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 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.
Yikes! That paints a pretty scary picture 😬
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.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
I have to agree with your sentiment. That statement did not hit me right either. It left me wondering where that piece of data come from. It’s my understanding that for decently savvy users of Firefox, extensions are a must.
Side note - I really like how you crossed out your spelling error instead of just fixing it - I always proof-read my comments after I post them (because I always forget to do it), and this might actually, in s tiny way, be useful to someone who’s still learning the language, or just didn’t know a particular working is wrong. I’m going to try and start doing this as well, thanks 😊👍
As I understand it, the message here is that any decently savvy user of Firefox turns off telemetry, so mozilla doesn’t know of them using extensions. hence why they say 80% don’t use them, people who do use them don’t give them their usage data.
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.
Boy that paints a grim picture.
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:
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.