Technology Firefox on the brink?

[Gandalf_The_Grey]

Content source

https://www.brycewray.com/posts/2023/11/firefox-brink/

The Big Three may effectively be down to a Big Two, and right quick.

A somewhat obscure guideline for developers of U.S. government websites may be about to accelerate the long, sad decline of Mozilla’s Firefox browser. There already are plenty of large entities, both public and private, whose websites lack proper support for Firefox; and that will get only worse in the near future, because the ’fox’s auburn paws are perilously close to the lip of the proverbial slippery slope.

The U.S. Web Design System (USWDS) provides a comprehensive set of standards which guide those who build the U.S. government’s many websites. Its documentation for developers borrows a “2% rule” from its British counterpart:

. . . we officially support any browser above 2% usage as observed by analytics.usa.gov.
At this writing, that analytics page shows the following browser traffic for the previous ninety days:

Browser	Share
Chrome	49%
Safari	34.8%
Edge	8.4%
Firefox	2.2%
Safari (in-app)	1.9%
Samsung Internet	1.6%
Android Webview	1%
Other	1%

“So what?” you may wonder. “That’s just for web developers in the U.S. government. It doesn’t affect any other web devs.”

Actually, it very well could. Here’s how I envision the dominoes falling:

1. Once Firefox slips below the 2% threshold in the government’s visitor analytics, USWDS tells government web devs they don’t have to support Firefox anymore.
2. When that word gets out, it spreads quickly to not only the front-end dev community but also the corporate IT departments for whom some web devs work. Many corporations do a lot of business with the government and, thus, whatever the government does from an IT standpoint is going to influence what corporations do.
3. Corporations see this change as an opportunity to lower dev costs and delivery times, in that it provides an excuse to remove some testing (and, in rare cases, specific coding) from their development workflow.2

. . . and just like that, in less time than you might think, Firefox — the free/open-source browser that was supposed to save the world from the jackboots of Internet Explorer (which had killed Firefox’s ancestor, Netscape Navigator) — is reduced to permanent status as a shrinking part of the fractured miscellany that litters the bottom of browser market-share charts.

I surely hope I’m wrong about this, but I fear I’m not.

Firefox on the brink? | BryceWray.com

The Big Three may effectively be down to a Big Two, and right quick.

www.brycewray.com

 

[silversurfer]

For me, this article is pure speculation and nothing really new because Firefox has a very low market-share since years when Edge got the 3rd place...
Why the end of Firefox should be coming sooner as for other browsers with even lower market-share like Opera, Brave, Vivaldi. Well, time will tell

 

[harlan4096]

That would be a very bad news... I don't see anything good that all browsers are based on Chrome in the end, there is wealth in diversity.

 

[SeriousHoax]

It's sad to see Firefox's number decreasing every year and I think it will continue to do so. Due to MV3 the number would probably increase a bit but not enough. I also completely agree with what @silversurfer & @harlan4096 said above.
This is the place to see Firefox's actual users by numbers:

Firefox Public Data Report

data.firefox.com

 

[Arequire]

It's sad to see Firefox's number decreasing every year and I think it will continue to do so. Due to MV3 the number would probably increase a bit but not enough. I also completely agree with what @silversurfer & @harlan4096 said above.
This is the place to see Firefox's actual users by numbers:

Firefox Public Data Report

data.firefox.com

What I'm interested in is why it's usage continues to decline. From what you see online, Firefox users are extremely fervent in their support for the browser, and frequently hostile towards Chromium due to it being administered by Google. So it begs the question: Why are millions of users abandoning Firefox each year and what browser(s) are they using instead?

 

[harlan4096]

During years (and still happening) Google Chrome has being installed automatically embedded as a mere PUP/PUA/Adware in much software and tools installers...

 

[brambedkar59]

Due to MV3 the number would probably increase a bit but not enough.

Probably not that much, we tech nerds overestimate our effect on global trends. Most of the users don't even know what the hell is MV3.

What I'm interested in is why it's usage continues to decline. From what you see online, Firefox users are extremely fervent in their support for the browser, and frequently hostile towards Chromium due to it being administered by Google.

r/Firefox sometimes feels like a cult to me. Anything chromium related gets hate all over.

 

[ZeroStrawberries]

What I'm interested in is why it's usage continues to decline. From what you see online, Firefox users are extremely fervent in their support for the browser, and frequently hostile towards Chromium due to it being administered by Google. So it begs the question: Why are millions of users abandoning Firefox each year and what browser(s) are they using instead?

Developers prioritize Chrome for testing, so sites are usually better on Chrome/Chromium than Firefox. Also both Microsoft and Google are advertising their browsers quite a bit. I would imagine that the biggest factor is that Android comes with Chrome and that it's easier and more convenient to use Chrome on their computer than switch on their phones or use different ones on their devices. People simply go with what they're used to, and more people are used with Chrome, I guess.

 

[cofer123]

Why the end of Firefox should be coming sooner as for other browsers with even lower market-share like Opera, Brave, Vivaldi.

Because these other browsers with lower market share all run on chromium. As such, if a site has been tested on Chrome, it will work on those browsers as well.

What I'm interested in is why it's usage continues to decline.

Years of Mozilla alienating users with hostile decisions that drove people away. Firefox initially spread during a time where IE6 was the alternative, and that was reason enough to give it a try. Word of mouth from tech enthusiasts also promoted Firefox everywhere. Then came Chrome and it was years ahead of Firefox in terms of speed and security. Mozilla took years to finally move Firefox into multiprocessing and stronger security models (which are still to this day not 100%), and Google took that widow to push Chrome everywhere. Firefox on Android is still terribly slow and memory hungry when compared to any chromium browser, and it offers little against alternative browsers like Brave or Vivaldi.

Then Mozilla, instead of playing on the strengths of Firefox, decided to replicate features Chrome had and to make it as similar as possible to Chrome to make it easier for users move from Chrome to Firefox (this is their words, not mine, from years of reading devs on bugzilla justifying their bad decisions). If I wanted Chrome, I would be on Chrome, not Chromefox.

Firefox's demise is 100% on Mozilla. I still use it, not because I like it, but because I find the alternatives worse. The best thing that could happen to Firefox is for Mozilla to cease to exist.

 

[Arequire]

Developers prioritize Chrome for testing, so sites are usually better on Chrome/Chromium than Firefox.

Sites working better on Chromium could absolutely be a factor, but ultimately it's speculative. What I'd love to see is actual data from a poll or survey about the exact reasons why former Firefox users stopped using the browser.

@cofer123 I've heard the same thing from other Firefox users too, that at some point they started emulating Chrome over doing their own thing. Another thing I hear brought up semi-regularly is Mozilla's removal of XUL extensions, which many people still seem bitter about.

@brambedkar59 It does to me too. I get that they like and want to promote Firefox, and I get that they want to see Firefox's market share increase, but the level of fanaticism does seem pretty ridiculous at times

I should mention that I too use Firefox, just not as my primary browser. It's overall slower than Chrome, and I don't want to have to deal with any potential site incompatabilities in my day-to-day.

 

[HarborFront]

No FF means no LibreWolf as well.............

 

[nicolaasjan]

The measurements from Cloudflare Radar, which doesn't use client side tracking, are quite different:

 

[ErzCrz]

With Bing outages randomly today at my end, really considering the FF switch again if I use 3rd party AV.

 

[wat0114]

Anything chromium related gets hate all over.

Because it's affiliated with Google I guess.

 

[Numeriku]

Govt apps in my country singapore can only use chrome, if i use any other browser as default, will break many things or unsupported.