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173

The fall of Firefox: Mozilla's once-popular web browser slides into irrelevance (www.zdnet.com)

submitted 10 months ago by ConstableJelly@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

154 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

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[–] kbal@fedia.io 6 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (5 children)

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.

[–] DarkThoughts@kbin.social 3 points 10 months ago

“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.

[–] ConstableJelly@beehaw.org 2 points 10 months ago

Boy that paints a grim picture.

[–] Hypx@kbin.social 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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.

[–] Aatube@kbin.social 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

While it doesn’t make much of a difference, this is part of why I recommend most people to keep market research telemetry on.

[–] renard_roux@beehaw.org 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Yikes! That paints a pretty scary picture 😬

[–] kbal@fedia.io 2 points 10 months ago

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.