However, some commenters stuck up for the browser. I'm close to quitting since all these changes for the sake of changing perfectly working things are getting out of hand," said omma911. "You guys have completely lost the plot, RIP firefox." "So instead of keeping it solid and up to date, like implementing web app standards, you're going to implement black box AI that goes against values of privacy to make shopping easier?" queried hanger1800. Others were more specific in their critiques.
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"So.what was it you wanted to update us about, then? Because the video is over, I still have no clue, but somehow I'm more uneasy than before watching it," reported adior8ot0s. "This sounds more like a vague marketing strategy rather than an update video," complained someone identified as UberRam. 89 and the near future, declaring that, "This is the start of the journey for us here at Firefox."Ĭommenters, even those who identified themselves as longtime Firefox users, were unimpressed. "We've been asking ourselves, 'What can the browser do to help people navigate today's Internet?' We're starting to experiment with suggestions that help people find items from their history, places they frequently visit and web content most relevant to them."ĭeckelmann also delved into the past to tout the recent UI (user interface) and UX (user experience) overhaul of Firefox that debuted in v. Earlier in her message, Deckelmann had - as already noted - ticked off some of the specific ways Firefox might accomplish that goal. "We want to build experience that are smart enough to know what users are trying to accomplish and powerful enough to do it," said Selena Deckelmann, senior vice president of Firefox.
Mozilla's video-format update on Firefox was short on concrete details - just one of the criticisms from commenters - but seemed to portend some AI-like additions and enhancements to the browser. (It's hard not to see Chrome as the winner, even with Firefox hanging on Google's browser accounted for 73.2% of all browser activity in July by NetApplications' measurements.) You guys have lost the plot Some fear that, absent Firefox and its Gecko rendering engine, Chrome wins the war by default. Other browsers are in a bad way - after a face-saving climb in the second half of 2020, Apple's Safari is now back to where it started 12 months ago - but Firefox is a special case, as it's the only one of the Top Four not tied in one way or another to the technologies that power Chrome. From January 2019 to July 2021, Firefox's usage share plummeted by more than 43%, nearly double the MAU downturn.
(Back in November, Computerworld forecast that Firefox would slip under the 6% bar by August 2021.) If Firefox stays on its past-12-month trend, the browser could slip under 5% by the end of this year and below 4% by August 2022.Īs if Mozilla's MAUs weren't bad enough, NetApplications' numbers trumped them spectacularly. At the end of July, for example, Firefox's share had dwindled to 5.6%, marking the second straight month at a sub-6% mark. That recent data showed Firefox continuing its advance toward zero. ( Computerworld asked the company last year to explain the disparity, but never received a reply.) From November 2020 through July 2021, the latter the most recent, the company continued to post monthly results. In actuality, NetApplications did not halt publication of browser usage numbers.
(At the end of October 2020, when NetApplications announced the end of its browser usage data collection, Firefox's share stood at 7.2%.) But in late 2020, NetApplications said it was pulling the plug on the data source. For years, Computerworld had regularly reported on the battles for browser dominance, and as a story-within-that-story, noted a gradual shrinking of Mozilla's share.Ĭomputerworld relied on data from NetApplications, a California metrics vendor that tracked browser usage by tallying agent strings reported to the websites of its customers. To anyone paying attention, Firefox's decline was no surprise. That's a precipitous decline for a browser with no fat on its user base bones. 1, 2021, Firefox shed 57.5 million MAUs, representing a reduction of about 23%, or nearly a quarter.