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The fall of Firefox: Mozilla's once-popular web browser slides into irrelevance (www.zdnet.com)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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?

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

which goes a long way to scaling back on the reliance of google donations.

$3 million is about 0.67% of the money they get from Google and that money isn't even going into Firefox development.