I think you would see a (further) mass exodus from people using Firefox if they suddenly changed the default search engine for all versions, in all languages worldwide, to Bing.
They switched to Yahoo search for a while. Looks like maybe 2014-2017[0], though I'm not certain of that.
It was briefly annoying, but I just switched it back, so it wasn't a big deal. Defaults matter, but if you're using Firefox, you're probably less likely to accept an inferior default than most people.
> Firefox has basically ceded its mass market usage to chrome.
Is that so? What are the numbers? And how do they look absolute? Is there an absolute decline in firefox use? Or just a relative one? Which of those really matter?
There is no way to get even remotely close to accurate numbers.
Firefox blocks many trackers, including Google Analytics, by default.
Chrome does not block trackers by default, and has been known to connect to Analytics even with plugins meant to block it.
Hence the numbers will show FF basically as non existing. Which is just where G wants them to be.
They do have some stats based on their own (much maligned) analytics, but nothing that can be used comparatively (at least AFAIK - would be happy to hear otherwise).
Sorry, but there are lots of ways to get accurate numbers, including through Google Analytics.
Firefox blocks third-party cookies used for tracking, not first-party, which is what GA uses. [1] The story that spread last year that Firefox blocks GA turned out to be a myth.
I don't know why you're trying to promote a narrative that Firefox is far more popular than analytics show, but that's simply not true. Heck, just dump user agent headers on your own websites and measure those -- nobody's blocking that.
At my previous job, a large payment app serving millions of users, I ran the logs through some analyzers and compared that to GA. There was a noticable difference: Firefox did have a noticable larger amount of users if read from the logs than from GA. If you think about it, it is not that strange either.
Similar: according to GA we had 0 people using Brave, Opera Mini or Icecat, yet the logs did show a (statistically insignificant) handfull of users using that.
So, while there is no technical reason why firefox might be underrepresented, there is a practical and explainable difference in some cases.
Edit: when I say "noticable", I mean that it could be percieved, not that it orders of magnitude or even significan enough to matter for the business or our choices.
Stock Firefox but I selected strict mode when it prompted me on the initial release. I'm aware that it's not the default setting but some fraction of people are going to choose it since the UI prompts you to choose between standard and strict mode and it's a couple of clicks away on every page.
> 4.1 billion internet users, firefox has 4% market share
Note that the denominator for market share as measured by StatCounter is "page views", not "browser users".
So for example, say you have 4.1 billion users, who use their laptop and phone evenly for their web browsing. On their phone, none of them use Firefox. All of them load the same number of pages every day. In this scenario, 4% of page views corresponds to 8% of users using Firefox on laptop.
Note that these are not realistic assumptions, of course: people vary widely in terms of how many pages they load, vary widely in terms of how their web activity is split between mobile and non-mobile, etc. For example, in 2010, I would bet that the average Firefox user used the web more than the average IE user, so the StatCounter number for Firefox was inflated compared to the actual fraction of users using Firefox.
If you want to measure actual number of Firefox users, you need to use a data service that tries to measure users instead of page views (i.e. not StatCounter).
Yes, this has been a long-running problem, and was the impetus for Mozilla's attempt at FirefoxOS/boot-to-Gecko.
The current mobile situation is:
* iPhone: can't run Firefox there at all, really. There's Firefox for iOS based on WebKit like everything else on iOS, but I don't even know that StatCounter would count it as "Firefox".
* Android: Google for a long time had (and in many cases continues to have, as far as I know) agreements with OEMs that forbid a default browser other than Chrome. In some cases those agreements forbid preinstalling a non-Chrome browser at all, even as non-default. So you have to rely on people downloading an extra browser from the app store, and people don't do that much.
In addition to all that, "mobile" sites tended to be written to "WebKit", not "standards", for a while for various historical reasons. Unfortunately, at this point that's pretty deeply ingrained and people continue to do that, albeit with "Blink or WebKit" replacing "WebKit", which entrenches the problem.
I don't understand why they sunk so much money into Firefox OS when they could have much more easily released an Android spin that had Firefox by default, along with other privacy enhancements.
I think they missed a huge opportunity in about 2014/2015 to do what CyanogenMod was doing, as a clean/no-nonsense power user variant of Android. Ultimately the Cyanogen company leadership made poor choices and killed their relationship with the largest phone manufacturer that was shipping their OS on the phones (OnePlus), who decided to go and re-implement the same features in their own oxygenOS android build. Thereby killing Cyanogen as a company.
My understanding, and I could be totally wrong on this, is that at the time such an Android spin would not have been able to use things like Google's app store, and possibly things like Maps and whatnot, due to not having Google's browser as default.
A bit tangential to your point but firefox for android isn't bad. I am using it to type this.
Not as snappy or polished as chrome on android to be honest.
I personally switched to it because I felt I give enough data to Google as it is. Probably not a great reason, because they still get a lot of data from me.
Sure, I use Firefox for Android as well. The "no one" was for ease of illustration; the general point is that Firefox market share on mobile is different from desktop and that this affects per-view share more than per-user share. Of course, to the extent that someone only uses a mobile device to access the web, per-user share is affected too.
Worrying and indeed not good for Firefox, if correct.
However, when you simply multiply "browser share" with "amount of 'internet' users, you may very well make some grave mistakes. E.g. does "Browsing Tinder" count as 'internet user'? Someone updating their instagram app? If so, you do miss a lot and maybe the numbers go very far in either direction when corrected?
It subjectively feels like we are back in 2006 when I and many of my fellow sysadmins had already changed to Firefox and my manager and some others insisted we shouldn't care about compability as everyone could just use IE.
Only at that time Firefox had a massive advantage because of enthusiasm and an API that allowed for crazy things, up to allowing extensions like IE tab that, on Windows, would allow you to run certain sites with an IE web view inside a Firefox tab..!
The numbers are worse when you look at American data alone. It looks like Firefox is slowly shedding users. Probably because of Mozilla's questionable practices recently (the enlarged awesome bar, the layoffs, etc).
Maybe I am missing a zoom function, or the visualisation is poor, but I see an almost flat curve, in some cases even slightly upwards (hours per day, probably Covid/work-from-home effect?).
US data does show a very small downtrend on some graphs, but so small, that it hardly counts as "trend", IMO.
According to statcounter in September 2016 Firefox had a roughly 15% market share. It now has roughly 9%. In America it's 13.7% down to 7.1%.
The monthly active users chart for Firefox shows that the last time there were 250M+ active users was April 2019 and the last time there were 240M+ active was October of that year. The graph as presented shows a very slight curve downward, it would be more clear if the Y axis started at 200M (which would however bring about its own caveats - data visualization sucks).
Note that StatCounter measures "page views", not "users". They're proportional if all users use the web an equal amount, but that last bit is just not true.
By consistently and continually molding Firefox to be as similar to Chrome as possible instead of offering something different enough to present a meaningful choice.
Of course most users took the path of least resistance if the choice was between Chrome and pretty-much-also-Chrome.
I think FFs loss of market share of course has been affected by advertising, but mainly by their own mistakes. I don't think the similarities to Chrome (which were not really so great for a long time) were the main driver.
I tried to hold onto FF for as long as possible for ideological reasons, and then for some years when I couldn't justify it because of just terrible performance, I used Chromium. They had a much, much better plugin market / platform for a long time and that too was a larger part of the draw that differentiated them. I switched back to FF as soon as I heard they had dealt with most of their speed issues in an update but, extremely reluctantly, I have been considering whether they are any better than Chromium at this point with the privacy / ad shenanigans that really seem to insist on reappearing in different ways with great consistency lately. The recent monetization debacle has frankly been disheartening.
So the main points for me are that they failed on speed (which drove most people I know who switched to Chrome) and now on culture/honesty.
I still use Firefox and only Firefox, as I still see it as the lesser evil, while being performant enough (I never really noticed any significant slowness that people keep harping about), but Mozilla is making it harder and harder every year.
Still, I am nowhere near wanting to switch to a Google product - Firefox would have to become really bad for me to consider that - and I see no other browser even remotely close to replacing Firefox for me. It's still "good enough".
I even keep an ancient Firefox version installed in /opt, because I need it to run a small proprietary Java applet for work, but that's another topic. :)
> I never really noticed any significant slowness that people keep harping about
> /opt
From what I understand, the slowness was primarily on Mac (a high-dpi rendering issue) and sometimes Windows (don't recall if there was a specific issue or just several small things that added up). On linux these issues tended not to exist, or at least be nowhere near as bad.
Is it even possible to be "different enough" from Chrome without also being a significantly worse browser? Becoming "as similar to Chrome as possible" is also the thing most browser users want. e.g. Multiprocess broke the XUL add-on model, but it also means dramatically better browser stability.
Multiprocess was a step in the right direction, of course - nobody likes it when one crashed tab brings down everything else with it.
But they kept on removing various cool and useful features just because their telemetry showed that they were only used by a small percentage of users, claiming that they need to save money and focus on things people use the most. Naturally, that leads to the world's blankiest blank of a browser, to borrow a bit of Futurama vernacular.
This is another case of people blaming the victim. The monopoly case against Google is there to show that it has stifled competition, including Firefox. Don't get distracted by the fact that Google is paying Firefox, in fact they're causing much more damage through their monopolist practices than whatever amount they're paying.
Like when Microsoft invested in Apple to keep it afloat... the monopolist needs a token competitor to show off to regulators.
Google dominates the browser market... Firefox is down to single digit marketshare. If Firefox is gone, it's pretty much just Safari on mobile... and who else? (Chrome forks don't count.)
As far as Firefox's hands being tied: they had a deal with Yahoo starting in 2015 for 5 years.. and they terminated it in 2017 when their contract gave them an opportunity. So that should say something about Firefox's choice in the matter.
> If that's the case why would Google pay for being the default search engine?
Even if it is, in fact, the best choice for Mozilla even if money is involved doesn't mean Mozilla will see it that way over stacks offered by Microsoft. So, if it's valuable to Google, it's worth them paying for to assure the decision, whether or not Mozilla should rationally be expected to choose the same thing anyway.
I honestly don't understand why people would give up an app because of a default setting. You can just change it in like 30 seconds. I know the average web user might not even be aware that this is possible, but I'd expect those to be mostly Chrome users in today's Google-dominated market.
Especially since Bing's contracts have historically required disabling the ability to switch to a different search engine, presumably because they realize that everyone would just switch to Google anyway, meaning that it wouldn't just be the default but the only search engine people could easily use unless they jumped ship to Chrome.
The problem isn't that Google is the only company that can pay due to their monopolistic position, it's that they're the only company willing to pay that wouldn't require Mozilla to compromise their key principles and their browser - probably because they're good enough that they're confident people actually want to use them.
> Especially since Bing's contracts have historically required disabling the ability to switch to a different search engine
I wasn’t aware of this or that it was even possible to not be able to switch search providers. What is the biggest example of Bing being forced on an install base without the ability to switch?
The only example I know of Bing is the setup in Windows for IE/Edge. And iOS toyed with it for a while but has stuck with google.
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