Wired: Is Firefox Okay?

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.

Conversation 16 comments

  • miamimauler

    16 February, 2022 - 3:27 pm

    <p>FF is absolutely in trouble and unfortunately the only path to long term survival is adopting Chromium. Even MS had to face that unpalatable fact with the failure of original Edge.</p>

    • lvthunder

      Premium Member
      16 February, 2022 - 4:18 pm

      <p>Oh please. They aren’t in trouble because of a rendering engine. They are in trouble because of bad business decisions or the fact that you can’t give a product away for free with no ads. The only way they make money is with their Google agreement.</p>

      • miamimauler

        16 February, 2022 - 4:46 pm

        <p>@Ivthunder</p><p><br></p><p>I agree with your points about Mozilla’s business model but I’ve read many times on Firefox fan sites how more and more websites will only function correctly with Chromium.</p><p><br></p><p>I can’t personally confirm that as I ceased using FF a couple of years ago but I’ve read it too many times for there not to be some truth behind it.</p>

        • hrlngrv

          Premium Member
          16 February, 2022 - 5:38 pm

          <p>For example, uniforminsignia.org is fubar w/Firefox, but renders correctly with Web, a Linux Webkit browser, and Chromium and Edge.</p>

        • wright_is

          Premium Member
          17 February, 2022 - 2:29 am

          <p>I must be lucky, I use Firefox and Safari and I’ve not had any real problems with any sites I regularly visit.</p><p><br></p><p>But this is just down to lazy web developers, unfortunately. When I was doing web development, we had banks of test machines with all supported versions of all browsers on all operating systems. Only once it ran without problems on all variants could we release the code.</p><p><br></p><p>What was painful was IE support, 6 rendered differently to 7, which rendered differently to 8, 8 through 11 were generally okay.</p><p><br></p><p>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, because Chrome would render some things 1 pixel lower than Safari and Firefox, and the CEO would go ballistic if the sites weren’t perfectly rendered… Which meant a lot of kluge code to ensure versions of IE and Chrome rendered the site properly.</p>

          • dftf

            17 February, 2022 - 4:41 am

            <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>

            • wright_is

              Premium Member
              17 February, 2022 - 4:55 am

              <p>I was very proud, I had to write an inventory tracking system for the photo studio. Flash was big in the agency, but I hated it, as it was a security and standards nightmare.</p><p><br></p><p>I wrote the system in PHP and the whole tracking system, with drop down menus and scanner support was pure HTML and CSS, with only one page requiring JavaScript to allow dragging and dropping items from one list into another.</p><p><br></p><p>2 years ago, I got a network request from someone at the agency on LinkedIn. He was the current PM for the project and thanked me for such thorough documentation on the system – he was still supporting it. I wrote the system in 3 months and generated around 1,500 pages of documentation to go with the system (PHPdoc), describing the API and the classes.</p>

            • arjay

              23 February, 2022 - 6:55 pm

              <p>I think more yes than no. My wife ran into that with a place she buys from; for the first time, she needed to edit the order, but could not. The only solution offered was to switch from Safari on her MacBook to "Chrome". Since we are, to the extent possible, a Google-free location, I helped her move her login credentials over to Brave.</p><p><br></p><p>I’ve installed Brave on all my Macs, for those cases where I have to emulate Chrome. Brave is what I use on my Windows machine, too.</p>

          • hrlngrv

            Premium Member
            17 February, 2022 - 6:38 pm

            <p>| <em>What was painful was IE support, 6 rendered differently to 7 . . .</em></p><p><br></p><p>My own story about this sort of thing. Lotus 1-2-3 version 4 and prior when importing text files with formfeed (ASCII 12 decimal) characters would just include an extended ASCII glyph (female symbol) in the imported text. Version 5 and later insisted on creating a new worksheet. Very unpleasant change of functionality. Not quite as unpleasant a change as Excel 2003 &amp; prior to Excel 2007 &amp; later, when the collection of all cells in a worksheet went from 2^24 to 2^34, which could no longer be stored in 32-bit integers. LOTS of macro code rewritten in the early 2010s.</p><p><br></p><p>Change is inevitable, and perhaps change shouldn’t be feared, but change is always EXPENSIVE.</p>

    • dftf

      17 February, 2022 - 4:44 am

      <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>

  • dftf

    16 February, 2022 - 3:36 pm

    <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>

    • wright_is

      Premium Member
      17 February, 2022 - 2:30 am

      <p>I did use the Android version, but they failed to update their access methods and it stopped working with LastPass, meaning I’d have to manually copy every username and password over! I kicked it out and used Brave, until I dropped Android.</p>

  • dftf

    16 February, 2022 - 3:38 pm

    <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>

  • lvthunder

    Premium Member
    16 February, 2022 - 4:23 pm

    <p>I bet at some point they get bought by someone. Maybe someone like one of the Linux companies.</p>

  • longhorn

    16 February, 2022 - 5:43 pm

    <p>Google will never let go of Firefox. $420 million annually is a very small price to pay for Google to be able to push "Web standards" through W3C thanks to its partner Mozilla.</p><p><br></p>

  • emily008

    14 March, 2022 - 11:44 pm

    <p>I love the developer tool of Firefox.</p>

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