8 ms·

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

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.
- PawgerZ 3y ago
  2% is still 7 million people
- account42 3y ago
  > it's not clear if Mozilla, the organization, could weather that. It would be best for the future of Firefox if they don't.
- robin_reala 3y ago
  USDS aren’t idiots, and if they haven’t realised this yet then maybe this post will focus attention. They want to support every citizen it’s reasonable to support (or at least I did when I was working for GOV.UK) and dropping support from a lack of knowledge shouldn’t be on the agenda.
  - dblohm7 3y ago
    Some of the USDS people are even ex-Mozilla!
  - Miraste 3y ago
    GOV.UK is dramatically more competent than USDS, are they not? I admit I'm not terribly familiar, but I wouldn't want to depend on the agency behind the Department of Education and VA websites for anything. I've seen the VA site, in particular, do serious harm to the people it's meant to serve.
flohofwoe 3y ago
If that's the case there would be a sudden decrease in the market share graph around 2019 (although that graph is from Statscounter which has Firefox currently sitting at around 3.2%). The decline has already been happening since around 2010 without any drastic ups or downs.
toss1 3y ago
If this is the case, it seems that they need to recode the Enhanced Tracking Protection for GA to ensure that they get flagged as FFox. Might also be useful to have a plug-in to make a daily 'ping'/check-in from FFox to any govt sites used by their users. E.g., I use USPS and SBA/SBIR sites, but only occasionally or monthly, but if most FFox users who did so got logged more like daily instead of ~fortnightly or ~monthly, it'd improve the numbers. (Obviously, also must be done carefully so as to not get wholesale discounted). The cascade effect of the US Govt abandoning support would be catastrophic, likely terminal, which would be bad for everyone.
- worik 3y ago
  > ...it seems that they need to recode the Enhanced Tracking Protection for GA to ensure that they get flagged as FFox. That would be backwards The main reason to use FF is the privacy protections I find it very frustrating they do not get more recognition for the work they do on that front
NelsonMinar 3y ago
Do you have a source for a more accurate picture of Firefox' market share? Every single report I've seen shows the same thing: long downward trend and a tiny fraction of the usage of Chrome and Safari.
- conradfr 3y ago
  I have a modest (non-technical) side project (a few thousands visitors per day) that is used worldwide. GoAccess puts Firefox at 7.8% and Google Analytics at 3.3%. GoAccess puts Chrome at 57% and Google Analytics at 73%.
  - simbolit 3y ago
    Non-technical as in "the average user isn't a nerd" ? For non-nerd populations, these numbers seem high.
    - conradfr 3y ago
      Yes I realized too late the term might be confusing. It's a radios streaming website/app, so not nerdy. There is an Android app that uses a webview so that even favours Chrome. Also GoAccess doesn't unfortunately filter all scrappers/bots and most of them declare themselves as Chrome. A sizeable part of the traffic is (non-app) Android and I don't think Firefox is huge there so maybe on desktop Firefox market-share is actually not as bad as we think?
chrismorgan 3y ago
“Enhanced Tracking Protection” is a poor name: it’s not just one thing, but has two modes: Standard and Strict. (There’s also Custom, which lets you go somewhere between the two, or restrict cookies even more tightly.) The default is Standard. It doesn’t block GA. The cynic in me suggests they decided making Firefox disappear altogether from popular stats by default would have harmed them more than not doing it harms their users, or that the backlash would be too great for their liking. Sources like Google Analytics and Statcounter are still chronically undercounting minority browsers and platforms, which are much more likely to block these sorts of things, and Firefox and Linux will be particularly heavily hit, but I’m sure the difference it makes isn’t as large as I’d like it to be.
Steltek 3y ago
What stood out to me was that they didn't break out mobile from PC. The mobile landscape dominates usage these days and extremely few people make an active choice in browser there. The presented stats to me reads more like Android vs iPhone than it does Chrome vs everyone else.
- culi 3y ago
  on iOS all browsers are forced to use WebKit And how could Firefox possibly complete against default browsers? Is it even worth the investment?
  - rchaud 3y ago
    They tried with FirefoxOS almost a decade ago but couldn't find any hardware partners.
    - fabrice_d 3y ago
      FirefoxOS was not stopped by Mozilla leadership due to a lack of hardware partners. The distribution model - mostly through carriers - failed because a key app was not available (WhatsApp) which caused a chicken and egg situation: no sales because no app, no official app because not enough users.
      - geoelectric 3y ago
        That's pretty interesting. I was around back then and hadn't recalled that there was such a lynchpin issue, but that makes a lot of sense as to why it suddenly hit such a hard stop. Were you able to support WhatsApp with KaiOS, or did the feature-phone target make it moot?
        fabrice_d 3y ago
        Yes KaiOS has an official WhatsApp app. This was possible thanks to the market size of Jio in India, with > 120M devices shipped.
Semaphor 3y ago
Just to add some anecdata, we have both Google Analytics (if you accept the GDPR tracking request…) and our own internal statistics based purely on useragents. Here are some percentages for November (this is Germany, generally far higher FF usage) Ours: Chrome 37.4% Firefox 24.7% Safari 21.1% Edge 7.5% Opera 2.6% GA: Chrome 39.3% Safari 31.5% Firefox 11.9% Edge 9.9% Samsung Internet 2.9% For us, GA is undercounting FF by almost 13 percentage points, over 50%.
- culi 3y ago
  Of course this heavily depends on niche. In some European countries Firefox is at almost 20% marketshare
  - Semaphor 3y ago
    I mentioned that: > this is Germany, generally far higher FF usage But the interesting part is not how much FF has here, but how much GA undercounts it.
    - culi 3y ago
      Yeah it's interesting. I wonder if it's done on purpose or if it has to do with the way bots/crawlers are counted
      - Semaphor 3y ago
        See parent. The default in FF is to shim the GA script
        hnbad 3y ago
        Also GA requires opt-in in the EU (even if some sites try to be clever and illegally make it harder to refuse than to accept) whereas presumably their first-party tracking is done in such a way consent is not necessary (e.g. sufficient anonymization that a data point can not be correlated with the user it originated from). Presumably FF users are more likely not to consent by default to begin with.
mozTA 3y ago
Mozilla employee here. Truth of the situation is probably worse. We are losing users faster than anticipated.
- lucasyvas 3y ago
  Do you anticipate the losses are due to people with aging machines upgrading and using a different browser? As a very happy Firefox user, I have a very hard time believing it's because people find the experience to be poor. I feel as if the losses you are describing have to be losses to defaults on new devices and people that fairly don't care enough to change them. The desktop is virtually dead for any "normal" user, and their Android or Apple tablet/phone don't prompt them with a choice (other vendor constraints notwithstanding). It's not remotely a fair fight. You are guaranteed to lose users for reasons totally outside your control.
  - achenet 3y ago
    longtime Firefox user here. I switched to Chromium recently bc Firefox started bugging on me.
- NoGravitas 3y ago
  Sure, brand new account with only one comment! I'm grateful for your trustworthy insider insights.
mvdtnz 3y ago
Please define your acronyms.

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.

PawgerZ 3y ago
2% is still 7 million people
account42 3y ago
> it's not clear if Mozilla, the organization, could weather that. It would be best for the future of Firefox if they don't.
robin_reala 3y ago
USDS aren’t idiots, and if they haven’t realised this yet then maybe this post will focus attention. They want to support every citizen it’s reasonable to support (or at least I did when I was working for GOV.UK) and dropping support from a lack of knowledge shouldn’t be on the agenda.
- dblohm7 3y ago
  Some of the USDS people are even ex-Mozilla!
- Miraste 3y ago
  GOV.UK is dramatically more competent than USDS, are they not? I admit I'm not terribly familiar, but I wouldn't want to depend on the agency behind the Department of Education and VA websites for anything. I've seen the VA site, in particular, do serious harm to the people it's meant to serve.

flohofwoe 3y ago

If that's the case there would be a sudden decrease in the market share graph around 2019 (although that graph is from Statscounter which has Firefox currently sitting at around 3.2%). The decline has already been happening since around 2010 without any drastic ups or downs.

toss1 3y ago

If this is the case, it seems that they need to recode the Enhanced Tracking Protection for GA to ensure that they get flagged as FFox. Might also be useful to have a plug-in to make a daily 'ping'/check-in from FFox to any govt sites used by their users. E.g., I use USPS and SBA/SBIR sites, but only occasionally or monthly, but if most FFox users who did so got logged more like daily instead of ~fortnightly or ~monthly, it'd improve the numbers. (Obviously, also must be done carefully so as to not get wholesale discounted). The cascade effect of the US Govt abandoning support would be catastrophic, likely terminal, which would be bad for everyone.

worik 3y ago
> ...it seems that they need to recode the Enhanced Tracking Protection for GA to ensure that they get flagged as FFox. That would be backwards The main reason to use FF is the privacy protections I find it very frustrating they do not get more recognition for the work they do on that front

NelsonMinar 3y ago

Do you have a source for a more accurate picture of Firefox' market share? Every single report I've seen shows the same thing: long downward trend and a tiny fraction of the usage of Chrome and Safari.

conradfr 3y ago
I have a modest (non-technical) side project (a few thousands visitors per day) that is used worldwide. GoAccess puts Firefox at 7.8% and Google Analytics at 3.3%. GoAccess puts Chrome at 57% and Google Analytics at 73%.
- simbolit 3y ago
  Non-technical as in "the average user isn't a nerd" ? For non-nerd populations, these numbers seem high.
  - conradfr 3y ago
    Yes I realized too late the term might be confusing. It's a radios streaming website/app, so not nerdy. There is an Android app that uses a webview so that even favours Chrome. Also GoAccess doesn't unfortunately filter all scrappers/bots and most of them declare themselves as Chrome. A sizeable part of the traffic is (non-app) Android and I don't think Firefox is huge there so maybe on desktop Firefox market-share is actually not as bad as we think?

chrismorgan 3y ago

“Enhanced Tracking Protection” is a poor name: it’s not just one thing, but has two modes: Standard and Strict. (There’s also Custom, which lets you go somewhere between the two, or restrict cookies even more tightly.) The default is Standard. It doesn’t block GA. The cynic in me suggests they decided making Firefox disappear altogether from popular stats by default would have harmed them more than not doing it harms their users, or that the backlash would be too great for their liking. Sources like Google Analytics and Statcounter are still chronically undercounting minority browsers and platforms, which are much more likely to block these sorts of things, and Firefox and Linux will be particularly heavily hit, but I’m sure the difference it makes isn’t as large as I’d like it to be.

Steltek 3y ago

What stood out to me was that they didn't break out mobile from PC. The mobile landscape dominates usage these days and extremely few people make an active choice in browser there. The presented stats to me reads more like Android vs iPhone than it does Chrome vs everyone else.

culi 3y ago
on iOS all browsers are forced to use WebKit And how could Firefox possibly complete against default browsers? Is it even worth the investment?
- rchaud 3y ago
  They tried with FirefoxOS almost a decade ago but couldn't find any hardware partners.
  - fabrice_d 3y ago
    FirefoxOS was not stopped by Mozilla leadership due to a lack of hardware partners. The distribution model - mostly through carriers - failed because a key app was not available (WhatsApp) which caused a chicken and egg situation: no sales because no app, no official app because not enough users.
    - geoelectric 3y ago
      That's pretty interesting. I was around back then and hadn't recalled that there was such a lynchpin issue, but that makes a lot of sense as to why it suddenly hit such a hard stop. Were you able to support WhatsApp with KaiOS, or did the feature-phone target make it moot?
      - fabrice_d 3y ago
        Yes KaiOS has an official WhatsApp app. This was possible thanks to the market size of Jio in India, with > 120M devices shipped.

Semaphor 3y ago

Just to add some anecdata, we have both Google Analytics (if you accept the GDPR tracking request…) and our own internal statistics based purely on useragents. Here are some percentages for November (this is Germany, generally far higher FF usage) Ours: Chrome 37.4% Firefox 24.7% Safari 21.1% Edge 7.5% Opera 2.6% GA: Chrome 39.3% Safari 31.5% Firefox 11.9% Edge 9.9% Samsung Internet 2.9% For us, GA is undercounting FF by almost 13 percentage points, over 50%.

culi 3y ago
Of course this heavily depends on niche. In some European countries Firefox is at almost 20% marketshare
- Semaphor 3y ago
  I mentioned that: > this is Germany, generally far higher FF usage But the interesting part is not how much FF has here, but how much GA undercounts it.
  - culi 3y ago
    Yeah it's interesting. I wonder if it's done on purpose or if it has to do with the way bots/crawlers are counted
    - Semaphor 3y ago
      See parent. The default in FF is to shim the GA script
      - hnbad 3y ago
        Also GA requires opt-in in the EU (even if some sites try to be clever and illegally make it harder to refuse than to accept) whereas presumably their first-party tracking is done in such a way consent is not necessary (e.g. sufficient anonymization that a data point can not be correlated with the user it originated from). Presumably FF users are more likely not to consent by default to begin with.

mozTA 3y ago

Mozilla employee here. Truth of the situation is probably worse. We are losing users faster than anticipated.

lucasyvas 3y ago
Do you anticipate the losses are due to people with aging machines upgrading and using a different browser? As a very happy Firefox user, I have a very hard time believing it's because people find the experience to be poor. I feel as if the losses you are describing have to be losses to defaults on new devices and people that fairly don't care enough to change them. The desktop is virtually dead for any "normal" user, and their Android or Apple tablet/phone don't prompt them with a choice (other vendor constraints notwithstanding). It's not remotely a fair fight. You are guaranteed to lose users for reasons totally outside your control.
- achenet 3y ago
  longtime Firefox user here. I switched to Chromium recently bc Firefox started bugging on me.
NoGravitas 3y ago
Sure, brand new account with only one comment! I'm grateful for your trustworthy insider insights.

mvdtnz 3y ago

Please define your acronyms.