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Firefox on the brink?

brycewray.com

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Re: Firefox on the brink?

#351

Post by culi »

Semaphor wrote: post #312
robin_reala wrote: post #28

It’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 F…

Of course this heavily depends on niche. In some European countries Firefox is at almost 20% marketshare

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#352

Post by slig »

jeroenhd wrote: post #96

Every time I see these articles, I feel like I have to reiterate this: Firefox contains tracking protection that blocks a lot of analytics websites, like Statcounter. 2% of Statcounter's visitors being Firefox doesn't say much about the actual Firefox visitors on the websites themselves. If you're deciding to drop Firefox, ignore Statcounter or any other data mining sources. Use passive analytics and your website's a…

See the stats from Cloudflare Radar [1], which do not use client side tracking and should be very diverse.

[1]: https://radar.cloudflare.com/adoption-and-usage

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#354

Post by ndriscoll »

crazygringo wrote: post #337
ndriscoll wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 would…

> then Firefox broke forms and needs to fix it. Not your bug. Not in the real world. In the real world, you've delivered a site that doesn't work and contractually, you can be sued or not paid for not fulfilling your contract.

That's the whole point of a standard (note that I said for .gov): the government says what standard they interop with. They either conform or don't. If other implementations don't conform, they are wrong. If the site doesn't conform, it is wrong. If it's not in scope for the standard (e.g. layout/font), it's out of scope. If the standard is underspecified or wrong somehow, you fix that and .gov now targets the new revision.

The government doesn't need to worry about market share. They can just dictate that this is what your browser needs to do to work with government systems. This is both more fair and easier for everyone; you don't have a moving target to aim for, and can just refer to the standard for what to do.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#355

Post by wkat4242 »

I'm not so worried.

I don't visit any US government sites ever, and very few corporate sites. The ones that I have problems with (Microsoft O365 in particular!!) are easily faked by setting the user agent to Edge on Windows. That magically solves everything (proving that Microsoft is deliberately breaking the experience on Firefox!).

But "Supporting" a browser doesn't really mean very much. As long as the browser is standards compliant it will still work.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#356

Post by ericskiff »

This discounts the number of people who see manifest v3 and the neutering of adblockers as a dealbreaker, forcing them to switch away from Chrome. Now, when they try Firefox it’s as fast and stable as Chrome (which was not the case a few years ago, they’ve made great strides)

I’m hopeful that yields a nice bump in user ship. I was a diehard Firefox fan in the beginning, switched to chrome because it was just better on Mac for years, and now have switched back to running Firefox for 2 years without a hitch. The only thing I keep chrome around for is a dedicated Google Meet app

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#357

Post by nine_k »

abirch wrote: post #331
widdershins wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, you're right. At 5$/month they'd need 6.66M subscribed users. Still a lot, but more acheivable.

Most people don't want to pay for anything. Look at all of the workarounds for news sites. I try to pay or donate for most of what I use but there seem to be a lot of people who want to get everything for free.

I totally won't mind paying for the occasional article I open, if micropayments were a thing! Pay a quarter, read something worthy.

The problem is that micropayments are not interesting for most news outlets: the friction of current solutions is high, the resulting revenue stream, unsteady. Monthly / yearly subscriptions bring a better revenue stream, and cost way less.

If micropayments were indeed zero-friction, and effectively zero-cost, maybe they'd be (reluctantly) integrated.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#358

Post by fragmede »

freedomben wrote: post #316
oldpersonintx wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ov…

Since implementing EME, I'm not sure Firefox is critical for an open web, since by almost definition, EME isn't open. As a practical matter I can understand why they chose to implement it (though that was not without controversy), but let's not fool ourselves here.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#359

Post by crazygringo »

ndriscoll wrote: post #354
crazygringo wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> then Firefox broke forms and needs to fix it. Not your bug. Not in the real world. In the real world, you've delivered a site that doesn't work and contractually, you can be sued or not paid for not fulfilling your contract.

That's the whole point of a standard (note that I said for .gov): the government says what standard they interop with. They either conform or don't. If other implementations don't conform, they are wrong. If the site doesn't conform, it is wrong. If it's not in scope for the standard (e.g. layout/font), it's out of scope. If the standard is underspecified or wrong somehow, you fix that and .gov now targets the new re…

But government don't exist to serve standards.

Governments exist to serve their citizens -- their users.

It's extremely user/citizen-hostile to say, "well our site works but no commercial browsers do, so I guess you can't register for a health plan this year over the web."

And I don't know about you, but I sure don't want the government building its own standards-based browser required for accessing government websites...

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#360

Post by hospitalJail »

I think I'm finally okay with this. Firefox/Mozilla cannot handle their responsibility. With the death of their dominance, we can hope a new player comes forward.

I'm sick of cheerleading Firefox when it is slower than Chromium, heavier, and buggier. The only benefit is less creepy google.

I'm sorry Mozilla, when FOSS teams that are unfunded can make browsers, I expect much much much more.

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