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?
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.
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.
a full and clear separation from any potential conflict of interest (while noble) is how projects die.
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.
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.
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.
curl -k IP_Address
Open in notepad.
Read.
“Oh, an empty HTML tag and 2Mb of JavaScript!”
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.
Servo is being actively worked on. Maybe it can become a worthy adversary to chrome?
The day Firefox shutters its doors is the day the internet truly dies.
Firefox is little more than just a Chrome clone itself, financed by Google no less. It doesn’t do anything to set itself apport. If they cared about an open Internet they should have put some effort into building it (support RSS, Torrent, IPFS, etc.). If Firefox dies tomorrow, nothing much would change as the rest of the Internet already didn’t care. It might however make room for a browser that actually cares about privacy and an open Internet, instead of just using those words for marketing purpose while still having telemetry by default.
Do you have examples for the sites that don’t render correctly? I’m genuinely curious since I haven’t encountered that issue in like a decade.
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.
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.
You mean like government (and business) employees that are forced to use some flavor of
Internet ExplorerChromium?Employees? I thought OP was talking about visitors and in that case a government site is as neutral as it gets.
And a lot of those visitors are people that are forced to use chromium - such as employees that use those governmental services as a part of work. As neutral as it gets, it doesn’t mean it is actually neutral.
For example, some government websites only work with chromium
Thanks, I understand what you mean now.
Market share doesn’t equal irrelevance as others have said. I use Librewolf and without Firefox it wouldn’t exist. It likely wouldn’t exist at the quality it is without Mozilla taking Google Cash either. But it’s super important to have an alternative even if most people don’t use it. It DOES provide a limited check and balance against google doing whatever they want with the web because if the right people make the right noise then people will move over to something that’s easy, convenient, and free of whatever pain in the butt google puts in chrome that sends people over the edge. See Linux desktop and Valve for an example of how a software with very few users comparatively can force a larger company to play ball. Remember in Windows 8 when MS basically banned 3rd party software stores on the OS… or tried? And Valve made the “Steam Machine” and SteamOS? Everyone says the steam machines failed but they 100% did everything Valve wanted them to do. It was enough to have MS go back on their walled garden and allow Steam to keep operating as it had been. And now we have the steam deck on top of it.
So, it’s ok if Firefox has a small market share as long as it remains a worthy competitor.
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.
For an article that tries to push a groupthink narrative to work, the people using the “discouraged” product need to believe the “encouraged” one has feature parity with zero downsides.
I guarantee that no one is accidentally using Firefox because they’re unaware of the alternatives.
deleted by creator
That came as a surprise to me too. 2.5% is just so little.
It’s not that low everywhere. In Germany, it’s 9.79%, for example.
Most traffic nowadays comes from mobile devices and hardly anyone installs alternative browsers on them at all. They just use the default.
There sure has been a lot of propaganda being posted to Beehaw lately.
ah zdnet, a waste of CO2 if there ever was
“slides into irrelevance” - zdnet
I will be honest. I didn’t read that article because it’s too click-baity. Using https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/ I see that Firefox is about 3% of 5b users. Not insignificant.
That 3% is about 150mil users. IMO, less than it should be. Google has great security, but terrible privacy. I switched middle of last year, from brave to FF for reasons I won’t get into here. Suffice it to say, they are numerous.
It truly is troubling that they don’t have independent funding. I, for one would pay $10/y for this service. Maybe I could donate?
Anyway, it’s a superior product in many ways.
That’s total browser market. On Desktop it’s 7.61%, in Germany 17.93%, making it second place (though Edge isn’t far behind). Europe is 10.56%, North America pretty much average, Asia and South America are dragging it down.
It truly is troubling that they don’t have independent funding. I, for one would pay $10/y for this service. Maybe I could donate?
Firefox is Mozilla’s cash cow, it’s how they’re earning funds for their charitable work. And google btw isn’t the only one paying them, which search engine is the default depends on where you are.
Firefox is Mozilla’s cash cow, it’s how they’re earning funds for their charitable work. And google btw isn’t the only one paying them, which search engine is the default depends on where you are.
Thank you that’s wonderful news! I don’t have the time to keep up on browser news like that so I truly appreciate the information.
I would say a good half of posts on Lemmy are too click-baity for me to actually look at. Every title clearly has picked a side and it’s rare to see something even attempt to be impartial
I can’t disagree with you. I feel like that’s the way of the world anymore regardless of platform.
Agreed, unfortunately you’re right
There are a few good sites that document slant and coverage.
https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news
https://ground.news/landingV4/middleground
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/
I hope this helps.
From ZDNet. How much did they get paid to post this article?
How much did they get paid by a PR firm who’s subsidized entirely by Alphabet, Inc.?
Cold plain metrics can easily hide social complexity.
Assume 10 investigative journalists use modded privacy-friendly Firefox for year long investigation. Then their report is read by 10 million average news reader on stock browsers like Chrome. Network logics tell us that Firefox browser has asymmetrical value in the ecosystem than plain usage metrics can ever reveal.
The obsession with numbers (the more the better) is a major blinding effect in societies driven by hierarchical cultures.
Usage numbers are part of how they pay for ongoing support and development though.
Sadly, yes. One would hope the more core sectors use it, the more the general population would use such tools. But alas!
The obsession with numbers (the more the better) is a major blinding effect in societies driven by hierarchical cultures.
So true!
Users that use Firefox are unlikely to show up in data used for these kinda articles I’d think
I wonder if Firefox users are more likely to spoof their user agent setting? Probably not.
I’ll still use it. Compared to every other browser, it is the least disastrous regarding privacy.
