Technology

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.

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.

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 Explorer~~ Chromium?

Is Firefox considered bad? It works well for me and when I use Chrome or edge It feels full of junk features

People are idiots. I've used Firefox for nearly 20 years and have zero plans to change.

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?

ah zdnet, a waste of CO2 if there ever was

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.

"slides into irrelevance" - zdnet

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

There sure has been a lot of propaganda being posted to Beehaw lately.

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 :)

Ironic that ZD-Net is speaking of relevancy. Ha

gives us a running count of the last 90 days of US government website visits. That doesn't tell us much about global web browser use, but it's the best information we have about American web browser users today.

Lmao article itself saying it's a steaming pile of chrome

Users that use Firefox are unlikely to show up in data used for these kinda articles I’d think

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.

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.

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.

Mitchell Baker is being paid $7m a year to drive it into the ground.