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189

The fall of Firefox: Mozilla's once-popular web browser slides into irrelevance (www.zdnet.com)

submitted 10 months ago by ConstableJelly@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

181 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

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[–] Fizz@lemmy.nz 56 points 10 months ago (5 children)

Is Firefox considered bad? It works well for me and when I use Chrome or edge It feels full of junk features

[–] ConstableJelly@beehaw.org 28 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] treadful@lemmy.zip 15 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Ilandar@aussie.zone 2 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] otter@lemmy.ca 4 points 10 months ago

It works for me, as well as family members who aren't as technical / don't care about why I picked Firefox

[–] tlf@feddit.de 2 points 10 months ago

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)