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Comment by ianbutler | Hacker News Reader

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

To be fair, you are correct in the mobile space, and that is now the lion share of devices, but Firefox does have a healthy 7.5% usage in the desktop space if the metrics on this page are to be believed.

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Why not just look at market share across all devices? Which makes chrisseaton's point: Firefox sits at 3.26% as opposed to Safari at 18.61%.

Because all browsers are Safari on the mobile platform that has 60% of market share in the US.

Well yeah that’s a fact that supports the point. Why exclude it?

You literally can’t run a different browser on the device.* If I’ve installed Firefox I’ve installed reskinned Safari.

“2.5.6 Apps that browse the web must use the appropriate WebKit framework and WebKit Javascript.”

From the App Store guidelines.

It’s not a choice thing.

*without jailbreaking

You choose the browser with the device.

That seems like an anti trust action waiting to happen frankly.

That is irrelevant though.

It sucks that Apple does this but it doesn't actually change the fact that Firefox use is at 3%.

It affects usage rates of other browsers other than Safari on that platform, because other "browsers" are just limited chrome on top of Safari. The quality of Chrome, Firefox, etc on iOS will be behind the quality of the same browsers on platforms that they're allowed to improve and innovate upon.

Even 3% of market share could be hundreds of millions of people. Browser market size is extremely large. That's hardly irrelevant.

https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity

Because mobile and desktop are different markets

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