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 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.?
Are you just here to spark a browser war? Claims like “firefox is dead” are guaranteed to get a shit ton of comments stating the exact opposite, backed up with annecdotal evidence.
I feel obliged to do the same though. So let me tell you that I’ve recently switched back to firefox after years of chrome and I haven’t regretted it one single moment.
Me? Not at all. I actually posted this out of concern because, as I’ve said elsewhere, I’m a Firefox user, and my layman’s impression was that its reputation has been improving over the past couple years. I assumed its user base was doing the same as people grew increasingly concerned with Google’s intentions.
Apparently ZDnet has some reputational issues itself I was unaware of.
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
The day Firefox gets native mouse gestures is the day I swap. Until then will continue to be a very happy Vivaldi user.
The plug-in gesturify on Firefox does what Vivaldi does but better on honestly. I Really like Vivaldi as my back up browser but it’s nice but being stuck using chromium on Firefox.
Nope. Doesn’t allow gestures on internal pages. Eg new tabs, menu, settings, etc… It doesn’t work in the entire browser
That’s Firefox’s fault not the plugins. They don’t allow any plugin to run in internal pages.
Yup, I know. So until Firefox has native lvl gestures, I won’t switch :)
What a ridiculous title, article and post.
I use Firefox as my daily driver, and have for years, but there’s no way Firefox is anything but doomed with Mozilla at the helm.
The mismanagement of money and ludicrous compensation for those at the top and chasing endless side ventures that all fail doesn’t bode well for them.
I get it, there’s anger at the article, but anyone who actually thinks Firefox has a chance at returning anywhere close to their old glory is holding onto groundless optimism.
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.
You mean like government (and business) employees that are forced to use some flavor of
Internet ExplorerChromium?Employees? I thought OP was talking about visitors and in that case a government site is as neutral as it gets.
And a lot of those visitors are people that are forced to use chromium - such as employees that use those governmental services as a part of work. As neutral as it gets, it doesn’t mean it is actually neutral.
For example, some government websites only work with chromium
Thanks, I understand what you mean now.
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.
Is Firefox considered bad? It works well for me and when I use Chrome or edge It feels full of junk features
It’s behind in many ways. Firefox is perfectly functional, but lacks the finish and capacity to implement modern standards as fast as the competition can.
I’d say “the competition has the advantage of being backed by billion dollar companies”, but Mozilla is funded mostly by Google paying for being the default search engine as well. Which only makes it weider that Mozilla is actively moving away from investing Firefox; they’re trying to be an “ethical AI” company now.
Firefox has been nice to work with on my end. And fast. Even the dev tools are way better than they were a decade ago. Almost all the important extensions work on it.
I don’t really understand how its market share is so low now.
I don’t think so. The article claims Firefox lost some of its lead developers to Google when it started developing Chrome and then took a long time to regain its footing around 2017. That sounds about right to my recollection. I had admittedly switched to Chrome myself for a while (I’m not terribly tech-savvy, maybe a little more than average) but switched back to Firefox last year. I am still pretty deeply embedded in the Google ecosystem though in other ways.
There sure has been a lot of propaganda being posted to Beehaw lately.
Mitchell Baker is being paid $7m a year to drive it into the ground.
Quoting someone from Reddit: Mozilla lost my respect years ago. They’re just buzzwords and a scam, at this point.
Firefox needs a hard fork. It’s obvious that Mozilla is just using it as their golden egg, because they know Google needs to have a “competitor” in order not to end up being sued or broken up because they have a browser monopoly.
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!
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?
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.
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.