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Apple's market share is only 8.6%. I can remember the click-bait headlines 20 or 30 years ago lamenting the Mac's demise and portraying it as an irrelevant plat

Apple's market share is only 8.6%. I can remember the click-bait headlines 20 or 30 years ago lamenting the Mac's demise and portraying it as an irrelevant platform doomed for the Information Age scrap heap. (See https://apple.slashdot.org/story/02/06/19/218246/dvorak-discontinue-the-mac https://apple.slashdot.org/story/02/06/19/218246/dvorak-disc... about a 2002 John C. Dvorak column calling for the Macintosh to be discontinued - Dvorak's column is no longer online but the Mac is still around) Firefox is still used by millions of people every day. It's not going anywhere.

zamadatix 3y ago
If Firefox were 8.6% and growing it'd be a completely different article. It's 3x less than that an shrinking though.
- ilamont 3y ago
  "Apple PC Shipments Dropped 2X More Than Any Other Manufacturer In Q3" https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2023/10/10/apple-pc-shipments-dropped-2x-more-than-any-other-manufacturer-in-q3/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2023/10/10/apple-p... "Sky is falling" headlines around Firefox, Apple, Linux and a host of other technologies miss the point that these platforms may be small, but have dedicated followings, often with niche use cases that can't be replicated elsewhere.
  - pi-e-sigma 3y ago
    Because the Web is evolving, niche browsers are not able to keep up with the changes and become useless at some point.
  - zamadatix 3y ago
    The fault with that headlines has little to do with a small dedicated following. Apple isn't a "small" PC manufacturer when it's got more than half the shipments of the largest manufacturer. The real fault with that clickbait is it ignores Apple desktops had an enormous boon with people migrating to M* based desktops and they aren't ready to upgrade yet while simultaneously ignoring shipments are still higher than pre M* Apple desktops. Besides that, clickbait articles about other things other companies do don't even say anything about this topic. Again, focusing on how the usage share is abysmal compared to competitors while consistently shrinking down to where it is over the last decade lets you easily see why this particular headline isn't clickbait. Even with millions of users, Firefox having such low usage share, especially compared to alternative competitors, is a risk to its main funding source. This is a problem for an organization like Mozilla which makes very little from its users vs one like Apple which has become the most valuable in the world through the exact opposite.
- seszett 3y ago
  It depends on which market, for example according to Cloudflare[0] Firefox is around 9% in France, and rather stable. Safari is only about twice that. Just like for the Android/iOS situation, I think the US is an outlier that skews all global statistics because of their weight. [0]https://radar.cloudflare.com/adoption-and-usage/fr?dateRange=52w https://radar.cloudflare.com/adoption-and-usage/fr?dateRange...
e_y_ 3y ago
Apple charges a premium on its hardware. Firefox is free and Mozilla makes most of its money from the default browser agreement, which is potentially now in jeopardy.

zamadatix 3y ago

If Firefox were 8.6% and growing it'd be a completely different article. It's 3x less than that an shrinking though.

ilamont 3y ago
"Apple PC Shipments Dropped 2X More Than Any Other Manufacturer In Q3" https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2023/10/10/apple-pc-shipments-dropped-2x-more-than-any-other-manufacturer-in-q3/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2023/10/10/apple-p... "Sky is falling" headlines around Firefox, Apple, Linux and a host of other technologies miss the point that these platforms may be small, but have dedicated followings, often with niche use cases that can't be replicated elsewhere.
- pi-e-sigma 3y ago
  Because the Web is evolving, niche browsers are not able to keep up with the changes and become useless at some point.
- zamadatix 3y ago
  The fault with that headlines has little to do with a small dedicated following. Apple isn't a "small" PC manufacturer when it's got more than half the shipments of the largest manufacturer. The real fault with that clickbait is it ignores Apple desktops had an enormous boon with people migrating to M* based desktops and they aren't ready to upgrade yet while simultaneously ignoring shipments are still higher than pre M* Apple desktops. Besides that, clickbait articles about other things other companies do don't even say anything about this topic. Again, focusing on how the usage share is abysmal compared to competitors while consistently shrinking down to where it is over the last decade lets you easily see why this particular headline isn't clickbait. Even with millions of users, Firefox having such low usage share, especially compared to alternative competitors, is a risk to its main funding source. This is a problem for an organization like Mozilla which makes very little from its users vs one like Apple which has become the most valuable in the world through the exact opposite.
seszett 3y ago
It depends on which market, for example according to Cloudflare[0] Firefox is around 9% in France, and rather stable. Safari is only about twice that. Just like for the Android/iOS situation, I think the US is an outlier that skews all global statistics because of their weight. [0]https://radar.cloudflare.com/adoption-and-usage/fr?dateRange=52w https://radar.cloudflare.com/adoption-and-usage/fr?dateRange...

e_y_ 3y ago

Apple charges a premium on its hardware. Firefox is free and Mozilla makes most of its money from the default browser agreement, which is potentially now in jeopardy.