Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did I need to append a /s for people to get my comment?
Nope, sarcasm was pretty obvious from the "iceberg jumping at the boat" part.
that was the give-away
Firefox on the brink?
311–320 of 840 posts
Re: Firefox on the brink?
#312It’s not on the brink, it’s that Firefox shims GA[1] with Enhanced Tracking Protection, which is on by default.[2] analytics.usa.gov uses GA. So you really can’t rely on usage figures that don’t represent the truth of your situation. [1] https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/blob/413b88689f3ca2a30b... [2] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-now-ava...
Just to add some anecdata, we have both Google Analytics (if you accept the GDPR tracking request…) and our own internal statistics based purely on useragents. Here are some percentages for November (this is Germany, generally far higher FF usage)
Ours:
Chrome 37.4% Firefox 24.7% Safari 21.1% Edge 7.5% Opera 2.6%
GA:
Chrome 39.3% Safari 31.5% Firefox 11.9% Edge 9.9% Samsung Internet 2.9%
For us, GA is undercounting FF by almost 13 percentage points, over 50%.
Re: Firefox on the brink?
#313"I am personally unaware of any serious reason to believe that Firefox’s numbers will improve soon."
There is a serious reason: Youtube ad-blocking. The combination of Firefox and Ublock Origin (or perhaps other ad-blockers) allows you to watch Youtube while blocking ads. Increasingly (and definitely in 2024) you will not be able to do this with Chrome.
Re: Firefox on the brink?
#314Two things about this: 1. Firefox blocks various analytics and tracking quite aggressively by default. Additionally, users of Firefox are, by and large, privacy minded and will have further mitigations. Any count of Firefox users is likely to be undercounting. 2. For the kind of basic web stuff(simple pages, forms etc) that USWDS supports it shouldn't matter greatly if Firefox is not supported. Theses standards are m…
FF is at 4% usage on Cloudflare Radar [1] which doesn't use JavaScript to measure usage.
Re: Firefox on the brink?
#315Having your rules based on % of marketplace usage is terrible... just one reason (out of many) is that is a moving target. Unbelievable (believable?) shortsightedness. I guess we're back to IE5 days. Everything is circular ehhh?
Re: Firefox on the brink?
#316Mozilla also just posted their State of Mozilla 2022 (this includes financial statements). From what I've read, it seems that expenses are up and revenue from search deals is down. https://stateof.mozilla.org/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38530382 https://www.ghacks.net/2023/12/05/mozilla-earned-close-to-60... Firefox's market share has been on the decline since 2010. https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market…
Firefox will be better off longterm as a true community project free from Mozilla.org. Let Mozilla.org die.
I'm sadly almost in this camp. Firefox is incredibly important to me and is critical for the open web to survive.
Mozilla has proven to be really bad stewards, and as long as they exist nobody is going to pick up firefox. They've had many years to wake and up correct the course but choose not to, so it may be time to die. If Mozilla disappeared, a new organization could pick it up and run with it. If it weren't so overloaded in tech already, I might even call it "Phoenix" as it arose from the ashes of Firefox.
Re: Firefox on the brink?
#317> I am personally unaware of any serious reason to believe that Firefox’s numbers will improve soon
MV3 in Chrome
Re: Firefox on the brink?
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Developers wrote and tested their sites for and with IE6, and were then surprised they rendered (in)correctly on Firefox and looked wrong But that's the point: rendering shouldn't really matter. For things that are important like government systems, we should treat web "apps" much like TeX encourages: you specify the semantics, and let the rendering engine do what it will. Don't try to precisely control it. You can…
None of that negates the need to test on various browsers to ensure compatibility.
What compatibility? If Firefox breaks forms, then Firefox broke forms and needs to fix it. Not your bug. If Chrome renders differently from edge because they decided the default color on .gov sites will be pink on white and all padding will be multiplied by 1.5, then that's fine. Not a bug. Chrome just decided to present a different look.
If it's even possible for basic functionality to break in a way where you wouldn't obviously say the browser is broken, then you've built it wrong. That means you need to test that TLS/HTTP protocols are implemented correctly and that your documents conform to a schema.
Re: Firefox on the brink?
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would e.g. take 33M users who agree to pay $5/mo for a Mozilla "support subscription" to collect $400M a year. Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but when I do the math (33M x 5 x 12) I get $1.98B. Maybe you meant $1/month?
I'm deeply disturbed of this normalization of software as a subscription service. I want the return of good old days when people could pay once for their software and use it in perpetuity.
subscription is a significantly fairer revenue model for software which undergoes regular upgrades and has support, which is most software nowadays.
It makes sure that people who continue to use continue to pay. Upfront charges are often either too low with long term users free-riding or too high, in case the project is abandoned. Subscription makes it much more likely to price products correctly.
Re: Firefox on the brink?
#320The organization that gave the world Rust, Web Assembly, and countless other useful technologies is in a probable death spiral, and most of the blame goes to Mitchell Baker. If Mozilla was not primarily driven by greed and laziness, smart people that still exist in around Firefox would have made the difficult technical decisions needed to continue to ship a useful product that protects user privacy while still being easy to support in a world dominated by Chrome and Safari.