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

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?

01011 ,

Raises eyebrows at article viewed via Firefox

yournamehere ,

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.

rottingleaf ,

What I don't get is why hasn't there been a split yet. Not like Seamonkey, but from major developers of FF.

cupcakezealot ,
@cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

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.

yournamehere ,

no. but very echochamberlike reaction.

which button removes the managing board?

cupcakezealot ,
@cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

same as any other corporation.

be a publicly traded company and buy shares

or be on the board of directors.

yournamehere ,

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.

pkulak ,

And then the person saying that FF blows because Google is the default browser uses… a Chromium wrapper.

markkdark ,

Before the new year, I donated 25€ for Firefox, my long-time companion to 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!!

rab ,

Is this copy pasta

Zworf ,

The problem is, you can't donate to firefox. Only to the mozilla foundation which spends it on other stuff.

cupcakezealot ,
@cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

theres a difference between the mozilla foundation - the non profit - and the mozilla corporation - the for profit.

Zworf ,

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.

cupcakezealot ,
@cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

firefox foundation is literally what you donate to when you donate to firefox.

Zworf ,

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

markkdark ,

Yes, to mozzila foundation. Thanx

TexMexBazooka ,

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

lemmyvore ,

Use any metric you want. StatCounter, Wikipedia... They all show Firefox at around 5% globally and still dropping. It's a very real alarm signal and there's no time to waste in denial.

lloram239 ,

Peak Firefox was back in 2010/2011, almost 14 years ago, it has been steadily dropping market share ever since. This is not a new problem by any stretch.

millie ,

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

cupcakezealot ,
@cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

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: 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

lloram239 ,

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.

MoonRaven ,
@MoonRaven@feddit.nl avatar

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

kzhe ,

There’s an extension which allows PWAs.

Firipu ,
@Firipu@startrek.website avatar

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

Sheltr ,

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.

Firipu ,
@Firipu@startrek.website avatar

Nope. Doesn’t allow gestures on internal pages. Eg new tabs, menu, settings, etc… It doesn’t work in the entire browser

FrostyPolicy ,
@FrostyPolicy@suppo.fi avatar

That's Firefox's fault not the plugins. They don't allow any plugin to run in internal pages.

Firipu ,
@Firipu@startrek.website avatar

Yup, I know. So until Firefox has native lvl gestures, I won't switch :)

pipows ,
@pipows@lemmy.today avatar

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

JokeDeity ,

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

Zworf ,

Same here, it's only getting better. Especially lately with mobile firefox finally getting up to scratch. The desktop browser has alwaysbeen great.

bartolomeo ,

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

bbbhltz ,
@bbbhltz@beehaw.org avatar

ah zdnet, a waste of CO2 if there ever was

legocorp ,

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 :)

limerod ,

What add-ons in particular made you make the change?

tryptaminev ,
@tryptaminev@feddit.de avatar

Not OP but the standard two ones: uBlock origin and NoScript. Added bonus is an addon to continue video view with screen off.

People constantly crying over the ads in their youtube app. Well i just watch in Firefox and if i want to watch an audiobook video to fall asleep to, i don't even have to drain my battery.

bitwolf ,

uBlock, Clean URLs, and “I still don’t care about cookies”

Are the must haves for me.

quirzle ,
@quirzle@kbin.social avatar

Is the last one still useful if you enable the cookies filter under annoyances in uBlock?

bitwolf ,

I didn't know about that actually. I'll try it out and remove cookies extension. Thanks!

Edit:
Working well so far!

quirzle ,
@quirzle@kbin.social avatar

Yeah, I've got a bunch of the annoyances filters active and don't know if I could browse most websites without them at this point.

legocorp ,

Bypass paywalls clean. It's great for reading news articles under a paywall.

CaptKoala ,

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

ExLisper ,

Use chrome for government sites and Firefox for everything else.

CaptKoala ,

That is exactly my policy, such policies shouldn't need to exist though.

viking ,
@viking@infosec.pub avatar

May I ask which country you’re from? That sounds dystopian.

John ,

Few years ago(maybe 10) it was still recommended or even necessary to use IE for a lot of goverment Internet Services here in Germany. The online Zoll handling for example. I think a lot of goverments are not really into accesibility optimization.

azerial ,

Ironic that ZD-Net is speaking of relevancy. Ha

viking , (edited )
@viking@infosec.pub avatar

Yeah, they are so 2010. I sometimes end up there when trying to dig up some obscure driver for outdated tech, but that's really it.

azerial ,

I remember watching zdtv as a kid in jr high? Lol these days, after seeing that article, i think i muttered “they’re still around?”

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