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?
There sure has been a lot of propaganda being posted to Beehaw lately.
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.
This is a very good example of the skewing I imagined. If you’re unable or prohibited from using Firefox on work devices (as many environments restrict), all that workday traffic will be coming from “approved” browsers.
“slides into irrelevance” - zdnet
Was ZDNet once a good source for news?
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.
I would say a good half of posts on Lemmy are too click-baity for me to actually look at. Every title clearly has picked a side and it’s rare to see something even attempt to be impartial
I can’t disagree with you. I feel like that’s the way of the world anymore regardless of platform.
Agreed, unfortunately you’re right
There are a few good sites that document slant and coverage.
https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news
https://ground.news/landingV4/middleground
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/
I hope this helps.
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.
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
Mitchell Baker is being paid $7m a year to drive it into the ground.
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.
Quoting someone from Reddit: Mozilla lost my respect years ago. They’re just buzzwords and a scam, at this point.
Yeah, that is indefensible.
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.
Government websites are really bad about needing to fake the user agent string because of low bidder contracted work that often starts and ends with Internet Explorer/Edge and is rarely updated due to how government budgeting works.
I worked at a small MSP 2020-2021. Some of our customers needed access to government sites for reporting. The fact that some of these pages still had the “Best Viewed in Internet Explorer” badge or language was sad and frightening. Luckily there’s browser compatibility mode in Edge (which as you mentioned is probably just changing the user agent string), but still. My dad works in govt IT and even he’s encountered internal sites that require ActiveX. He has to sometimes figure out workarounds.
I did have one medical client that used some web charting/reporting platform. And it required a specific, long outdated version of Firefox. We had to intentionally turn off updates in Firefox so they could access it. Anything newer than that version and the site wouldn’t load. It was very strange.
Using a Chrome user agent in FF can result in broken video / audio playback on various sites.
i had to fudge the useragent to chrome yesterday to get 1080p out of azn.
users can modify their useragent string, and sometimes they have to because some webdevs are morons.
The minority of users do this or even know about UA strings.
some browsers actually default to using chrome instead of its own.
Sure, but Firefox isn’t one of them
Sure, but Firefox isn’t one of them
but those that do inflate google’s stats.
Doesn’t seem too likely that’d be more than a few percentage points. Which non-Chromium browsers even do this?
I use Firefox on Linux, Windows (at work), and Android, and I like it.
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 :)
I guess Firefox market share will be closely related to Linux desktop market share
Raises eyebrows at article viewed via Firefox
I don’t think the zdnet article adds much but it does link to https://news.itsfoss.com/firefox-continuous-decline/ which gets it about right. If anything has changed since it was written, evidence of it has not yet reached me.
While it doesn’t make much of a difference, this is part of why I recommend most people to keep market research telemetry on.
This. People are basically in denial over how poorly Mozilla is handling Firefox. They are genuinely going to drive their product to zero marketshare pretty soon.
Boy that paints a grim picture.
“You’re just a tiny minority, most people like the change”
They did the same shit with their redesign with their idiotic floating tabs. They look ugly and they even take up way more space, while displaying less information, for literally no reason. They argued the need this change for future FF features, which yet, several years later, have yet to appear. Here’s a quote from “Paul”, one of their moderators - almost 3 years ago:
Hi,
We bring a modernized and differentiated look to tabs since Firefox 89 in order to create a signature Firefox look and experience. This major redesign will help us enable more use cases and features in the future.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1338169
I love Firefox and will continue to use it, but its decline is a mixture of Google’s aggressive embrace, extend, and extinguish approach and straight up continued mismanagement of the Mozilla Corporation.
Yikes! That paints a pretty scary picture 😬
Indeed, that we tend to write such scary-looking rants and post them all over the Internet is one reason it was perhaps a bad idea for Mozilla to alienate their most geeky users in so many little ways over the years.
Firefox itself is still the least scary of the available full-featured web browsers, of course.
Our telemetry shows 80% of users never install any add-ons” i.e. the telemetry that any tech savvy person immediately turns off because they don’t want their browser spying on them and about which we have also complained numerous times.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
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Side note - I really like how you crossed out your spelling error instead of just fixing it - I always proof-read my comments after I post them (because I always forget to do it), and this might actually, in s tiny way, be useful to someone who’s still learning the language, or just didn’t know a particular working is wrong. I’m going to try and start doing this as well, thanks 😊👍
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As I understand it, the message here is that any decently savvy user of Firefox turns off telemetry, so mozilla doesn’t know of them using extensions. hence why they say 80% don’t use them, people who do use them don’t give them their usage data.
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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!!
The problem is, you can’t donate to firefox. Only to the mozilla foundation which spends it on other stuff.
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
Yes, to mozzila foundation. Thanx
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but when you tell the moz fanboys why moz sucks you’ll find yourself in a meta/maga like echochamber. again and again moz made absolute shit decisions, the managing board is eating money like mad and google is STILL your default search engine. pathetic.
What I don’t get is why hasn’t there been a split yet. Not like Seamonkey, but from major developers of FF.
And then the person saying that FF blows because Google is the default browser uses… a Chromium wrapper.
youre mad that firefox gets funded by google and all they have to do is change one setting thats easily changeable by the user on install?
if you are that mad… then donate to mozilla.
it is one example. sure one could switch. so why not random search engine on install? because money. the managing board seems to eat money. i am still missing weave server. i still miss plugins from before they made these drastic changes back then… all the freaking time they make the wromg decisions. and their supporters are like a militia…just mentioning what one thinks might be the problem with FF as a horde of ppl like you just reflex talking the same shit that did not get more people to like ff or moz. thunderbird will die the same way. why on earth did they waste resources to have a calender and drive more devs away? always the wrong decisions. always.
no. but very echochamberlike reaction.
which button removes the managing board?
same as any other corporation.
be a publicly traded company and buy shares
or be on the board of directors.
