This is a fairly obvious—but important—question. From Wired…
AT THE END of 2008, Firefox was flying high. Twenty percent of the 1.5 billion people online were using Mozilla’s browser to navigate the web. In Indonesia, Macedonia, and Slovenia, more than half of everyone going online was using Firefox. “Our market share in the regions above has been growing like crazy,” Ken Kovash, Mozilla’s president at the time, wrote in a blog post. Almost 15 years later, things aren’t so rosy.
Across all devices, the browser has slid to less than 4 percent of the market—on mobile it’s a measly half a percent. “Looking back five years and looking at our market share and our own numbers that we publish, there’s no denying the decline,” says Selena Deckelmann, senior vice president of Firefox. Mozilla’s own statistics show a drop of around 30 million monthly active users from the start of 2019 to the start of 2022. “In the last couple years, what we’ve seen is actually a pretty substantial flattening,” Deckelmann adds.
In the two decades since Firefox launched from the shadows of Netscape, it has been key to shaping the web’s privacy and security, with staff pushing for more openness online and better standards. But its market share decline was accompanied by two rounds of layoffs at Mozilla during 2020. Next year, its lucrative search deal with Google—responsible for the vast majority of its revenue—is set to expire. A spate of privacy-focused browsers now compete on its turf, while new-feature misfires have threatened to alienate its base. All that has left industry analysts and former employees concerned about Firefox’s future.
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<p><strong>"But this is just down to lazy web developers, unfortunately."</strong></p><p><br></p><p>Well, yes and no. If Firefox’s usage-share continues to decline (currently 9.1% on desktop; 0.5% on smartphones; less-than 0.5% on tablets), then does it make financial-sense to companies to put in the extra-effort to support it? It’s similar to a story late last-year when various indie developers shared their experiences of releasing their games on Linux: users on that platform generated around 1% or less of sales, but around 30-40% of all support tickets. So why bother?</p><p><br></p><p><strong>"Unfortunately, I worked for an advertising agency that made corporate presence websites and the sites had to be pixel-perfect in all browsers, which was a real pain"</strong></p><p><br></p><p>Well done you at-least then for actually going to the effort of making the site work and not just taking the easy route-out of building the site in <em>Shockwave Flash Player</em>, as did many at the time.</p>
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<p><strong>"[…] the only path to long term survival is adopting Chromium."</strong></p><p><br></p><p>On the <em>iOS</em> and <em>iPadOS</em> platforms, <em>Firefox</em> already uses Apple’s <em>WebKit </em>rendering-engine, as <em>Apple </em>do not allow any app on their platform to use anything-else. And yet <em>Firefox</em>’s usage-share is less than 0.5%. So in this example, using a different rendering-engine hasn’t helped market-share whatsoever.</p>
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<p>I wouldn’t be surprised if they did go-under at some point — I can’t say I know anyone who uses the <em>Android</em> or <em>iOS</em> versions.</p><p><br></p><p>It’s a pity, as using it in recent-months I have found it faster than <em>Edge</em>, but it still lacks some features that <em>Edge</em> offers that I make-use of. (1) <em>Edge</em> offers a useful "Paste as plain text" in the right-click menu; <em>Firefox</em> always pastes in rich format, so I have to dump into <em>Notepad</em> first; (2) <em>Edge</em> allows me to choose domains I want to keep cookies from, and delete all others when I exit the browser; <em>Firefox</em> sort-of offers this feature, but only on a specific-URL basis, not by specifying a TLD, making it more-irritating to use; (3) <em>Firefox</em> always shows a dialog-box for downloading certain file-types, whereas <em>Edge</em> just sends them to the <em>Downloads</em> toolbar icon without making you click something else first; (4) the <em>Sleeping Tabs</em> feature in <em>Edge </em>is pretty-good at reducing CPU for idle tabs.</p><p><br></p><p>But where <em>Firefox</em> excells is the fact you <em>actually still can </em>customise parts of the interface (<em>Edge </em>is limited to just choosing which icons you want to the left and right of the <em>Address Bar</em>, but you can’t reorder them); the <em>Print</em> UI is better and works more-consistently, whereas <em>Edge</em> sometimes doesn’t offer all options on all sites, and if you sign into <em>Firefox</em>, it won’t try and then add that account to <em>Windows</em>, as will <em>Edge</em>.</p><p><br></p><p>Neither browser though offers a simple "Load this URL when I open a new tab", though, sadly. <em>Edge</em> forces you to the "New Tab Page", with the <em>Bing </em>search; and <em>Firefox </em>offers "Firefox Home" or "Blank page", but the latter doesn’t show the <em>Boomarks Toolbar</em>, and still hasn’t been fixed. I’m sure years back, browsers used to let you choose either a custom URL for a new tab, or to open your first homepage… not sure why they’ve all dropped it?</p>
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<p>(If anyone wants to support <em>Mozilla </em>financially, I’ve read subscribing to their <em>Mozilla VPN</em> is apparently the best way to do so, as the money goes directly to them) </p>