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by sharps1 902 days ago
There is definitely a downward usage trend from Mozilla own stats.

https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity

2 comments

Right; nobody is claiming that Firefox is doing well. But that downward trend is not proportionate with the claimed global downward trend; it's much smaller.
Firefox has lost over 20 million users in 2 years.

Jan 3 2021 210,085,100

Jan 1 2023 193,199,300

Dec 17 2023 185,599,100

I can read. The point is that the number doesn't translate: 7.5 million lost users over 2023 doesn't correspond to a 0.75% decline in global browser presence. 7.5 million is a tiny fraction of that.
It does if the global number of active browsers increased. The more people get connected to the internet, and the more of them use Chrome or Edge, the smaller Firefox' market share will be if their user numbers stay about equal.
7.5M out of 193M is 0.39%, so it's off by about a half. Hardly a "tiny fraction". Presumably the growth in internet users in the period would increase the relative decline in market share, too.
You're comparing apples to oranges. The 0.75% decline from the OP is of market share across all browsers. The figure here is a 3.9% (not 0.39%) decline in Firefox users only. This would translate to 3.9% of 3.79% = about 0.14% of market share. It's not about half but more than 5x less.
3.9%
Worth pointing out Firefox had 310 Million user in 2017. That is a lost of 100 Million user in from 2017 to 2021.
There are also more and more internet users. Marketshare and active users don't necessarily go at the same dimensions.
I'm not sure if we have reliable data on desktop computer usage stats, but I think a large part of the decline is also correlated with that - along with never having been able to significantly gain market share on mobile, which is responsible for an increasing share of people's time online.