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?
There sure has been a lot of propaganda being posted to Beehaw lately.
For an article that tries to push a groupthink narrative to work, the people using the “discouraged” product need to believe the “encouraged” one has feature parity with zero downsides.
I guarantee that no one is accidentally using Firefox because they’re unaware of the alternatives.
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What a ridiculous title, article and post.
I guess Firefox market share will be closely related to Linux desktop market share
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!
My government sites don’t work with Firefox (no add-ons), have to use chrome, they recommend and only support chrome.
May I ask which country you’re from? That sounds dystopian.
Few years ago(maybe 10) it was still recommended or even necessary to use IE for a lot of goverment Internet Services here in Germany. The online Zoll handling for example. I think a lot of goverments are not really into accesibility optimization.
Use chrome for government sites and Firefox for everything else.
That is exactly my policy, such policies shouldn’t need to exist though.
Was ZDNet once a good source for news?
“slides into irrelevance” - zdnet
Ironic that ZD-Net is speaking of relevancy. Ha
Yeah, they are so 2010. I sometimes end up there when trying to dig up some obscure driver for outdated tech, but that’s really it.
I remember watching zdtv as a kid in jr high? Lol these days, after seeing that article, i think i muttered “they’re still around?”
Market share doesn’t equal irrelevance as others have said. I use Librewolf and without Firefox it wouldn’t exist. It likely wouldn’t exist at the quality it is without Mozilla taking Google Cash either. But it’s super important to have an alternative even if most people don’t use it. It DOES provide a limited check and balance against google doing whatever they want with the web because if the right people make the right noise then people will move over to something that’s easy, convenient, and free of whatever pain in the butt google puts in chrome that sends people over the edge. See Linux desktop and Valve for an example of how a software with very few users comparatively can force a larger company to play ball. Remember in Windows 8 when MS basically banned 3rd party software stores on the OS… or tried? And Valve made the “Steam Machine” and SteamOS? Everyone says the steam machines failed but they 100% did everything Valve wanted them to do. It was enough to have MS go back on their walled garden and allow Steam to keep operating as it had been. And now we have the steam deck on top of it.
So, it’s ok if Firefox has a small market share as long as it remains a worthy competitor.
I will be honest. I didn’t read that article because it’s too click-baity. Using https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/ I see that Firefox is about 3% of 5b users. Not insignificant.
That 3% is about 150mil users. IMO, less than it should be. Google has great security, but terrible privacy. I switched middle of last year, from brave to FF for reasons I won’t get into here. Suffice it to say, they are numerous.
It truly is troubling that they don’t have independent funding. I, for one would pay $10/y for this service. Maybe I could donate?
Anyway, it’s a superior product in many ways.
I would say a good half of posts on Lemmy are too click-baity for me to actually look at. Every title clearly has picked a side and it’s rare to see something even attempt to be impartial
I can’t disagree with you. I feel like that’s the way of the world anymore regardless of platform.
Agreed, unfortunately you’re right
There are a few good sites that document slant and coverage.
https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news
https://ground.news/landingV4/middleground
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/
I hope this helps.
That’s total browser market. On Desktop it’s 7.61%, in Germany 17.93%, making it second place (though Edge isn’t far behind). Europe is 10.56%, North America pretty much average, Asia and South America are dragging it down.
It truly is troubling that they don’t have independent funding. I, for one would pay $10/y for this service. Maybe I could donate?
Firefox is Mozilla’s cash cow, it’s how they’re earning funds for their charitable work. And google btw isn’t the only one paying them, which search engine is the default depends on where you are.
Firefox is Mozilla’s cash cow, it’s how they’re earning funds for their charitable work. And google btw isn’t the only one paying them, which search engine is the default depends on where you are.
Thank you that’s wonderful news! I don’t have the time to keep up on browser news like that so I truly appreciate the information.
I wonder if Firefox users are more likely to spoof their user agent setting? Probably not.
I’ll still use it. Compared to every other browser, it is the least disastrous regarding privacy.
I always spoof the ua. Not for privacy (though it helps), but because some sites artificially break for certain browsers or OSs and work perfectly fine when they think you’re on a different browser. The artificial restriction should be illegal, but it isn’t.
Keep it default until you encounter a website that doesn’t work. Then swap it temporarily either manually or with an extension. And then swap back immediately. Then send the webmaster a complaint.
I do that at home (not the webmaster bit), but at work I’m usually in a hurry and switching between different admin panels, so it’s constantly set to something that will work with ABM, intune, and MS admin (there are more admin panels, but those the ones always giving me the “your browser is not supported” bs). Not chrome, though.
Firefox has been irrelevant for about a decade now. Most webdevs don’t even test for firefox anymore. Major websides actively ignore it and most users evidently either don’t know and/or use it.
Yes, firefox is relevant as an alternative to Chromium-based browsers, but that’s about it. Mozilla has done a stellar job at keeping it irrelevant to keep bagging that sweet google money.
Honestly, I hope firefox and mozilla die, to be reborn again by another entity, but Mitchell Baker probably will do their best to keep getting that sweet, sweet, Google money.
With how google has been gong mask-off, I’d argue that FF has never been more relevant
I use Firefox on Linux, Windows (at work), and Android, and I like it.
