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?
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?
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!
Bypass paywalls clean. It’s great for reading news articles under a paywall.
I use Firefox as my daily driver, and have for years, but there’s no way Firefox is anything but doomed with Mozilla at the helm.
The mismanagement of money and ludicrous compensation for those at the top and chasing endless side ventures that all fail doesn’t bode well for them.
I get it, there’s anger at the article, but anyone who actually thinks Firefox has a chance at returning anywhere close to their old glory is holding onto groundless optimism.
gives us a running count of the last 90 days of US government website visits. That doesn’t tell us much about global web browser use, but it’s the best information we have about American web browser users today.
Lmao article itself saying it’s a steaming pile of chrome
People are idiots. I’ve used Firefox for nearly 20 years and have zero plans to change.
Same here, it’s only getting better. Especially lately with mobile firefox finally getting up to scratch. The desktop browser has alwaysbeen great.
What a ridiculous title, article and post.
ah zdnet, a waste of CO2 if there ever was
There sure has been a lot of propaganda being posted to Beehaw lately.
Are you just here to spark a browser war? Claims like “firefox is dead” are guaranteed to get a shit ton of comments stating the exact opposite, backed up with annecdotal evidence.
I feel obliged to do the same though. So let me tell you that I’ve recently switched back to firefox after years of chrome and I haven’t regretted it one single moment.
Me? Not at all. I actually posted this out of concern because, as I’ve said elsewhere, I’m a Firefox user, and my layman’s impression was that its reputation has been improving over the past couple years. I assumed its user base was doing the same as people grew increasingly concerned with Google’s intentions.
Apparently ZDnet has some reputational issues itself I was unaware of.
Mitchell Baker is being paid $7m a year to drive it into the ground.
Quoting someone from Reddit: Mozilla lost my respect years ago. They’re just buzzwords and a scam, at this point.
Firefox needs a hard fork. It’s obvious that Mozilla is just using it as their golden egg, because they know Google needs to have a “competitor” in order not to end up being sued or broken up because they have a browser monopoly.
Yeah, that is indefensible.
Is Firefox considered bad? It works well for me and when I use Chrome or edge It feels full of junk features
I think it’s mostly about convenience. Most people don’t care enough and have only learned how to install chrome (if it isn’t preinstalled)
It works for me, as well as family members who aren’t as technical / don’t care about why I picked Firefox
I don’t think so. The article claims Firefox lost some of its lead developers to Google when it started developing Chrome and then took a long time to regain its footing around 2017. That sounds about right to my recollection. I had admittedly switched to Chrome myself for a while (I’m not terribly tech-savvy, maybe a little more than average) but switched back to Firefox last year. I am still pretty deeply embedded in the Google ecosystem though in other ways.
Firefox has been nice to work with on my end. And fast. Even the dev tools are way better than they were a decade ago. Almost all the important extensions work on it.
I don’t really understand how its market share is so low now.
I don’t really understand how its market share is so low now.
Everyone has a Google account, Chrome comes preinstalled on many web-enabled devices, people don’t realise how bad Chrome is compared to alternatives, people don’t understand they can search with Google on any web browser, etc. Most people are not particularly tech literate and don’t really understand what they are doing. They just use the most popular/advertised product and assume it is the best choice for them. Even in Lemmy privacy communities, where you’d expect users to be more tech literate, I’ve come across many people who don’t even know that browser export/import is a standard feature everywhere, or that other browsers have their own versions of cross device sync. They think they’re locked into Chrome and moving to Firefox would mean completely starting again from nothing.
Firefox is far from irrelevant. Pure stupid click bait. Market share of courses is a sad thing and may lead to irrelevance when most web sites stop supporting. In the late days of Netscape and the early days of Firefox that was the case… lack of website support. I am just starting to see that again.
Manifest V3 will force some people to go back to Firefox.
I wish so too, but I think you’re overestimating people.
Agree. I know so many folks that just deal with ads and think its just how the internet works
firefox will stay relevant, even if only because alphabet really really wants to avoid antitrust lawsuits.
Only thing I miss in Firefox is PWA, but I still mainly use it.
There’s an extension which allows PWAs.
The day Firefox gets native mouse gestures is the day I swap. Until then will continue to be a very happy Vivaldi user.
The plug-in gesturify on Firefox does what Vivaldi does but better on honestly. I Really like Vivaldi as my back up browser but it’s nice but being stuck using chromium on Firefox.
Nope. Doesn’t allow gestures on internal pages. Eg new tabs, menu, settings, etc… It doesn’t work in the entire browser
That’s Firefox’s fault not the plugins. They don’t allow any plugin to run in internal pages.
but when you tell the moz fanboys why moz sucks you’ll find yourself in a meta/maga like echochamber. again and again moz made absolute shit decisions, the managing board is eating money like mad and google is STILL your default search engine. pathetic.
What I don’t get is why hasn’t there been a split yet. Not like Seamonkey, but from major developers of FF.
youre mad that firefox gets funded by google and all they have to do is change one setting thats easily changeable by the user on install?
if you are that mad… then donate to mozilla.
no. but very echochamberlike reaction.
which button removes the managing board?
The day Firefox shutters its doors is the day the internet truly dies. Almost every “alternative” browser is chromium under the hood. Google’s next big plan is basically constructing a walled garden around the internet (at least the HTTP part) via complex DRM. Eventually, if you want to access an actual web page, it’ll have to be via a Chromium browser. Hell, even today a shitload of websites I visit on FF just don’t fucking render correctly and I’ll have to fire up a chromium instance just to access them. That’s only going to get worse with time.
curl -k IP_Address
Open in notepad.
Read.
No. This is just a return to the days of the IE-only web. It will be problematic but it won’t be the end of the web.
It wasn’t really IE-only. People sort of could use Netscape, and then Mozilla, and then Firefox. And Opera which wasn’t free.
I mean, you can argue that Google actually has a monopoly on web browsers right now. iirc Firefox takes a ton of money from Google, so if the choices are “Google’s proprietary browser” or “a non-Chromium browser backed by Google” (EDIT: unless you’re on Apple hardware and use Safari), then Google comes out on top either way.
Wish we could get another good browser engine that isn’t Chromium, WebKit, or Quantum.
I’m still sad about the day the real Opera with the presto rendering engine died. And while Vivaldi is getting many of the features and functionality, it’s still a chromium rebuild. I guess it just takes too much money to build your own rendering engine anymore.
I guess it just takes too much money to build your own rendering engine anymore.
Even Microsoft couldn’t do it.
Heck even Google couldn’t do it, they used Apple’s WebKit. And even Apple couldn’t do it, they used KDE’s KHTML. Speaking of KHTML: Konqueror is still around, though they’ve already decided to get rid of KHTML completely and move to one of the forks, development pretty much stalled since 2016.
I’m fighting the good fight by using Safari to browse and Kagi to search. I have effectively eliminated Google from my life and I could not be happier about it.
Signed, a former Google fan who got tired of being the product for their ever shittier services.
Apple and Google deserve about the same amount of trust. I don’t know that Safari is any better than Chrome other than keeping a large portion of users in a secondary browser. I guess it all depends on whether uBlock Origin is able to be loaded on it along with other useful extensions. I’m a Firefox fan though.
Apple has their own set of issues for sure, but I don’t think they’re comparable to the spyware advertising conglomerate that is Google.
I wouldn’t nominate either one for sainthood, no argument there. I walked away from Google because they are an ad company that makes devices and software - that has become increasingly more apparent in the last several years, I’m sure it was always true but less obvious in the early days.
Ehh
There’s a clear difference between accepting money from an entity and letting it control things and make decisions. Pushing for a full and clear separation from any controversial entity is how projects die.
I’d love for Firefox to be fully funded through small anonymous public donations in an ideal world. As it is, I don’t see an issue from taking Google’s money to do something that most users would do anyways.
If the default search wasn’t google, I’m certain even more users would bail on Firefox. Anyone who does want an alternative search engine is capable of clicking on it during installation.
Firefox might be able to survive on donations, if Mozilla’s CEO stopped giving herself raises
They don’t even want our money. They just let you donate to Mozilla foundation, which does other projects.
Firefox is developed by Mozilla corporation which is funded by the google deal.
I donate to several FOSS projects including monthly to KDE but I won’t donate to Mozilla until I can actually make sure my money goes to firefox. And ideally not their overpaid CEO either, no.
The day Firefox shutters its doors is the day the internet truly dies.
*the web
The internet has so far been doing a much better job surviving as a proper decentralized system than the web.
Servo is being actively worked on. Maybe it can become a worthy adversary to chrome?
I thought Servo was basically dead since the layoffs at Mozilla in 2020, but your comment caused me to look into it and evidently funding was found to resume development on it at the beginning of last year. That’s good news! (to me!)
Hell, even today a shitload of websites I visit on FF just don’t fucking render correctly and I’ll have to fire up a chromium instance just to access them.
Can you link to an example? I remember this from years ago, but haven’t encountered it for a long time.
