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?

Fizz ,
@Fizz@lemmy.nz avatar

Is Firefox considered bad? It works well for me and when I use Chrome or edge It feels full of junk features

treadful ,
@treadful@lemmy.zip avatar

Firefox has been nice to work with on my end. And fast. Even the dev tools are way better than they were a decade ago. Almost all the important extensions work on it.

I don't really understand how its market share is so low now.

Ilandar ,

I don’t really understand how its market share is so low now.

Everyone has a Google account, Chrome comes preinstalled on many web-enabled devices, people don't realise how bad Chrome is compared to alternatives, people don't understand they can search with Google on any web browser, etc. Most people are not particularly tech literate and don't really understand what they are doing. They just use the most popular/advertised product and assume it is the best choice for them. Even in Lemmy privacy communities, where you'd expect users to be more tech literate, I've come across many people who don't even know that browser export/import is a standard feature everywhere, or that other browsers have their own versions of cross device sync. They think they're locked into Chrome and moving to Firefox would mean completely starting again from nothing.

rwhitisissle ,

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.

azdle ,
@azdle@news.idlestate.org avatar

The day Firefox shutters its doors is the day the internet truly dies.

*the web

The internet has so far been doing a much better job surviving as a proper decentralized system than the web.

erwan ,

Really? What's left of the Internet beyond the web?

How many people use Usenet today, rather than forums or social media on the web?

How many people use IRC, rather than Slack? (Either on the web or in a Chromium-backed desktop app)

How many people use an email client, rather than webmail?

admin ,
@admin@beehaw.org avatar

Back in the day I used IRC but prefer Signal and Matrix now. I, also, use an email client.

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