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?
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 :)
What add-ons in particular made you make the change?
Bypass paywalls clean. It’s great for reading news articles under a paywall.
uBlock, Clean URLs, and “I still don’t care about cookies”
Are the must haves for me.
Is the last one still useful if you enable the cookies filter under annoyances in uBlock?
I didn’t know about that actually. I’ll try it out and remove cookies extension. Thanks!
Edit: Working well so far!
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.
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.
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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.
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.
Can you link to an example? I remember this from years ago, but haven’t encountered it for a long time.
I mean, you can argue that Google actually has a monopoly on web browsers right now. iirc Firefox takes a ton of money from Google, so if the choices are “Google’s proprietary browser” or “a non-Chromium browser backed by Google” (EDIT: unless you’re on Apple hardware and use Safari), then Google comes out on top either way.
Wish we could get another good browser engine that isn’t Chromium, WebKit, or Quantum.
Ehh
There’s a clear difference between accepting money from an entity and letting it control things and make decisions. Pushing for a full and clear separation from any potential conflict of interest (while noble) is how projects die.
I’d love for Firefox to be fully funded through small anonymous public donations in an ideal world. As it is, I don’t see an issue from taking Google’s money to do something that most users would want anyways.
If the default search wasn’t google, I’m certain even more users would bail on Firefox. Anyone who does want an alternative search engine is capable of clicking on it during installation.
a full and clear separation from any potential conflict of interest (while noble) is how projects die.
There are worse things than death, like being successful by screwing people over and/or making the biosphere unlivable.
Firefox might be able to survive on donations, if Mozilla’s CEO stopped giving herself raises
They don’t even want our money. They just let you donate to Mozilla foundation, which does other projects.
Firefox is developed by Mozilla corporation which is funded by the google deal.
I donate to several FOSS projects including monthly to KDE but I won’t donate to Mozilla until I can actually make sure my money goes to firefox. And ideally not their overpaid CEO either, no.
I’m still sad about the day the real Opera with the presto rendering engine died. And while Vivaldi is getting many of the features and functionality, it’s still a chromium rebuild. I guess it just takes too much money to build your own rendering engine anymore.
And it was so fast, awww. And had a built-in BitTorrent client which didn’t suck balls and didn’t feel excessive.
And all that caching.
I guess it just takes too much money to build your own rendering engine anymore.
Even Microsoft couldn’t do it.
Heck even Google couldn’t do it, they used Apple’s WebKit. And even Apple couldn’t do it, they used KDE’s KHTML. Speaking of KHTML: Konqueror is still around, though they’ve already decided to get rid of KHTML completely and move to one of the forks, development pretty much stalled since 2016.
I’m fighting the good fight by using Safari to browse and Kagi to search. I have effectively eliminated Google from my life and I could not be happier about it.
Signed, a former Google fan who got tired of being the product for their ever shittier services.
Apple and Google deserve about the same amount of trust. I don’t know that Safari is any better than Chrome other than keeping a large portion of users in a secondary browser. I guess it all depends on whether uBlock Origin is able to be loaded on it along with other useful extensions. I’m a Firefox fan though.
I wouldn’t nominate either one for sainthood, no argument there. I walked away from Google because they are an ad company that makes devices and software - that has become increasingly more apparent in the last several years, I’m sure it was always true but less obvious in the early days.
Apple has their own set of issues for sure, but I don’t think they’re comparable to the spyware advertising conglomerate that is Google.
No. This is just a return to the days of the IE-only web. It will be problematic but it won’t be the end of the web.
It wasn’t really IE-only. People sort of could use Netscape, and then Mozilla, and then Firefox. And Opera which wasn’t free.
Do you have examples for the sites that don’t render correctly? I’m genuinely curious since I haven’t encountered that issue in like a decade.
Servo is being actively worked on. Maybe it can become a worthy adversary to chrome?
I thought Servo was basically dead since the layoffs at Mozilla in 2020, but your comment caused me to look into it and evidently funding was found to resume development on it at the beginning of last year. That’s good news! (to me!)
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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.
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?
Usenet, IRC, mailing lists. and TUI email clients are fading away because they have horrible UX (and UI in most cases). The internet used to be a nerdy space, but now it’s for everybody: from your youngest to your oldest citizens, from the least technically adept to the most technically adept, and everyone in between. You can mourn the death of technologies and solutions written for another era if you wish, but that doesn’t make you better nor right. It just makes you bitter (or salty if that’s what the kids say nowadays).
There never has been a better newsreader than pineapple news. That program alone was reason enough to boot up BeOS, fite me irl.
IRC? Graphical, in particular, hexchat. Also switch the font to proportional you’re not editing text.
IRC has no built-in support for replies, media (audio, video, stickers, reactions, custom emoji, etc.), threads, and encryption. It’s barebones text with a bunch of cryptic slash commands on top of it - everything else is done by the client.
And pineapple news’ UI is from another era. It’s like looking at papyrus when you have Gutenberg’s print.
To each their own, but the amount of people willing to use such outdated tech is dwindling.
IRC has no built-in support for
And? It’s a chat room, not a forum and emojis are a scourge upon the internet. And you’re certainly more likely to get an answer than on stackoverflow…
And pineapple news’ UI is from another era. It’s like looking at papyrus when you have Gutenberg’s print.
It’s BeOS’ default tk, the point is the UX not lack of subpixel font rendering. Windows looked like this back in the days. And no I don’t use it any more, haven’t visited usenet in almost 20 years.
And? It’s a chat room, not a forum and emojis are a scourge upon the internet. And you’re certainly more likely to get an answer than on stackoverflow…
Just like not everything that’s new is good, not everything that’s old is good. There’s a time and place for anything. The time and place for IRC is a museum IMO. You may disagree, but I disagree with you probably just as much that “emojis are a scourge upon the internet”.
Back in the day I used IRC but prefer Signal and Matrix now. I, also, use an email client.
I know I’m an outlier, but I prefer text mode IRC, then slack, and then all the other shit (telegram, signal, discord, teams, etc) fall way behind. “Everything is a walled-off app” is a horrible way to communicate. I get why these companies do it, and I also even understand the headache over maintaining useful open APIs, but honestly, they drop that ASAP because it doesn’t make them money.
Some non-HTTP(S) Internet stuff:
Email is transferred to its destination (where, sure it might be accessed through a Web UI) via SMTP. Even where things like Slack are used internally, email usage between organisations is still extensive, due to effectively being a federated lowest-common-denominator system that’s not completely at the mercy of a single vendor.
VoIP, which increasingly underlies telephony/mobile networks, uses things like SIP, RTP and RTCP - even if, again, it might be accessed via a Web UI, it doesn’t have to be, and there are dedicated clients.
SSH is widely used for remote system administration. SFTP, built on top of SSH, is used to transfer sensitive data, e.g. (in the US) medical records covered by HIPAA.
SNMP is used for network device management, sometimes doing so via the Internet.
Don’t confuse certain end-user applications with the Internet more generally.
The original comment, was the claim that the internet is doing a lot better than the web.
In that context, the fact that literally every single one of those services is primarily accessed and managed through the web, makes that claim that the web hasn’t succeeded look a little ridiculous.
I have yet to see a usenet post that was both written by a person and not incredibly batshit insane
curl -k IP_Address
Open in notepad.
Read.
“Oh, an empty HTML tag and 2Mb of JavaScript!”
Is Firefox considered bad? It works well for me and when I use Chrome or edge It feels full of junk features
I don’t think so. The article claims Firefox lost some of its lead developers to Google when it started developing Chrome and then took a long time to regain its footing around 2017. That sounds about right to my recollection. I had admittedly switched to Chrome myself for a while (I’m not terribly tech-savvy, maybe a little more than average) but switched back to Firefox last year. I am still pretty deeply embedded in the Google ecosystem though in other ways.
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.
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.
It works for me, as well as family members who aren’t as technical / don’t care about why I picked Firefox
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I think it’s mostly about convenience. Most people don’t care enough and have only learned how to install chrome (if it isn’t preinstalled)
I only use FF in Linux, I tried on Android but it’s somewhat bad 😔
I use Firefox on all my devices and couldn’t be happier with it. I especially love how sync works: there’s options to both pull tabs from other devices, and push to them. Quite frequently I’d be just browsing on my phone and send a tab over to my laptop to deal with/read/act on when I’m sitting down at a bigger screen.
Same! I believe that others struggle with it but I can’t wrap my head around why their experience is so different from my own.
Opposite of my experience, FF + uBlock Origin made browsing the web on my phone enjoyable because the filtering of ads makes page layouts readable.
I’ve found the reason it’s not great on mobile is because even if you tell your android phone to use Firefox as default it simply ignores it and uses chrome anyways
Edit: I was able to get it to work properly as my default browser but I had to disable chrome in the app settings. Now it’s great
What phone do you use that you experience this?
Just fully remove chrome. I do not even have chrome on my phone. Firefox works fine on mobile. Have no idea why people think it does not.
Disable chrome. Problem solved.
Can’t confirm. My default browser and web view are Firefox on both Sony and Samsung devices.
be sure to actually launch firefox and don’t use the google ‘app’ either.
You can disable chrome in it’s app settings!
What’s bad about it? It’s the only way to use an ad blocker on mobile
Yes, but it’s buggy, it often freezes, it also consumes ~5% battery per hour, even if I kill FF before going to bed, the next morning it took like 40% of the battery in 8h night.
Wrong. Vivaldi and Brave have adblockers, without even taking into account AdGuard, Blockade and the likes.
vivaldi also has an adblocker on android
The url bar is in the bottom of the screen in stead of in the top.
You can move it to the top in the settings though…? They moved it to the bottom by default because most people have their thumbs close to the bottom of the screen, so they don’t need to reach all the way to the top to get to the URL bar or change tabs.
That drove me nuts… You can fix it through, I did it immediately when they made the change
I just checked in my own, you can change the toolbar to the top of the screen in the “Customize” page of the settings.
Yeah i know. That’s just the worst thing I could think of.
I’ve also had problems with Firefox on mobile. For some reason it’s just very heavy on my phone, slower than chromium and has frozen android twice. I go back to it every now and then to see if it’s changed but until then there are many browsers that support ad blockers. Kiwi works great for me
Same here … there is more than enough content on the internet as a whole … if I run into a site that gives me a hard time to see or read any of their content, I just turn it off, close the tab and restart my search or go somewhere else. I’m not wasting my time to accommodate a dumb website that doesn’t want to easily show me something I can see elsewhere … and if I can’t see it elsewhere, then more than likely, it wasn’t worth seeing anyway.
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Working just fine for me…
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.
This is a very good example of the skewing I imagined. If you’re unable or prohibited from using Firefox on work devices (as many environments restrict), all that workday traffic will be coming from “approved” browsers.
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.
Boy that paints a grim picture.
“You’re just a tiny minority, most people like the change”
They did the same shit with their redesign with their idiotic floating tabs. They look ugly and they even take up way more space, while displaying less information, for literally no reason. They argued the need this change for future FF features, which yet, several years later, have yet to appear. Here’s a quote from “Paul”, one of their moderators - almost 3 years ago:
Hi,
We bring a modernized and differentiated look to tabs since Firefox 89 in order to create a signature Firefox look and experience. This major redesign will help us enable more use cases and features in the future.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1338169
I love Firefox and will continue to use it, but its decline is a mixture of Google’s aggressive embrace, extend, and extinguish approach and straight up continued mismanagement of the Mozilla Corporation.
Our telemetry shows 80% of users never install any add-ons” i.e. the telemetry that any tech savvy person immediately turns off because they don’t want their browser spying on them and about which we have also complained numerous times.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
I have to agree with your sentiment. That statement did not hit me right either. It left me wondering where that piece of data
comecame from. It’s my understanding that for decently savvy users of Firefox, extensions are a must.Side note - I really like how you crossed out your spelling error instead of just fixing it - I always proof-read my comments after I post them (because I always forget to do it), and this might actually, in s tiny way, be useful to someone who’s still learning the language, or just didn’t know a particular working is wrong. I’m going to try and start doing this as well, thanks 😊👍
🙂
As I understand it, the message here is that any decently savvy user of Firefox turns off telemetry, so mozilla doesn’t know of them using extensions. hence why they say 80% don’t use them, people who do use them don’t give them their usage data.
Okay, that makes sense, now that you’ve explained that. Thank you.
This. People are basically in denial over how poorly Mozilla is handling Firefox. They are genuinely going to drive their product to zero marketshare pretty soon.
Yikes! That paints a pretty scary picture 😬
Indeed, that we tend to write such scary-looking rants and post them all over the Internet is one reason it was perhaps a bad idea for Mozilla to alienate their most geeky users in so many little ways over the years.
Firefox itself is still the least scary of the available full-featured web browsers, of course.
While it doesn’t make much of a difference, this is part of why I recommend most people to keep market research telemetry on.
What a ridiculous title, article and post.
Raises eyebrows at article viewed via Firefox
From ZDNet. How much did they get paid to post this article?
How much did they get paid by a PR firm who’s subsidized entirely by Alphabet, Inc.?
I use Firefox on Linux, Windows (at work), and Android, and I like it.
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.
Me? Not at all. I actually posted this out of concern because, as I’ve said elsewhere, I’m a Firefox user, and my layman’s impression was that its reputation has been improving over the past couple years. I assumed its user base was doing the same as people grew increasingly concerned with Google’s intentions.
Apparently ZDnet has some reputational issues itself I was unaware of.
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.
firefox will stay relevant, even if only because alphabet really really wants to avoid antitrust lawsuits.
Manifest V3 will force some people to go back to Firefox.
I wish so too, but I think you’re overestimating people.
Agree. I know so many folks that just deal with ads and think its just how the internet works
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.
Using a Chrome user agent in FF can result in broken video / audio playback on various sites.
i had to fudge the useragent to chrome yesterday to get 1080p out of azn.
users can modify their useragent string, and sometimes they have to because some webdevs are morons.
The minority of users do this or even know about UA strings.
some browsers actually default to using chrome instead of its own.
Sure, but Firefox isn’t one of them
Sure, but Firefox isn’t one of them
but those that do inflate google’s stats.
Doesn’t seem too likely that’d be more than a few percentage points. Which non-Chromium browsers even do this?
Government websites are really bad about needing to fake the user agent string because of low bidder contracted work that often starts and ends with Internet Explorer/Edge and is rarely updated due to how government budgeting works.
I worked at a small MSP 2020-2021. Some of our customers needed access to government sites for reporting. The fact that some of these pages still had the “Best Viewed in Internet Explorer” badge or language was sad and frightening. Luckily there’s browser compatibility mode in Edge (which as you mentioned is probably just changing the user agent string), but still. My dad works in govt IT and even he’s encountered internal sites that require ActiveX. He has to sometimes figure out workarounds.
I did have one medical client that used some web charting/reporting platform. And it required a specific, long outdated version of Firefox. We had to intentionally turn off updates in Firefox so they could access it. Anything newer than that version and the site wouldn’t load. It was very strange.
