zlacker

https://gs.statcounter.com/

Firefox is not a serious competitor at this point and its tiny 4% of the market has already slipped to 3% in the last year.

That’s inching close to the “can we please drop IE11” sort of numbers from some years ago.

>>leland+(OP)
Are you suggesting that people shouldn't use it since it has a small market share, and thus should allow it to get smaller until it dies out?

>>Merely+i
Moreso that Safari truly is the only bastion against Chrome’s hegemony.

>>leland+P
Safari is not competing. It only runs on MacOS and iOS. It doesn't compete on Linux, Windows or Android.

- It comes last out of the three major browser engines in feature support. - It has the most number of bugs out of the three engines. - It has the worst support for Web Apps.

Apple has deprived the Safari/Webkit team of funding for the past decade.

Safari places no competitive pressure on chrome, and has deprived Mozilla and thus Firefox of 100's of millions of dollars in search engine revenue. Apple has done untold damage to the web and this needs to be fixed.

>>leland+(OP)
Statcounter is in the list[0] firefox uses to block trackers, it also seems like Edge use the same list [1], so the 3% is more FF-users who are not using the build in tracking protection

[0]https://github.com/disconnectme/disconnect-tracking-protecti... [1]https://disconnect.me/trackerprotection#trackers-we-block

>>Merely+i
As it becomes more of a niche, also-ran browser, you can expect its quality (and so, its security) to fall as well.

The "use an inferior tool for philosophical reasons" mindset is already pretty unconvincing for me. A chromium fork maintained by a pro-user, pro-privacy team is the best of both worlds and doesn't expose you to Mozilla's fad-chasing.

>>mtomwe+s3
Firefox is almost no where to be found and hardly has anything to bring to fight against Chrome [0]. In fact, Mozilla is on life support with Google's money with the Mozilla CEO being the one laughing all the way to the bank as Firefox continues to be irrelevant.

Safari (WebKit) is the only one competing against the Chrome ecosystem, especially on mobile devices market. The EU Digital Markets Act will just declare Chrome the winner and will increase Chrome's dominance and will make Mozilla even more irrelevant.

[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/

>>leland+(OP)
Statcounter has no chance to see my Firefox browsers on Linux and Android, because of uBlock Origin and Blockada.

Maybe they don't see as many Chrome browsers too, in percent. Maybe Firefox users are not the ones who block more tracking, who knows.

>>Karuna+p7
Firefox is not an “inferior tool.” Its cookie segregation and CSS styling feature are not found in Chrome. I don’t use Firefox for moral reasons, I use it because it’s better.

>>Karuna+p7
This is assuming that their funding is dependent on their share of browser use, or that Mozilla would get bored of Firefox if it stays at a lower share, and move on to other projects.

These assumptions would be true of a for-profit entity like Google, Apple, Microsoft, but it's not as directly applicable to Mozilla.

>>mtomwe+s3
The point is that, even with all those flaws, developers have to target at least two browsers instead of just building for Chrome.

The force keeping Safari afloat is not the one keeping Firefox down, the problem is that Firefox has nothing to drive up its adoption. Telling people that they're "free" to use Firefox and see as the web is swallowed whole by Google with Chrome, like MS did with IE, is missing the point so badly.

>>Lalaba+Ia
I think the first assumption holds. There is a (conspiracy?) theory that Google's funding of Mozilla is based on a desire to avoid antitrust scrutiny. If Firefox usage continues to tumble, it ceases to be a meaningful competitor and the funding might be safely discontinued without legal consequences.

Mozilla exists as it does today entirely due to Google's largess.

>>forget+4b
You're talking about lack of competition while defending corporate mandated lack of competition and undermining of the web. That's not how this works.

>>izacus+6h
Unless you think of another solution, when the "it" is the web, we have nothing else that works, because antitrust regulators won't come down hard enough on Google for leveraging its dominant position in search and mail to corner the browser market, and use it as an ad delivery platform.

Sent from my Firefox install.

>>Keegs+O9
Plus much as I'm very much and definitively unhappy about a lot of directions and decisions taken by the Firefox developers, Chrome's (and Edge's, too) address bar search alone is a no-go – it's positively amnesiac and frequently (with no discernible rhyme or reason) doesn't return even pages I've recently visited and that are definitively still in my browser history (and it's not for lack of space to display the results, because often it returns no local results at all!).

>>rypska+I4
Yeah, there’s no way to account for everyone. It’s probably not fair to assume there’s a huge amount of untracked users. And Mozilla cops to the continuing decline as well:

> “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

https://www.wired.com/story/firefox-mozilla-2022/

>>leland+Am
If statcounter is in the list of blocked trackers, and trackers are blocked by default, then assuming there is a huge list of untracked users is only fair. Because it would be everyone not specifically disabling the tracking protection, which no one does. Statcounter would only count outdated FF installations that also do not use an adblocker (3% seems high for that, but not absurdly high).

But I'm not certain that this is the case. https://disconnect.me/trackerprotection claims to link to lists that show which trackers are only identified and which are identified and blocked, but those links just go to https://github.com/disconnectme/disconnect-tracking-protecti..., where I do not see such a distinction being made.

>>leland+(OP)
Does Firefox have a small market share compared to Chrome? Yes.

At the same time, Firefox has 200 million users. For perspective, that's just behind the population of Brazil, the world's seventh-most-populous country. It's hardly dead in absolute terms. It's hard to think of any open-source end-user application that's more widespread.

>>leland+P
Safari seems to rather build their own web then obey standards that both firefox and chrome are following. They are in many ways worse than chrome.

>>onli+Xp
> If statcounter is in the list of blocked trackers, and trackers are blocked by default, then assuming there is a huge list of untracked users is only fair.

Did we see a massive drop in Firefox users when tracking protection was introduced?

>>rypska+I4
Firefox doesn't block statcounter or other analytics trackers by default. You'd have to go into "Settings > Enhanced Tracking Protection" and change it from "Standard" ("Balanced for protection and performance. Pages will load normally.") to "Strict" ("Stronger protection, but may cause some sites or contact a break.") While I expect Firefox users are much more likely than users of other browsers to do this, I'd also expect a large majority leave settings at the default.

You can test behavior on this tracker here: https://www.jefftk.com/test/statcounter

>>onli+Xp
Trackers are not blocked by default. You can verify this by visiting https://www.jefftk.com/test/statcounter in stock Firefox, and then again after setting "Enhanced Tracking Protection" to "Strict".

>>jefftk+vL
Thanks for the tester, on Firefox I just see:

    <html><head></head><body><img src="https://statcounter.com/" vt9kpu8nj="">
    </body></html>

but uBlock Origin with default settings blocks the image.

>>LeifCa+qR
Looking in the browser networking panel is probably the easiest way to see whether it actually sends a request.

>>Merely+i
"The rich should get richer" is a common reasoning implement for the rich.

>>postal+3y
But at the same time, there have been several cases where Mozilla and Apple have been on the same page in terms of feelings on a particular feature/change. In one of those cases Google bulldozed through and did their own thing anyway (see WebUSB).

>>mtomwe+s3
Running on Windows/Linux/Android fundamentally does not matter. Market share does.

>>mtomwe+s3
Incorrect, Safari leads the pack on new feature support.

>>postal+3y
Incorrect, Safari leads the pack on new feature support.

>>iggldi+pi
This is exactly the kind of problem that is a fork can solve when the upstream project can't or won't. I haven't used Chrome in years, but I do not notice the problem you describe in Brave.

>>jefftk+WT
The above poster is right. If you have uBlock Origin, it blocks it by default. I tested the following:

1. Plain install: Not blocked 2. With uBlock Origin: Blocked 3. Strict Enhanced Tracking Protection: Blocked 4. 2+3: Still blocked (unsurprisingly)

I would expect knowledgeable and concerned users (i.e. installing at least uBlock Origin) and people on systems managed by such people (e.g. family members of people in the first group who let that person manage their system) to be a higher percentage of Firefox users than other browsers.

I don't think Firefox has say a 10% share, but I do think that data derived from statcounter.com is going to underrepresent the share of Firefox users. As Google continues to make larger moves to fight ad-blocking, I expect that gap will widen.

>>postal+3y
This is a very uncharitable assessment. They drag their feet on API support but they're still a part of the interop group and actually were more conformant by the end of last year on the targeted features than Chrome: https://wpt.fyi/interop-2022

There's a case to be made that they handicap PWA features, but I don't see their team directly implementing features incorrectly.

>>postal+3y
> Safari seems to rather build their own web then obey standards that both firefox and chrome are following

wat. Firefox and Safari are more closely aligned on standards support than Chrome which pushes its own non-standards aggressively