[csin]

This 3% number is deceptive.

The whole desktop market is cratering.

I was talking to a reddit mod a few months ago. He was looking at the subreddit stats. 95% of his users were on mobile.

Think about that. We desktop users are dinosaurs.

So FireFox having a 3% market share might actually mean more than half of desktop users are on FireFox.

[OvervCW]

It is the desktop where Firefox has a 4% market share right now. Once you consider all traffic it drops down to 2%.

Source: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...

[glenstein]

I think you're right, but it's important to emphasize many of these attempts to tell the story of market share get major facts catastrophically wrong. The decline in Firefox market share from like 33% to below 10% is mostly because the world pivoted to mobile, and Firefox "dominance" was in a world of desktop browsers. It was defaults and distribution lock-in as the world pivoted to mobile that led to the change in market share. As well as the web as a whole effectively tripling in number of users, and Google leveraging its search monopoly and pushing out Chromebooks effectively at cost.

For some reason that part of the story always seems to get omitted, which I find bizarre. But the web pivoted to mobile and Google flexed its monopoly powers. I would argue that upwards of 95% of the change in market share is explained by those two factors.

[dTal]

No, the decline of Firefox market share happened in the early 2010s, on desktop, when everyone switched to Chrome because it felt way faster. I say "everyone" - this is the subset of "everyone" who were switched on enough to use a non-default browser in the first place. The rest used IE or Safari, dependent on platform.

[derbOac]

What happened in the last 6 months or so to affect those numbers? According to them, Chrome increased in percentage quite a but recently and the others all got "compressed" towards 0.

Looking at the last 10 years gives a different perspective (not great for Firefox but maybe underscores something is different recently in general):

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...

[abenga]

I can't imagine browsing the web on my phone and tablet without Firefox mobile. That would honestly be the biggest loss once this CEO takes this nonsense to the logical end.

[csin]

I'm genuinely curious. What does FireFox mobile have over it's competition?

You can't install UBlock Origin on mobile.

Like I still use FireFox on mobile, just purely out of habit. I don't really see anything better about it (I am quite inexperienced when it comes to phones).

[OvervCW]

You can install uBlock Origin on Firefox mobile; it's the only reason I use it.

[csin]

Oh wow TIL. Thanks, that is amazing.

I just looked it up. 2023 was when it started. I'm surprised Android even allows something like this.

[rightbyte]

Yeah at some point it wasn't possible. I think Mozilla did some workaround by having a bunch of wetted extensions?

[literallywho]

Pretty sure even back then, uBO was on the list of vetted extensions. I remember using it prior to 2023 (since like 2019), on my old OnePlus 6. There may have been a period it wasn’t available, but surely it wasn’t gone for too long.

[rurban]

I use several extensions on Fennec mobile: AdGuard AdBlocker, Google & YouTube cookie consent popup blocking, NoScript, Privacy Badger, Translate this page, Web Archives, uBlacklist

[dvngnt_]

you can even use extensions like vimium. it made using the galaxy xr much more usable than chrome

[edelhans]

You can also install uBlock Origin on Edge for Android btw.