boil down to poor marketing. Things like these have to appear 'cool' and appeal to people. There has to be a reason for people to go out and actively want to download Firefox. Something akin to Apple's privacy adverts is how I'd go about it.
  • signaru 3y ago
    For one, Ubuntu should stop breaking Firefox with Snap, even though I think that is a relatively small user base. (There are some suggested fixes but I think the simplest is to bypass Ubuntu's packages and just download FF directly from Mozilla).
  • cx42net 3y ago
    I absolutely agree with you. Firefox must stay. But. I've been using both Firefox and Brave as my browsers, and Firefox is eating my memory way more than Brave (I have around 60+ tabs open at Brave, and just a few at Firefox). (I'm on Linux Fedora 36 with the latest versions available in the repository). This is why I'm not using it much, but it saddens me.
  • cx42net 3y ago
    When Google Chrome came out, what made it stand out for me was their impressive developer console. This lead developers to switch from IE/Firefox where you had to install a plugin for developers, into using Google Chrome that had a native and more advanced tool for debugging. *For me this is the key*. If you provide a browser that greatly improve the developer's experience, they (the developers) will move to use it, making it the best compatible browser to use, which will then make the rest of the crowd to use it because the overall experience is better there. I just hope the team at Firefox will realize this before Google ...
  • rumdz 3y ago
    I agree. I'm not a Firefox fanboy. It has literally run better for me than Chrome for a few years now.
    • 3y ago
• jeroenhd 3y ago
  Every time I see these articles, I feel like I have to reiterate this: Firefox contains tracking protection that blocks a lot of analytics websites, like Statcounter. 2% of Statcounter's visitors being Firefox doesn't say much about the actual Firefox visitors on the websites themselves. If you're deciding to drop Firefox, ignore Statcounter or any other data mining sources. Use passive analytics and your website's actual visitors (GDPR/CCPA restrictions may apply).
  • slig 3y ago
    See the stats from Cloudflare Radar [1], which do not use client side tracking and should be very diverse. [1]: https://radar.cloudflare.com/adoption-and-usage https://radar.cloudflare.com/adoption-and-usage
• slmkbh 3y ago
  Could we get numbers from the rest of the world before we make a verdict? There is 10 times the people outside the US, as inside...
  • JohnBooty 3y ago
    The article is specifically about the browser usage distribution among users accessing US Government websites. We should always try to avoid needless USA-centrism! But I think the USA-centric focus here is appropriate.
• spenrose 3y ago
  Seventy-one upvotes in the first 18 minutes for a story about a browser with < 10% usage. My fellow Mozillians (I worked there for four years) are wildly overrepresented among HN voters, which suggests that HN voters have a large contingent of tech veterans as opposed to startup coders. Meanwhile the other 30 stories most recently submitted, several of them excellent and on important topics, are getting 0, 1, or 2 upvotes. Maybe it's time to let go of the '00s.
• hs86 3y ago
  I switched over after the Manifest v3 debacle, and after a couple of months, I wonder if the implications of using a browser with a lower market share are overblown. I haven't encountered any site that misbehaves, and the only missing feature so far is within the Google Drive web app because it uses a Chrome-only extension [1]. Maybe the ongoing standardization of the web shows its effects here, and using a standard-conform niche browser is not that bad anymore. [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/application-launcher-for/lmjegmlicamnimmfhcmpkclmigmmcbeh https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/application-launch...
  • ryukoposting 3y ago
    A handful of Google services are buggy and slow in FireFox. Stackdriver in particular is an absolute shambles. Thankfully I'm an embedded guy so most of the stuff in Stackdriver is hieroglyphics to me anyway. I can't prove that Google is doing that intentionally, but I wouldn't put it past them.
  • SkyPuncher 3y ago
    Outside of some subtle pixel variations, I know of a single bug in our product that is browser specific. Even then, it’s kind of our fault.
  • MrMember 3y ago
    I've been using Firefox as my primary browser since 2005-2006ish. A site misbehaving because of it is a rare enough occurrence that offhand I can't remember any time that it has happened. One issue I do come across occasionally, and I'm not sure if it's Firefox alone or the combination of add-ons I use in Firefox, is sites being overzealous with captchas. I find myself doing 3-5 captchas occasionally just to use a site.
  • hoherd 3y ago
    webusb is another missing feature, and AFAIK Mozilla has a strong stance against enabling it because of the security implications. This is one of the only reasons I keep a chrome-ish browser installed.
  • preinheimer 3y ago
• hadrien01 3y ago
  Since analytics.usa.gov uses Google Analytics, this doesn't seem like a very representative datapoint...
• hexo 3y ago
  Beware - a rant ahead: We can thank mozilla mgmt for consistently making "great" decisions, with UX changes, making it worse and worse over time. Introducing "features" not many really need or want. And of course making it less and less configurable, taking away options from power users "for sake of users", which of course are long gone and not coming back. They pretty much alienated their user base with every release more infuriating than previous. I've "upgraded" laptop to one with 16G ram, only to find firefox consistently eating up all my ram to the point when it's either killed by OOM (speaking of which - in-kernel oom killer got enshitified so bad it takes 1.5h+ to decide what to kill, unless you spend days researching how to setup your system) or by other precautionary means. For past few months I'm launching this browser in memory-restricted cgroup, it gets 7gigs. And you know what? It gets killed about 15-25 times a day because it eats more. The ram upgrade did not help. At all. They even took away option to limit process count, so now it spawns whatever amount it wants. As if the browser was the only thing running on computer. This is the primary reason folks left. The browser got maddeningly bad in terms of resource usage, UI and configurability. The rest 2.2% users have to suffer this. I suspect this is not going to change at all and I feel there is strong ($500M+) incentive from google for stuff to not improve at all.
• zelon88 3y ago
  So all Google has to do is spam US government websites with scrapers reporting Chrome UA and Firefox is done for?
  • slig 3y ago
    They want FF to be on life support, not end it. Their half a billion a year is buying exactly that.
• pelorat 3y ago
  I'm one of those who rarely uses Firefox. I have it installed, but Google is just to integrated in my life. Gmail, Drive, YouTube, Android, etc. Now, I just launched Firefox (on Windows), and the fonts look absolutely atrocious compared to Chrome. What's up with that? Edit: "gfx.font_rendering.cleartype_params.enhanced_contrast 0" made it a lot better, but not quite as nice a Chrome. Still a whole lot better than the default setting.
  • JohnBooty 3y ago
    Google is just to integrated in my life. Gmail, Drive, YouTube I use these all day too and they work perfectly on FF for me. I know there was the recent "5 second YT delay on FF" debacle. But, I actually have a paid YT subscription, so I never saw/see it. Now, I just launched Firefox (on Windows), and the fonts look absolutely atrocious compared to Chrome. Something I've noticed is that when you spend enough time looking at one style of font rendering, the others look "wrong" and I think that's what you're experiencing. Used to see this a lot with Mac and Windows in the pre retina/hidpi days. Users switching from one to the other would be shocked at how "wrong" the fonts were. In reality, neither one was "right" or "wrong" but they sure were different. FWIW FF and Chrome's fonts both look fine to me on Windows 10 but again, that's just my purely subjective view.
• cheekibreeki2 3y ago
  I stopped using ff when it stopped being a browser and became some weird political tool.
  • biosed 3y ago
    Genuinely curious, what do you mean?
    • xcv123 3y ago
      Examples that I could find. Not sure that the browser itself is a political tool (yet). But the leadership has been strongly in favour of implementing some dystopic ideas. Crazy ultra far left weirdos. "MOZILLA CEO CALLS FOR INCREASED CENSORSHIP: ‘WE NEED MORE THAN DEPLATFORMING’" https://www.movieguide.org/news-articles/mozilla-ceo-calls-for-increased-censorship-we-need-more-than-deplatforming.html https://www.movieguide.org/news-articles/mozilla-ceo-calls-f... "Notes on Implementing Vaccine Passports" https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/leadership/notes-on-implementing-vaccine-passports/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/leadership/notes-on-impl... And the usual corporate social justice / diversity bullshit: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/leadership/mozilla-racial-justice-commitments-one-year-in/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/leadership/mozilla-racia... https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/careers/diversity/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/careers/diversity/
• 127361 3y ago
  We'll see what happens after Manifest V3 becomes mandatory in Chrome. That might trigger an influx of users?
• catwalk_moto 3y ago
  [dead]
• JohnBooty 3y ago
  If you care about the web, use Firefox. It's as simple as that.
  • luuurker 3y ago
    Unfortunately that only works with people like us and alone we're not enough to "save" Firefox.
  • beej71 3y ago
    Understated but true. Or I might modify to say if you care about the web, you don't run Chrome. For us to have a nice web, we need interoperability. And for that to happen, we need multiple players implementing a single standard.
    • JohnBooty 3y ago
      I'd say, "if you care about the web, don't use a Chromium-based browser, but also Safari does not need your help w.r.t. marketshare" so.... yeah. Use FF basically.
• jessehattabaugh 3y ago
  Web Developers shouldn't need to "support" particular browsers at all, that's what standards are for. Nobody should be "supporting" any non-standard functionality at all.
  • azangru 3y ago
    > Web Developers shouldn't need to "support" particular browsers at all, that's what standards are for. I agree. But different standards get adopted by different browsers at different rates. Case in point: Firefox still has not released support for declarative shadow DOM. As a side note, although related to standards: I thought Firefox insisted several years ago that they were not going to support File System Access API. But now MDN lists it among supporting browsers.
    • godshatter 3y ago
      In this case, though, a government website should be aiming to support the lowest common denominator in web standards. They shouldn't be writing websites that require something like the shadow DOM or the File System Access API. Standards low enough that actually testing against different browsers is an afterthought.
• trinsic2 3y ago
  Just because gov. websites might discontinue support for Firefox doesn't mean that is going to impact the browser's, lots of use cases are outside of that industry.
• llIIllIIllIIl 3y ago
  Oh, so we’re back to square 1 with IE6 (it’s just called Chrome this time) and marginalities. Thank god this time we already have jquery so we don’t throw it out of our projects too aggressively it may save a day once again.
• FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  what the hell happened? Firefox was the chosen one.
  • JohnBooty 3y ago
    A bunch of smart idiots fell into Google's convenient embrace, just like everybody falling into Microsoft's arms 15-20 years ago, because this industry learns absolutely nothing, perhaps because we age out most of our competent engineers after 10 years or less. What's sad about this time around is that Firefox was fine this whole time. It has been my daily driver for 8+ hours per day since like 2001. I have spent many thousands of hours with Chrome as well for various jobs. I literally never felt a perceivable overall performance gap. I've always had pretty well-specced machines; maybe there were points when Chrome was noticeably better on low-spec machines. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that we sold out. But just sad that our price was so f'ing cheap.
    • sleepybrett 3y ago
      ... sold out to chrome to become the crop instead of the farmer.
• nulcow 3y ago
  > In fact, because the iPhone is so popular in the U.S. — which is obvious from what you see on that aforementioned government analytics page — Safari pulls large numbers that also hurt Firefox. This makes me dislike smartphones more than I already did. Not only has iOS Safari overtaken Firefox in terms of market share, it has also overshadowed macOS Safari, a much better browser than iOS Safari for a much better operating system than iOS.
• superlupo 3y ago
  I can only recommend to give Firefox another go, if you don't use it by default. It really has improved the last years, it also had made much progress in privacy features, and doesn't want to kill ad-blocker like Google wants. Also, Firefox on Android finally started supporting extensions. Another thing: Because no other browser engines are allowed to be installed on iOS, those numbers should be subtracted from the total.
  • deanc 3y ago
    I hear this everytime a thread on HN pops up. Everyone talks about the major improvements, how it performs well nowadays etc. after a few years of perf. issues. But it runs like shit on my Macbook Pro 2019 (Intel) 32GB RAM. Videos freeze, it takes ages to cold start. Every interaction feels slow to me compared to chrome.
• bambax 3y ago
  > I am personally unaware of any serious reason to believe that Firefox’s numbers will improve soon. Is it possible that Manifest V3 will help Firefox? Of course most people don't know or care about Manifest V3, but if uBlock Origin or other effective ad blockers cease to work satisfactorily on Chrome, won't that make some users switch? I'd rather go back to fetching web pages from a terminal than suffering the insanity of modern web ads. I can't be the only one.
  • soundnote 3y ago
    Unlikely: You can make pretty good adblockers even with Manifest v3, and there are Chromium-based options with adblockers built in.
    • consumer451 3y ago
      As I understand it, Google’s latest raised middle finger is that they will delay updates to extensions. This will allow advertisers to always stay one step ahead, making adblocking much less effective.
    • luuurker 3y ago
      Can those extensions adapt to new methods of adblocker avoidance/detection and update their lists as fast as they can do now? I'm not sure if they can.
      • soundnote 3y ago
        Possibly not, but multiple Chromium-based browsers have already built their own adblocking solutions as part of the browser itself, so they certainly don't have to care. Brave's especially is about as strong as uBO, Vivaldi has a decent adblocking system and the people making Arc are looking to build their own as well.
  • Moldoteck 3y ago
    Most users don't care abt mv3. My parents would continue to use the browser without adblocking if I don't install it, just because they don't have the skills to do this. They don't even think about this. Just extrapolate for the entire world
• jeremyjh 3y ago
  I don't think browser compatibility testing matters so much anymore. It's not like we're going back to the IE-only days. If an application works in both Chrome and Safari, its almost certainly going to work in Firefox without any special care.
• fab13n 3y ago
  If Google succeeds at banning ad blockers from Chromium-based browsers, there's no doubt that Firefox' usage will go back up.
• causality0 3y ago
  Personally I wonder if Google's recent decisions kicking their war on adblocking into high gear could result in increased Firefox usage.
• pasttense01 3y ago
  "I am personally unaware of any serious reason to believe that Firefox’s numbers will improve soon." There is a serious reason: Youtube ad-blocking. The combination of Firefox and Ublock Origin (or perhaps other ad-blockers) allows you to watch Youtube while blocking ads. Increasingly (and definitely in 2024) you will not be able to do this with Chrome.
• throw7 3y ago
  Having your rules based on % of marketplace usage is terrible... just one reason (out of many) is that is a moving target. Unbelievable (believable?) shortsightedness. I guess we're back to IE5 days. Everything is circular ehhh?
• TedDoesntTalk 3y ago
  > I am personally unaware of any serious reason to believe that Firefox’s numbers will improve soon MV3 in Chrome
• billiam 3y ago
  The organization that gave the world Rust, Web Assembly, and countless other useful technologies is in a probable death spiral, and most of the blame goes to Mitchell Baker. If Mozilla was not primarily driven by greed and laziness, smart people that still exist in around Firefox would have made the difficult technical decisions needed to continue to ship a useful product that protects user privacy while still being easy to support in a world dominated by Chrome and Safari.
  • beretguy 3y ago
    Firefox needs new useful features to attract people. Like tab groups, tab position, other useful stuff…
    • nwah1 3y ago
      I, personally, hate those features. Tab groups were just added to my browser, and my first thought was how to turn it off. Firefox initially won users by being the fastest. And then lost users when it wasn't the fastest.
  • nojvek 3y ago
    Firefox letting go of many important teams such as MDN, Rust etc was its death knell in developer community. Mitchell Baker will surely get a golden parachute even if Firefox is sold for scraps.
    • quesera 3y ago
      If it takes a hundred million dollars to get Mitchell to leave Mozilla, it would be money well-spent. Just do it soon.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• 21eleven 3y ago
  Shout out to Firefox Mobile. I have it as the default browser on my android phone and the experience is great. I don't miss chrome at all. Once you get used to the minor UI differences you won't even notice you are not on chrome.
• abirch 3y ago
  I think these metrics are going to be jacked in a few years. 1) Firefox will be the only browser to support ad blocking 2) Internet Sites that are funded by ads will block Firefox 3) Firefox or a Firefox Extension will change the User Agent field to a corporate browser 4) All of these browser market share metrics are going to be incorrect.
• aporetics 3y ago
  I wish they had been working on an endowment like Wikipedia, that would be a better model in terms of the importance of an independent, open source browser. Maybe Wiki and take them under their wing.
• qwertox 3y ago
  I'm just preparing to fully move over to Firefox.
• zaphod420 3y ago
  FireFox is so good these days. This post is nonsense.
• wkat4242 3y ago
  I'm not so worried. I don't visit any US government sites ever, and very few corporate sites. The ones that I have problems with (Microsoft O365 in particular!!) are easily faked by setting the user agent to Edge on Windows. That magically solves everything (proving that Microsoft is deliberately breaking the experience on Firefox!). But "Supporting" a browser doesn't really mean very much. As long as the browser is standards compliant it will still work.
  • kdmccormick 3y ago
    > But "Supporting" a browser doesn't really mean very much. As long as the browser is standards compliant and websites continue to build to the standard it will still work. FTFY "This website is best viewed in IE" was not just a misguided suggestion from the webmasters. It was a statement that the site may rely on nonstandard IE-specific features. How confident are you that Apple and Google will never agree to add some matching non-standard "extension APIs" to Safari and Chrome?
• ericskiff 3y ago
  This discounts the number of people who see manifest v3 and the neutering of adblockers as a dealbreaker, forcing them to switch away from Chrome. Now, when they try Firefox it’s as fast and stable as Chrome (which was not the case a few years ago, they’ve made great strides) I’m hopeful that yields a nice bump in user ship. I was a diehard Firefox fan in the beginning, switched to chrome because it was just better on Mac for years, and now have switched back to running Firefox for 2 years without a hitch. The only thing I keep chrome around for is a dedicated Google Meet app
  • dcsommer 3y ago
    Google may pay less for search placement on Firefox if all their users block their ads.
• hospitalJail 3y ago
  I think I'm finally okay with this. Firefox/Mozilla cannot handle their responsibility. With the death of their dominance, we can hope a new player comes forward. I'm sick of cheerleading Firefox when it is slower than Chromium, heavier, and buggier. The only benefit is less creepy google. I'm sorry Mozilla, when FOSS teams that are unfunded can make browsers, I expect much much much more.
• ako 3y ago
  What should Firefox do for you to select it as your default browser? (It’s my default browser, I’m pretty happy with it, also use the pocket functionality quite bit)
  • soundnote 3y ago
    Features. Vertical tabs, PWA support. More technically solid browser on Android. Primarily though they should just focus on making a browser. The organization seems interested in doing anything and everything but building a tool for the user. Why not use Brave, or Vivaldi, or Arc, which actually add features and where the organizations are focused primarily on toolmaking?
  • rTX5CMRXIfFG 3y ago
    Come up with their own privacy-focused computer and mobile OS, and mobile devices, really. I don’t think that browsers can survive as standalone software anymore. We’ve come to a point where default browsers are so tightly integrated with smartphone or computer OSes that a browser by itself offers too little value without integration. It’s going to be expensive, but they can compete with Linux distros that try to do the same but which all cannot gain any traction, polish, and long-term support.
    • paulryanrogers 3y ago
      Or regulate a browser ballot. It's worked before.
  • anovick 3y ago
    Add this feature (Chosen Bookmark Shortcut Indicator): https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/feature-suggestion-firefox-desktop-chosen-bookmark-shortcut/idc-p/41485/emcs_t/S2h8ZW1haWx8dG9waWNfc3Vic2NyaXB0aW9ufExOSVdKREtSWTExVktQfDQxNDg1fFNVQlNDUklQVElPTlN8aEs#M24106 https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/feature-suggestion-fire...
  • breischl 3y ago
    It is my default, but keep a Brave install around just for the ability to "fake" a site into being an app. ie, it gets a separate launcher shortcut, a separate icon, etc. Very useful for sites I use constantly so they're not trapped in the same window as random surfing.
• layer8 3y ago
  According to https://radar.cloudflare.com/reports/browser-market-share-2023-q3 https://radar.cloudflare.com/reports/browser-market-share-20..., Firefox still has 4.7 % global market share, 4.9 % in the US, and significantly more in some relevant countries, like Germany with 15 %. So this may be a bit premature. It’s still a significant-enough market share to support. Of course, if it continues to decline further, Firefox will eventually become irrelevant. Let’s hope this won’t happen.
• the_third_wave 3y ago
  Here's an idea on how to turn this ship in the right direction: get Musk interested in funding a project which will fork the code base, clean up the cruft - pocket etc. - and relaunch Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox. That is what a Phoenix is supposed to do after all, when the time has come to die it will burn to ashes from which it arises all new and fresh. Why Musk? The choice seems clear as are the tangents to his other activities. He is one of the few "tech zillionaires" who does not kowtow to the demands of the censorious identity politics crowd which has instantly turned him from one of the darlings of "progressives" to "undesired person #1". He seems to have the drive to keep that crowd from dominating the 'net. Having all major browsers - Chrome, Safari, Edge and Firefox - under the control of that same crowd in one way or another is not conducive to the diversity of opinion on the 'net, the only type of diversity which really matters and yet the one type of diversity which is shunned by the aforementioned I.P. crowd. What is needed is developers ("developers, developers, developers!" [1]), funding and mindshare. The latter is probably fairly easy to get given that there are many who are more than tired of all that identity politicking. Funding should not be that hard to arrange either given the way money is being thrown around. Developers who are versed in the Gecko code base and are willing to work for a project which explicitly states to be politically neutral - as in 'does not push any narrative' - is more of a question. If there is anyone here who works/worked at Mozilla who can shine a light on that it would be helpful. Do those who work/worked there actually support Baker's push towards politicising the Mozilla project while the flagship product - Firefox - is heading towards oblivion? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33grif58qO8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33grif58qO8
  • the_third_wave 3y ago
    To the downvoters: tell us what you think instead of trying to get an opinion contrary to your own greyed out. Is it just that I mention undesirable person #1 which caught your ire, is it that you do not think a fork would be a good idea, is it because you do not agree that Mozilla has been abused by Baker? Discuss, do not just click that down-vote button.
    • kemotep 3y ago
      People are probably turned off to the comment because of all the complaining about “identity politics”. There also exists several forks of Firefox already. Suggesting the nth idealogical fork that will be funded out of the kindness of a billionaire’s heart doesn’t sound productive. Why not donate to Librewolf? Why must Musk actually have any involvement besides funding?
• sleepybrett 3y ago
  ... on the brink of being awesome. Every time i see someone using chrome I shudder. I wonder how much the youtube adblock bullshit debacle is going to effect these numbers and how.
• taf2 3y ago
  I can't be alone in my view that open source won. Just not the original Mozilla open source browser. Instead the re-invented one spear headed by Google - Chrome. Chrome is like the 2.0 of everything the IE6 team and Mozilla team learned the hard way. It was built by many of the original founding members of those teams. It's not a bad thing when Microsoft now uses the open source Blink rendering engine. It's not a bad thing that Apple uses the open source Webkit engine. My feeling is "we won". The web is so much better today thanks in part to the amazing teams that came together sponsored by Google to build Chrome. Time marches forward and there are plenty of interesting problems to overcome for the web as a platform. I just think we can move on from M$ bad, Mozilla good... Mozilla showed us we could have a better browser and helped break the web free from the shackles of Microsoft. There's new problems to solve new fights to win just this one, is IMO, over.
  • dhimes 3y ago
    We don't move on until Google lets us protect our privacy. Containers would be a good start.
  • Closi 3y ago
    That would be great, if Chrome was actually open source, and if the Chromium and Chrome projects weren't run by a company with perverse incentives (see: Manifest v3).
    • phendrenad2 3y ago
      That's just splitting hairs. Chrome is not holding back features from Chromium, so Chromium has everything that Chrome has. The only things it's missing are things that literally don't matter to Chromium users (like google sync, what are you going to do, make your own google corporation?) or things that literally can't be open-sourced (non-free codecs). The point here is that open-source "won" because nobody is trying to push features on the W3 Consortium without providing a reference implementation that is also the live, production code in the flagship browser of the largest browser company.
      • deleted 3y ago
• linuxhansl 3y ago
  This is really frustrating to hear! It continues to boggle my mind how Chrome - partly closed source, questionable goals related to advertising - has almost 50% market share; while Firefox is declining.
  • passion__desire 3y ago
    One feature which is stopping me from switching is Google account sync between devices.
    • digging 3y ago
      Firefox has account sync!
    • geysersam 3y ago
      I had the same concern until recently. But the switch to FF, keeping my bookmarks/passwords etc, was quick and entirely painless. I use FF on all my devices and it syncs just as well as chrome.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• locallost 3y ago
  The decline is exacerbated by mobile. It's become the dominant form of using the web, but almost everyone uses the default that comes with the phone and Firefox is nowhere to be seen. Additionally it's been on the decline even with the developer population, my guess is because Chrome and the team around it has been much better in explaining how to e.g. write better performing code and critically how to actually use devtools to measure. Anyway, I think Firefox is toast mostly because of its leadership which seems less interested in actually doing something interesting, and more interested in draining what's left until they can stick a fork in it.
• Animats 3y ago
  If only Firefox still worked. Every time I open Firefox on Linux, it does disk I/O for about two minutes before it is usable. No idea why. On current Ubuntu, about once a day, Firefox stops accepting keyboard input. Sometimes right in the middle of a text box. Other windows still accept input. Restarting Firefox is usually necessary.
  • worik 3y ago
    > Every time I open Firefox on Linux, it does disk I/O for about two minutes before it is usable. No idea why. I have no idea either But I do not think it is Firefox. I open it regularly on three computers, Ubuntu, mint, and Debian 12 and I don't see that
  • theteapot 3y ago
    I've used Firefox on Debian for years. Boot time is perceptibly zero. Performance is on par with Chrome. And I can't remember it ever crashing except for maybe a tab crashing every now and then due to some errant Javascript.
    • Animats 3y ago
      Maybe it has to be on an SSD disk now.
• 28304283409234 3y ago
  Please oh dear god just let me pay for Firefox. This isn’t the nineties. I can and will afford it. I pay for Bitwarden, Fastmail, NordVPN, ElementaryOS. Just give me a paid version, Mozilla.
  • hughw 3y ago
    You can make monthly donations to the Mozilla Foundation.
    • luuurker 3y ago
      Apparently it's not used for browser development...
    • dralley 3y ago
      Not really the same thing. The best thing you could do to fund Firefox is not to donate, but to pay for a service like Mozilla VPN
    • Karunamon 3y ago
      That only results in your money going to miscellaneous secondary concerns and administrative bloat.
• nojvek 3y ago
  That chart is sad. Like most things, the decline is gradual for decades and then all at once. It doesn’t help that iPhone can have no other browser engine other than Safari. Big Tech dominance is powerful that many nation states when it comes to internet.
• bdcravens 3y ago
  Lately I've been using Firefox as a primary browser again, mostly to get used to it before ad blockers stop working in Chrome. Mostly it's good, though some things I'm still adjusting to: Firefox wants to claim the ESC key to get out of full-screen, resulting in a number of sites with different behavior (namely, many sites use ESC to close modals)
• indymike 3y ago
  A quick look at Mozilla's product page with 12 products of which five are different browsers, explains why the decline has happened: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/products/ https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/products/ That's a lot of products to support. Add to that this list of 27 discontinued products: https://killedbymozilla.com/ https://killedbymozilla.com/ And you can understand why the struggle is real for firefox. It should be the best, bar none at this point.
  • rbanffy 3y ago
    All the browsers are probably counted as Firefox. A better guidance would be to count based on engines (Chrome, Edge, and Safari are all variations on WebKit) and have a device preventing an engine monopoly.
    • indymike 3y ago
      > All the browsers are probably counted as Firefox. Firefox for iOS uses WebKit as the rendering engine, and the others are significantly divergent from Firefox proper and take significant development resources away from the core product, so I disagree with counting the products as a single browser.
      • rbanffy 3y ago
        Those browsers are part of the product. It's just functionality that's not in the most popular version. Still, for all purposes, they should be counted as one (with the exception of the iOS version, of course, because it behaves like Safari for the web-page side).
        • indymike 3y ago
          Mozilla does not position them or manage them as "part of the product".
• ape4 3y ago
  They should run some ads - they have a great product
• macinjosh 3y ago
  If Firefox goes away, we need serious anti-trust scrutiny on Google/Chrome. To me they are in a similar place that MS was when IE got them into trouble. They dominate PIM/Office tools with the google suite and design them to work best in Chrome. The only major difference is that Chrome is open sourced, but their software we need Chrome for isn't so that doesn't affect their moat at all.
• deviantbit 3y ago
  I am always suspect of these surveys. I saw one the other day that claimed C# was the top language being used. I'll continue to donate to Firefox and Thunderbird.
• xwowsersx 3y ago
  I use Firefox. I started using it because I liked the Multi-Account Containers and I've just stuck with it. I am absolutely shocked that FF's market share is ~2%. I had no idea it was that low, wow!
• neilv 3y ago
  Instead of government leaving it up to "market share", in an industry with decades of documented history of underhanded anti-competitive behavior, how about: 1. All government Web frontends must be compliant with one of the government-defined profiles of browser features, which are defined in terms of W3C (not WHAT, not Chrome) open standards. With sufficient penalties to motivate compliance. 2. As a practical matter, developers of government Web-based systems -- in addition to developing to documented open standards, and using open standards-based libraries/frameworks -- will be motivated to test with multiple browsers, including Firefox, because that's the most likely way that end users will discover and report noncompliance with the standards and profiles. 3. Government "apps" for non-Web platforms, such as Apple iOS and Google Android, are strongly discouraged. Furthermore, such non-Web apps by default are not compliant unless complete comparable functionality is available via compliant government Web frontends/apps. (To get permission for exceptions in extraordinary circumstances, there will be an onerous and uncertain process, and thus the motivation is to invest in the open standard Web platform for any "extraordinary" platform facilities that might be needed.) (Also there would be regulations about backend implementations; that's just about browsers.)
  • insanitybit 3y ago
    I don't think the government wants to (or possibly is even able to) get involved in defining web standards. Tracking market share seems like the least hands-on way to determine support as it's purely "pull based" - they follow everyone else's lead, they aren't trying to dictate what a "good" browser is. The government is generally very slow and deliberate about technology recommendations let alone requirements when it comes to generally available software.
    • neilv 3y ago
      There's been credible international standards since early on. The government can say "use that international standard for government systems, not these (more) proprietary and unstable things".
  • JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    Nos. 1 and 3 will win you the developer pico-vote while royally pissing everyone else off. No. 2 is the matter at hand. You need a cut-off for the multiple browsers requirement. If you don’t, you’ll find contracts to CronyCorp for testing every site against the CronyCorp browser.
• ags1905 3y ago
  I have been using Firefox for many years in Windows and in Linux. Indeed it is much slower than Chrome, but I cannot ditch it because: - I need tab scrolling; - I need a separate search box, where I can install and use different search engines. Google search started being crap about 5 years ago.
• stuff4ben 3y ago
  Similar to what Microsoft did, Apple should stop working on Safari and switch to Firefox for MacOS and IOS.
• quietpain 3y ago
  I recently installed the STM32 Cube IDE from ST [1] and discovered that it contains a stealth binary of Google's Chrome in my home directory. The fans started spinning and I found the culprit pretty fast, but if you delete the Chrome executable in the double-hidden directory it just gets installed again at the next run of the IDE. I wonder what percentage of market share can be attributed to this kind of clients that are used not for browsing but for lazily loading some web interface or product page. [1] https://www.st.com/en/development-tools/stm32cubeide.html https://www.st.com/en/development-tools/stm32cubeide.html
  • rewmie 3y ago
    That's a great point. Both Chrome and Edge are widely used as WebView drivers by some applications, and whether the user likes it or not they end up using one of the browsers that's dubbed market leader. Does Firefox even provide any webview-capable deployment option? If they managed to put together one that didn't weight around 100MB or phoned home, I'm sure it would be widely adopted once it's out.
• sreejithr 3y ago
  Firefox is the only browser that has reliable ad-blocking. Chrome allows ads by default because you know, it's from Google. Edge is no better the last I used it. Websites are simply faster on Firefox. But I guess people like me are fast becoming a minority.
  • nkg 3y ago
    I'm with you!
• crowcroft 3y ago
  My rebuttal is that a lot of web devs have already moved on from actively supporting Firefox (although most websites still work just fine), and if anything the USDS is a laggard. The laggards all moving away from Firefox might actually be a big problem though, the enterprise laggards kept Internet Explorer on life support way past its best before date, but FF won't get that.
• G3rn0ti 3y ago
  Are all those overall market share numbers aggregated over device types? In the 2000s most internet users were sitting in front of a desktop PC, while nowadays most web surfers are doing it from the palm of their hand. Of course, in that case people primarily choose their platform‘s native browser i.e. either Chrome or Safari. The latter is even forced onto its users (not that it is a really bad browser). So the decline of Firefox’s market share really tells us a story of the rise of the mobile web.
• iteratethis 3y ago
  Firefox was already statistically irrelevant 5 years ago. On our dashboard, a global e-commerce site with billions of views per year, it's not even in the top 10. Even regional browsers sometimes surpass it. Firefox is also no longer a developer-default browser. This too has been true for years now. There's very little Mozilla can do about it. Chrome and Safari are big because they're shipped as a default to platforms with billions of users. And the web works well on both of those browsers. It's not an engineering problem. You can't improve Firefox and expect market share to rise. It's pretty much a done deal, and Microsoft (as well as Brave) using Chromium cemented that deal.
  • troyvit 3y ago
    Late to the party, but these are the things people were saying about Apple in 1999/2000. Apple was sitting with a < 4% marketshare and also (luckily) $5 billion. They turned it around. There are massive differences between Apple and Mozilla clearly, but it does indicate that there's hope for Mozilla.
  • usr1106 3y ago
    Sorry, nothing personal. But as a 100% Firefox user I would very likely avoid to visit any global ecommerce site. It's the same world I want to avoid by not using Google products. I know I am a small minority, but you don't even see that minority.
    • insanitybit 3y ago
      Even if you assume that 50% of Firefox users are falling into "they wouldn't visit those sites to begin with" or "they run a user-agent spoofer" you're basically going from 2-4% to 4-8%, and the trend is clearly negative.
    • Newsharpha 3y ago
      minorities matter only if they serve a purpose, it seems.
• hnav 3y ago
  Mozilla should develop a rudimentary Blink or Webkit mode for FF that allows it to fallback to a better supported engine (with obvious limitations wrt extensions, privacy policy) for select websites. I think once the user has opened Chrome/Safari because something rendered all fucked up in FF, they're likely to keep using it. The telemetry from fallbacks could be used to prioritize compatibility issues and drive down the number of sites that require it. Oh and replace its own netstack with something better like the one from chrome.
  • graypegg 3y ago
    I’m not sure if the specifics but I think embedding an alternative rendering engine within a browser already built around a different one would be a significant chunk of work. I could imagine a sort of quirks mode though, just a few hand selected chrome bugs/features implemented in gecko to make it behave just a little more like chrome. What a horrible future but it’s a possibility.
    • hnav 3y ago
      I just don't see a viable alternative once your market share has fallen low enough for devs not to care about testing on your browser.
• AtlasBarfed 3y ago
  Are web standards that bleak that specific browsers need attention still?
  • punyearthling 3y ago
    no. web interoperability is a thing that's happening and the major players (including ff) mostly all behave/look the same. a project officially dropping ff support should have no impact on ppl using ff.
• denton-scratch 3y ago
  > I surely hope I’m wrong about this, but I fear I’m not. I suspect that the remaining Firefox users are likely to be quite "sticky". If there are websites that don't work in Firefox (but work in Chrome and Safari), I haven't yet blundered into one. My guess is that those would be mainly corporate intranet sites/apps, which I don't have to deal with. No platform deploys Firefox by default; you have to deliberately choose it. That is NOT true of Chrome or Edge. I doubt anyone has ever deliberately chosen Edge; you can only get Edge on Windows, where it's the default anyway. And the only people I know that have deliberately chosen Chrome over the OS default are developers.
  • zahllos 3y ago
    Slight nitpick but you can get edge on both Mac and Linux. They package both a deb and an rpm here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge/business/download?form=MA13FJ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge/business/download?form=... and it is also available on Mac. The main reason for using this is to run edge on windows subsystem for Linux on windows and wonder if anyone would have predicted that in the year 2000. (I actually have edge installed on some Linux machines as well, but it isn't my main browser except when I need to teams).
    • denton-scratch 3y ago
      Hah! I am now better-informed. Thanks.
• uticus 3y ago
  If Firefox stops being a supported codebase, would Rust popularity be another domino to fall? Since it is the largest (and probably best known) Rust project in the world.
  • fooker 3y ago
    Firefox is mostly written in C++.
  • steveklabnik 3y ago
    I don't think Firefox's usage of Rust is in any way relevant to Rust's popularity (or lack thereof) at this point in Rust's life, nor going forward. (I also suspect it's neither the largest nor best known project that uses Rust, but that's very difficult to quantify.)
• askonomm 3y ago
  I've worked with a ton of start-ups and digital agencies on countless projects by now in my career, and I can honestly say supporting Firefox has never been a priority. I've tried to push for cross-browser testing many times, but according to the stats (which management makes these decisions with) Firefox users are such a tiny, insignificant amount of most websites and products that it doesn't make a lot of sense, which I'm sure even further adds to abysmal Firefox usage when sites work badly or don't work at all because nobody tests anything with it. Ce'st la vie, I guess.
• WWLink 3y ago
  The fact is a bunch of web devs are lazy fucks that want to see Firefox die because they are lazy and refuse to develop for anything but chrome. :S
  • kiwijamo 3y ago
    Just like in the good old days of IE.
• EchoReflection 3y ago
  seems like if FF leadership is smart they will figure out some way to tweak their product so that it is compliant or they will start spending money on advertising. I have never once in my entire life (I'm 36) seen an ad for FF. Personally I like FF but find the browser to be TOO tight in terms of things like needing 2FA to sync. My number one browser is Vivaldi, which is Chromium-based (obviously) but does have enhanced tracking protection. https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-powerful-privacy-settings/ https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-powerful-privacy-settings/
• merotiskonel 3y ago
  People who should know better keep on using chrome just as people who should know better keep on using vscode. I guess that's the zeitgeist, accepting the corporate trojan gift. Let's just hope alternatives like Firefox don't completely vanish.