The fall of Firefox: Mozilla's once-popular web browser slides into irrelevance

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.

ah zdnet, a waste of CO2 if there ever was

From ZDNet. How much did they get paid to post this article?

"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.

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 :)

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

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

Ironic that ZD-Net is speaking of relevancy. Ha

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.

Are you just here to spark a browser war? Claims like "firefox is dead" are guaranteed to get a shit ton of comments stating the exact opposite, backed up with annecdotal evidence.

I feel obliged to do the same though. So let me tell you that I've recently switched back to firefox after years of chrome and I haven't regretted it one single moment.

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.

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.

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

My government sites don't work with Firefox (no add-ons), have to use chrome, they recommend and only support chrome.

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.

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!!

I guess Firefox market share will be closely related to Linux desktop market share

Firefox has been irrelevant for about a decade now. Most webdevs don't even test for firefox anymore. Major websides actively ignore it and most users evidently either don't know and/or use it.

Yes, firefox is relevant as an alternative to Chromium-based browsers, but that's about it. Mozilla has done a stellar job at keeping it irrelevant to keep bagging that sweet google money.

Honestly, I hope firefox and mozilla die, to be reborn again by another entity, but Mitchell Baker probably will do their best to keep getting that sweet, sweet, Google money.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Only thing I miss in Firefox is PWA, but I still mainly use it.

The day Firefox gets native mouse gestures is the day I swap. Until then will continue to be a very happy Vivaldi user.

What a ridiculous title, article and post.

I only use FF in Linux, I tried on Android but it's somewhat bad 😔

I use Firefox on Linux, Windows (at work), and Android, and I like it.

I made an effort to only use Firefox because browser diversity is important for the web. It can be rough sometimes when things like.chromecast only work.via unstable extensions but I persist even on mobile.

I suspect the Mozilla corporate structure and leadership needs to be reviewed. They don't seem to know where they are going and get sidetracked.

Things like lack of good cross platform support for passkeys (fido2/ctap stuff) is going to hurt them even more as people won't be able to use Firefox to login to many sites on Linux where there is currently no blessed platform libraries for this. Unfortunately stuff like that is going to drag me back to Chrome for some stuff which handles this fine on Linux.

I really want to see Firefox remain relevant. But Mozilla doesn't seem to allow it. Project managers seem to be running the show anymore, with ideas trying to cater to everyday audiences that personally don't stick. They're only real "idea" as of recent has been to create limited time themes, and a couple of AI features that could have been expansion points for add-ons to do the same. Sure, Firefox for Android got add-ons recently. But those were already there for a while in a limited form. They're just expanding onto it now.

Anymore, Mozilla seems to be more concerned with trying to tackle problems that are not within their domain, and building things revolving around AI. In fact, that seems to be their primary plans for 2024. Presumably because that's what's hot and trending. I'm almost willing to believe that Google not only pays them for the default browser, in addition, they pay them to secretly sit and muck around on other things.

I can't even really say that Firefox has a community outside of FOSS advocates who constantly circlejerk on how much you should use it because omg monopoly!!!1!!1! Despite the fact that chromium itself is open source too. It just suddenly becomes distrusted because It comes from a large corporation

Google isn't paying anyone to not develop a browser, and they would still be moving at breakneck speeds even if they weren't developing chromium in the open (which would leave the web absolutely even more worse than it already is). And while difficult, if it proves truly a problem (since it technically hasn't happened yet), there can always be a fork keeping MV2 in. And based on the amount of attention the deprecation of MV2 has, it might even have a chance to keep a little bit of traction (Mozilla still plans to deprecate MV2 by the way. They're just doing it differently with compatibility in mind).

As an open source project, they're only now moving to git, their code base is long and complex. And has apparently been difficult to modify in the way that people often want it.

I'm hoping that possibly something like Floorp might one day be able to pick up the torch since Mozilla doesn't really seem interested in carrying it that much anymore, but only time would tell for that.