Article seems pretty flawed. Relevance is a vague metric, and the author relies pretty heavily on data related to government site visitation, which seems subject to bias toward certain types of users.
Market share is likely still incredibly low, but Firefox’s relevance should be spiking right now due to Google’s shenanigans with Chromium. The fact that like 90% of revenue for its for-profit wing is from Google is still troubling.
Any alternative views out there?
I use Edge for corporate intranet, Safari for anything with real-life connected personal accounts, and Firefox for everything else. Have done so for over a decade (with Edge previously being Chrome and before that IE).
This means government sites would mostly see me as a Safari user, with the occasional Edge visit, unless I was just looking something up, in which case it’d be Firefox.
According to YouTube, I’d be 99% a Firefox user.
I didn’t think that the market share was actually changing much? Like it’s low but it’s still used, especially on Linux workstations with nothing else pre-installed
“slides into irrelevance” - zdnet
From ZDNet. How much did they get paid to post this article?
How much did they get paid by a PR firm who’s subsidized entirely by Alphabet, Inc.?
I guess Firefox market share will be closely related to Linux desktop market share
I’ve recently moved away from Chrome to Firefox and the transition was so seamless that I’m surprised. The main reason for the change is that Firefox for android now allows addons, serious addons not just the mobile ones. Before I was using a chrome / kiwi browser combo. So happy that now I can sync my desktop and phone :)
What add-ons in particular made you make the change?
Not OP but the standard two ones: uBlock origin and NoScript. Added bonus is an addon to continue video view with screen off.
People constantly crying over the ads in their youtube app. Well i just watch in Firefox and if i want to watch an audiobook video to fall asleep to, i don’t even have to drain my battery.
uBlock, Clean URLs, and “I still don’t care about cookies”
Are the must haves for me.
Is the last one still useful if you enable the cookies filter under annoyances in uBlock?
I didn’t know about that actually. I’ll try it out and remove cookies extension. Thanks!
Edit: Working well so far!
Yeah, I’ve got a bunch of the annoyances filters active and don’t know if I could browse most websites without them at this point.
Bypass paywalls clean. It’s great for reading news articles under a paywall.
I will be honest. I didn’t read that article because it’s too click-baity. Using https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/ I see that Firefox is about 3% of 5b users. Not insignificant.
That 3% is about 150mil users. IMO, less than it should be. Google has great security, but terrible privacy. I switched middle of last year, from brave to FF for reasons I won’t get into here. Suffice it to say, they are numerous.
It truly is troubling that they don’t have independent funding. I, for one would pay $10/y for this service. Maybe I could donate?
Anyway, it’s a superior product in many ways.
I would say a good half of posts on Lemmy are too click-baity for me to actually look at. Every title clearly has picked a side and it’s rare to see something even attempt to be impartial
I can’t disagree with you. I feel like that’s the way of the world anymore regardless of platform.
Agreed, unfortunately you’re right
That’s total browser market. On Desktop it’s 7.61%, in Germany 17.93%, making it second place (though Edge isn’t far behind). Europe is 10.56%, North America pretty much average, Asia and South America are dragging it down.
It truly is troubling that they don’t have independent funding. I, for one would pay $10/y for this service. Maybe I could donate?
Firefox is Mozilla’s cash cow, it’s how they’re earning funds for their charitable work. And google btw isn’t the only one paying them, which search engine is the default depends on where you are.
Firefox is Mozilla’s cash cow, it’s how they’re earning funds for their charitable work. And google btw isn’t the only one paying them, which search engine is the default depends on where you are.
Thank you that’s wonderful news! I don’t have the time to keep up on browser news like that so I truly appreciate the information.
Only thing I miss in Firefox is PWA, but I still mainly use it.
There’s an extension which allows PWAs.
I wonder if Firefox users are more likely to spoof their user agent setting? Probably not.
I’ll still use it. Compared to every other browser, it is the least disastrous regarding privacy.
I always spoof the ua. Not for privacy (though it helps), but because some sites artificially break for certain browsers or OSs and work perfectly fine when they think you’re on a different browser. The artificial restriction should be illegal, but it isn’t.
Firefox has been irrelevant for about a decade now. Most webdevs don’t even test for firefox anymore. Major websides actively ignore it and most users evidently either don’t know and/or use it.
Yes, firefox is relevant as an alternative to Chromium-based browsers, but that’s about it. Mozilla has done a stellar job at keeping it irrelevant to keep bagging that sweet google money.
Honestly, I hope firefox and mozilla die, to be reborn again by another entity, but Mitchell Baker probably will do their best to keep getting that sweet, sweet, Google money.
With how google has been gong mask-off, I’d argue that FF has never been more relevant
It won’t change anything about Mozilla. They know they are the only viable option at the moment and they will milk it until they die. We should let it die.
but when you tell the moz fanboys why moz sucks you’ll find yourself in a meta/maga like echochamber. again and again moz made absolute shit decisions, the managing board is eating money like mad and google is STILL your default search engine. pathetic.
And then the person saying that FF blows because Google is the default browser uses… a Chromium wrapper.
What I don’t get is why hasn’t there been a split yet. Not like Seamonkey, but from major developers of FF.
youre mad that firefox gets funded by google and all they have to do is change one setting thats easily changeable by the user on install?
if you are that mad… then donate to mozilla.
no. but very echochamberlike reaction.
which button removes the managing board?
same as any other corporation.
be a publicly traded company and buy shares
or be on the board of directors.
it is one example. sure one could switch. so why not random search engine on install? because money. the managing board seems to eat money. i am still missing weave server. i still miss plugins from before they made these drastic changes back then… all the freaking time they make the wromg decisions. and their supporters are like a militia…just mentioning what one thinks might be the problem with FF as a horde of ppl like you just reflex talking the same shit that did not get more people to like ff or moz. thunderbird will die the same way. why on earth did they waste resources to have a calender and drive more devs away? always the wrong decisions. always.
Cold plain metrics can easily hide social complexity.
Assume 10 investigative journalists use modded privacy-friendly Firefox for year long investigation. Then their report is read by 10 million average news reader on stock browsers like Chrome. Network logics tell us that Firefox browser has asymmetrical value in the ecosystem than plain usage metrics can ever reveal.
The obsession with numbers (the more the better) is a major blinding effect in societies driven by hierarchical cultures.
The obsession with numbers (the more the better) is a major blinding effect in societies driven by hierarchical cultures.
So true!
users can modify their useragent string, and sometimes they have to because some webdevs are morons.
some browsers actually default to using chrome instead of its own.
using a browser-reported useragent string to count marketshare itself is flawed from the start, using a very narrow and limited scope of web sites to measure it–even more so.
if i counted my own clients: home, soho and small business end users… it’s about even between chrome and firefox on windows (chrome users doing so on their own, as we highly recommend firefox, and vivaldi over chrome for a chromium-based solution) with edge trailing far behind; and about 3 to 1 android (chrome) over safari on mobile with (so far, but soon to change) very few mobile firefox users.
Government websites are really bad about needing to fake the user agent string because of low bidder contracted work that often starts and ends with Internet Explorer/Edge and is rarely updated due to how government budgeting works.
I worked at a small MSP 2020-2021. Some of our customers needed access to government sites for reporting. The fact that some of these pages still had the “Best Viewed in Internet Explorer” badge or language was sad and frightening. Luckily there’s browser compatibility mode in Edge (which as you mentioned is probably just changing the user agent string), but still. My dad works in govt IT and even he’s encountered internal sites that require ActiveX. He has to sometimes figure out workarounds.
I did have one medical client that used some web charting/reporting platform. And it required a specific, long outdated version of Firefox. We had to intentionally turn off updates in Firefox so they could access it. Anything newer than that version and the site wouldn’t load. It was very strange.
Before the new year, I donated 25€ for Firefox, my long-time companion to #degoogle Grapheneos and Linux. Although Google is introducing DRM, I don’t think anything is so important in this life that I have to use Chrome or IE, I will adapt to the situation and instead of worrying about DRM (of course, for the public Internet, this seems like a total violation of users’ rights, for safety 🤣🤣🤣, really?) I will try to be more social, but not in the sense of social networks, but hanging out with friends or listening to music or running or a good book… I definitely don’t want this big corporation near me, which we are more and more they control… (google,ms,apple,amazon…) Firefox probably missed by not insisting on FirefoxOS (phones), but it has a great agenda - privacy and simplicity. I look forward to many years of using FF!!
Is this copy pasta
The problem is, you can’t donate to firefox. Only to the mozilla foundation which spends it on other stuff.
Yes, to mozzila foundation. Thanx
theres a difference between the mozilla foundation - the non profit - and the mozilla corporation - the for profit.
Yes exactly, that’s what I mean. Firefox is from the for-profit and you can’t donate to that. I think they did that because of the google deal but it also means they locked themselves out of a sustainable donation model.
The non-profit is just running some BS side-projects now.
firefox foundation is literally what you donate to when you donate to firefox.
No, it’s the Mozilla foundation: https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/ . Not the firefox foundation.
They do a lot of stuff but Firefox is not part of that, that’s under the corporation: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-we-do/
liter
Users that use Firefox are unlikely to show up in data used for these kinda articles I’d think
Use any metric you want. StatCounter, Wikipedia… They all show Firefox at around 5% globally and still dropping. It’s a very real alarm signal and there’s no time to waste in denial.
Peak Firefox was back in 2010/2011, almost 14 years ago, it has been steadily dropping market share ever since. This is not a new problem by any stretch.
