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.
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.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/14/mozilla-terminates-its-dea...
Firefox has basically ceded its mass market usage to chrome.
From my subjective experience, the only people I see using it today are technical.
Firefox became somewhat popular at a time when the big player was Internet Explorer, and it was manifestly terrible.
As soon as Google started heavily promoting Chrome (which is, whatever else you might say about it, vastly superior to IE6) people switched to that.
What could Mozilla realistically do to compete against the world's largest marketing company pushing their browser?
Of course most users took the path of least resistance if the choice was between Chrome and pretty-much-also-Chrome.
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.
https://librewolf-community.gitlab.io/ https://github.com/intika/Librefox
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. :)
> /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.
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.
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?
Absolute numbers: https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
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).
US data does show a very small downtrend on some graphs, but so small, that it hardly counts as "trend", IMO.
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).
2010: 2 billion internet users, firefox has 30% market share => 600mio absolute users.
2019: 4.1 billion internet users, firefox has 4% market share => 165mio absolute users.
That's of course very rough and may be a severly off, but the absolute number of firefox users seem to have shrunk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/m...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/273018/number-of-interne...
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?
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).
As the world goes mobile, that by itself is disquieting for Mozilla.
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.
* it could come with an alternative app store
* maps can be used as a web app (how is that different from Firefox OS?)
But yes it would look more like Amazon's offering than Google's. Look where microg is now, though. That is without Mozilla's backing.
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.
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).
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.
[1] https://www.upbuild.io/blog/firefox-google-analytics-data/
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.
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..!
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.
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.
I'd guess that as far as regulators are concerned, Chrome forks count just fine.
I've always viewed it more as protection money/a bribe to not block ads by default. Not just to Firefox, but to Apple, Samsung, et. al.
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.
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.