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 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.
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 potential conflict of interest (while noble) 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 want 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.
There are worse things than death, like being successful by screwing people over and/or making the biosphere unlivable.
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.
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.