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?
The day Firefox shutters its doors is the day the internet truly dies. Almost every “alternative” browser is chromium under the hood. Google’s next big plan is basically constructing a walled garden around the internet (at least the HTTP part) via complex DRM. Eventually, if you want to access an actual web page, it’ll have to be via a Chromium browser. Hell, even today a shitload of websites I visit on FF just don’t fucking render correctly and I’ll have to fire up a chromium instance just to access them. That’s only going to get worse with time.
Hell, even today a shitload of websites I visit on FF just don’t fucking render correctly and I’ll have to fire up a chromium instance just to access them.
Can you link to an example? I remember this from years ago, but haven’t encountered it for a long time.
curl -k IP_Address
Open in notepad.
Read.
“Oh, an empty HTML tag and 2Mb of JavaScript!”
Firefox is far from irrelevant. Pure stupid click bait. Market share of courses is a sad thing and may lead to irrelevance when most web sites stop supporting. In the late days of Netscape and the early days of Firefox that was the case… lack of website support. I am just starting to see that again.
Manifest V3 will force some people to go back to Firefox.
I wish so too, but I think you’re overestimating people.
Agree. I know so many folks that just deal with ads and think its just how the internet works
firefox will stay relevant, even if only because alphabet really really wants to avoid antitrust lawsuits.
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.
People are idiots. I’ve used Firefox for nearly 20 years and have zero plans to change.
Same here, it’s only getting better. Especially lately with mobile firefox finally getting up to scratch. The desktop browser has alwaysbeen great.
Market share doesn’t equal irrelevance as others have said. I use Librewolf and without Firefox it wouldn’t exist. It likely wouldn’t exist at the quality it is without Mozilla taking Google Cash either. But it’s super important to have an alternative even if most people don’t use it. It DOES provide a limited check and balance against google doing whatever they want with the web because if the right people make the right noise then people will move over to something that’s easy, convenient, and free of whatever pain in the butt google puts in chrome that sends people over the edge. See Linux desktop and Valve for an example of how a software with very few users comparatively can force a larger company to play ball. Remember in Windows 8 when MS basically banned 3rd party software stores on the OS… or tried? And Valve made the “Steam Machine” and SteamOS? Everyone says the steam machines failed but they 100% did everything Valve wanted them to do. It was enough to have MS go back on their walled garden and allow Steam to keep operating as it had been. And now we have the steam deck on top of it.
So, it’s ok if Firefox has a small market share as long as it remains a worthy competitor.
For an article that tries to push a groupthink narrative to work, the people using the “discouraged” product need to believe the “encouraged” one has feature parity with zero downsides.
I guarantee that no one is accidentally using Firefox because they’re unaware of the alternatives.
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.?
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That came as a surprise to me too. 2.5% is just so little.
It’s not that low everywhere. In Germany, it’s 9.79%, for example.
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the problem with firefox is that chrome’s marketing is just too prevalent among the general population; it’s built into their gmail, their phone, everything that they use.
as a flutter dev it’s especially frustrating since debugging on the web requires chrome (please help boost this issue in the issue queue: https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/55324)
on the other hand they also reached their goal of over $3m grassroots donations in 2023, which goes a long way to scaling back on the reliance of google donations.
you also have to remember that web statistics are largely done by third party sources - like google analytics - or through telemetry. in the first case, many firefox users or those with adblockers will disable that. in the second case, this is exactly why i implore people to not disable telemetry in firefox since it’s necessary for bug testing and usability studies but also for determining reach of software.
personally i prefer firefox but still use a mix of google products, including maps, youtube premium/music, and drive (which i pay for). i also have a monthly donation to mozilla and thunderbird. it’s not much but every little bit helps - even $5
“slides into irrelevance” - zdnet
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.
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.
There sure has been a lot of propaganda being posted to Beehaw lately.
Ironic that ZD-Net is speaking of relevancy. Ha
Yeah, they are so 2010. I sometimes end up there when trying to dig up some obscure driver for outdated tech, but that’s really it.
I remember watching zdtv as a kid in jr high? Lol these days, after seeing that article, i think i muttered “they’re still around?”
Users that use Firefox are unlikely to show up in data used for these kinda articles I’d think
