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Actually that exists in native CSS: https://developer.mozilla.org/...

Alas, as long as you need support for dreaded IE11, you're out of luck: https://caniuse.com/#feat=css-...

Your right. . . only IE isn't supporting shadow dom (v0 was experimental, v1 is used now):
Shadow Dom Support

Now it is being included in the standard Dom/Html/CSS/Event W3C specs.
W3C


So yes, YouTube (ie Google) provided a hacked "pollyfill" and/or javascript version to emulate what was spec by W3C but not implemented by IE.

That's why nobody uses Chrome on Android.

Caniuse.com's usage table disagrees with that claim.

Chrome for Android: 32.65%
Firefox for Android: 0.18%

Nor is Firefox beating other mobile browsers.

Safari for iOS (11.2 and 11.4): 8.55%
Opera Mini (more remote desktop than browser): 2.29%
IE Mobile (10, 11, and Edge): 0.22%

The reality, when we look at browser usage statistics, is that users hate Firefox. It only has about 3.6% of the mobile and desktop markets. There are single versions of Chrome that have 3 to 5 times as many users!

Why do users hate Firefox? It's pretty clear if you listen to these users: they say that Firefox is way too slow, bloated, and restrictive. The Firefox community often treats Firefox users with disrespect and contempt. It's a negative experience.

But instead of addressing these real issues, we see moz://a do unwanted stuff like wasting resources on Pocket, Firefox OS, Rust, and other nonsense. Firefox is already irrelevant. There's no way it can be saved at this point.

OK, well...

According to this Chrome has supported these things since version 7, that's eight years ago...

https://caniuse.com/#search=de...

Chrome today reminds me a lot of what Firefox was during its early years. Each release of Chrome is something that users look forward to. These releases bring new, useful features. Chrome's already-excellent performance keeps getting better and better. Even if it isn't perfect, at least Chrome is consistently moving in a positive direction release after release.

Then there's the Firefox of today. We already know that users have been fleeing it, seeing as Firefox's total market share is likely at most about 5% at this point. The Firefox 57 release was quite a disaster. In October 2017, before Firefox 57 was released, Firefox 55 had 3.86% of the market. Firefox 57 is only at 3.55%, according to the December 2017 stats.

Firefox 57 was supposed to be a very positive release for Firefox. Yet breaking nearly all extensions, and unnecessarily changing the UI, and not delivering significant performance improvements resulted in Firefox 57 being widely disliked by users, as reflected in Firefox's dropping market share stats.

It worries me that we're seeing Chrome succeed so much, while Firefox is failing so badly. Instead of getting real competition, we're getting back to the same position we were in when IE was the dominant browser, except this time it's Chrome that's in power.

It didn't have to be like this. All that the Firefox devs had to do was listen to their users! For years we've had Firefox users saying that they just want a fast, extensible, secure browser. Yet time and time again we've seen the Firefox devs just not deliver this. Firefox 57 was supposed to be such a positive release, yet it fell on its face with such force because it just ended up screwing users over so badly.

I don't know where we go from here. Who will unseat Chrome's dominance over the browser market? It probably won't be Safari, since it's so tied to macOS and iOS these days. It probably won't be Firefox, because it's pretty much a dead browser at this point. It probably won't be Opera or Vivaldi, since they're just re-skinned Chromium browsers, essentially. Writing a browser from scratch really isn't an option any longer, given how complex they've gotten.

Thanks to Chrome's stunning success, and Firefox's abysmal failure, Chrome has basically become the driving force behind the web.

Let's compare browser market share stats from October 2017, before Firefox 57 was released against browser market share stats December 2017, after Firefox 57 was released.

The first thing to notice is that Firefox 55 had 3.86% of the market in October, but Firefox 57 only had 3.55% as of December. This indicates to me that new users aren't adopting Firefox 57, and existing users have been avoiding or leaving it.

Firefox 54 dropped from 0.24% to 0.05%. This indicates to me that users haven't been sticking with recent older versions instead of upgrading.

We must also notice that Firefox 52 dropped from 0.49% in October down to 0.44% by December. Remember that Firefox 52 is an extended support release (ESR), and we would have expected this number to have grown, or at least remained constant, if users had chosen to stick with Firefox 52 instead of upgrading to Firefox 57.

There has also been a decline in the market share of the future (at the time) versions. Firefox 56 had 0.16% of the market in October, but the equivalent next version as of December, Firefox 58, had only 0.13% of the market. So Firefox wasn't even able to maintain its more advanced users, who use upcoming versions of Firefox.

So we've seen Firefox suffer from some significant market share loss within the desktop segment.

Some people will probably point out how Firefox for Android went from 0.09% in October to 0.45% in December. There's nothing to get excited about here, though. First of all, any growth here has been more than offset by declines in the usage of desktop Firefox. Second of all, it's likely that this sudden jump is a result of people trying out Firefox, but there's little to suggest that they'll continue to use it over the long run. Third of all, a market share of 0.45% still makes Firefox for Android totally irrelevant, with mobile browsers like Chrome for Android at over 28%, UC Browser for Android at almost 9%, iOS Safari at over 7%, Samsung Internet at over 3%, and even Opera Mini at just over 3%. So Firefox is at best the 6th place mobile browser, which is a rather pathetic place to be for an organization like Mozilla that has significant resources and had specialized in browser development for a long time.

I don't see how anyone can consider Firefox 57 to have been a success. The broken extensions, the unwanted new UI, and the lack of performance improvements meant it was a very painful release for end users. We see their pain reflected in these recent browser market share statistics, which clearly show that Firefox is still losing users and not gaining users, and this is something it just can't afford to have happen given how low its market share was to begin with.

If Firefox 57 was meant to "recover" Firefox, as the summary suggests, then it completely failed at achieving this goal. I think it has actually done the opposite: Firefox 57 has accelerated Firefox's decline, as indicated by the market share stats.

WebP is great. Better lossless compression than PNG. Better lossy compression quality than jpg for comparable size. Support for lossy compression with alpha (and even lossy alpha). Unfortunately, it is not supported by IE, Edge, Safari or Firefox (although the last two are "experimenting with supporting WebP images"). See caniuse.

https://caniuse.com/#search=we...

That's actually pretty pathetic.

In the 4th quarter of fiscal year 2017 alone, Microsoft's revenue was greater than that Red Hat market cap value you gave.

Microsoft's profit in that one quarter alone was about 2 to 2.5 times the Red Hat revenue value you just gave.

It would take Microsoft only a couple of weeks to make more than the Red Hat revenue value!

Your comment reminds me of the delusional people who claim that Firefox is a "success", despite recent market share stats showing it only has about 5% of the browser market, while individual versions of Chrome like Chrome 62 and Chrome 63 each have 2 or more times as many users!

What makes your point even worse is that Red Hat is perhaps the most successful of the open source focused companies, and it's "achievement", if we can even call it that, pales in comparison to so many of its competitors.

I'm assuming you didn't even bother to read the summary, since it clearly states:

The name changes does not affect Opera Software AS or the Opera and Opera Mini internet browsers, all of which Otello sold in 2016, Opera Software AS said in a separate statement.

But while we're on the topic of the Opera web browser, it's important to note that it has almost the same number of users as Firefox does these days.

The most recent browser market share stats show that the various Opera browsers have a market share of around 4%. Firefox, on the other hand, is only about 5% in total, including their desktop and mobile offerings.

We should also remember that Firefox is probably losing market share at a much faster rate than the Opera browsers are. Firefox 57 was a disastrous release for Firefox, breaking most extensions for most users. The new UI also hasn't been well received, and many users report not seeing any of the claimed performance improvements. More recently there was the disastrous marketing stunt where they injected a very suspicious extension into Firefox users' browsers unexpectedly. The negative sentiment surrounding Firefox is perhaps at an all-time high. People are truly disliking Firefox now more than they ever have before.

So I think it's very plausible that Firefox will shed more and more users, especially after this latest extension injection debacle. All it will take is them losing 1% of their users to end up where Opera is. Seeing as Firefox has dropped from about 35% of the market down to 5% within only a few short years, losing 1% is very possible.

If you consider Opera irrelevant, then Firefox is just about as irrelevant now, and is likely to become more and more irrelevant as its market share continues to drop lower and lower.

Lets face it both are the Distant 3rd place players in their respected areas.

Based on the latest browser market share stats, Firefox isn't in 3rd place. It's much worse than that.

Yes, Chrome is the leader, without a doubt, at about 60% of the market, including both mobile and desktop devices.

Second place goes to Safari, with about 12% of the market.

UC Browser for Android is at about 8%.

So at this point we know that Firefox is at best 4th place, at around 4% to 5% of the market.

Things get hazy at this point, as there are several other browsers near this range, including Samsung Internet, IE/Edge and Opera.

Realistically, Firefox could be well below IE/Edge, given that there are many corporate and institutional users of Microsoft's browsers on large Windows intranets, and these users wouldn't appear in usage data collected for the public web.

So Firefox is probably the 5th place browser now, with at least Samsung Internet and the Opera family of browsers not far behind. If Firefox were to lose a percent or two of market share within the near future, and the nearby competitors don't lose any users, then Firefox could soon fall to perhaps 6th or even 7th place!

The most interesting thing to notice with the stats is how much of a disaster Firefox 57 has been.

If we look at the October 2017 stats, which don't include the final release of Firefox 57 that happened mid November, we see that 4.28% of the market was using Firefox 55, 56 or 57. The November 2017 stats show that Firefox 56, 57 and 58 only have 4.14% of the market! We should also note that the Firefox 52's usage has dropped from 0.50% to 0.49%.

Firefox 57 was supposed to be a hugely important release that was meant to draw in new users. But we've seen the opposite: Firefox has actually lost market share!

We shouldn't be surprised, of course. Firefox 57 is well-known for breaking most extensions, for having a generally-disliked UI, and for not really offering any real improvements to its users. The extension breakage in particular drove many users to alternate browsers, now that Firefox no longer offers an advantage in this area, and it actually offers a lot of disadvantages in other areas.

Things are looking really bleak for Firefox.

LOL! "Firefox" and "preferred" should never appear in the same sentence!

Just look at the recent browser market share stats.

Firefox? It has about 5% of the market, including both desktop and mobile users.

Chrome? It has over 60% of the market!

Keep in mind that those percentages don't yet include the people who already have or will be leaving Firefox and moving to Chrome or some other browser due to Firefox 57 breaking most of their extensions.

And keep in mind that Firefox 57 won't attract any significant number of new users because it's still slower than Chrome and pretty much every other one of its main competitors.

So by next month Firefox's numbers will likely be lower.

Pretty much nobody prefers Firefox. But people do prefer Chrome, however. Why is that? It's because Chrome is actually a fast and efficient browser that doesn't waste CPU and RAM. Chrome is a pleasant browser to use. Firefox? People often find it to be a pain to use!

What the W3C does is pretty much irrelevant, since they aren't really a browser vendor. (I think the Amaya project was ended years ago.)

If any browser vendor is to blame for Chrome becoming the standard, I think that blame would fall on Mozilla.

Firefox had some amazing momentum. It rapidly got to about 35% of the browser market, back when IE was its main competitor. But then Mozilla decided to throw it all away. They started making unwanted changes to Firefox, and continued doing this even after users screamed, "NO! STOP!". They also ignored mobile platforms until it was far too late, and even then they dicked around with the awful Firefox OS abomination instead of creating a usable mobile browser.

Now Firefox is down to about 5% of the market, and it has essential no mobile usage (0.25%). Firefox 57, which was released recently, is a hugely disruptive release, as it breaks Firefox's long-standing extension system. A lot of users have voiced displeasure with it, and it's likely that Firefox will lose a lot of its few remaining users as a result of this extension breakage, without actually drawing in any significant number of new users.

I know some Firefox fanatics will claim that Chrome is popular because it's "bundled" or "advertised by Google", but those claims are nonsensical. Neither of those force users to start using Chrome, and neither of those force users to continue using Chrome. The reality is that people use Chrome because it's a far better browser than Firefox. It's faster, it uses less memory, it works with more sites, it has much better support for corporate network environments, and people actually like it. Interestingly, most of Chrome's biggest benefits are also Firefox's biggest weaknesses!

It didn't have to be this way. Firefox could have continued to become the dominant browser had its developers just listened to what Firefox's users wanted. The users were very clear when they said they wanted a fast, light, and extensible browser. Yet the Firefox developers didn't listen, and instead forced stupid stuff like Australis, Hello, Pocket, Quantum and WebExtensions on Firefox's users.

If Firefox's users had been treated better, and if Firefox had been improved in ways that the users wanted, then they wouldn't have had to flee to Chrome just to get a barely tolerable browsing experience. We'd be looking at Firefox with 60% or more of the market, with Chrome down around 5%. But instead we got the opposite, where Chrome is the dominant browser, and Firefox is withering away into obscurity.

And thanks to Firefox's failure, Chrome has essentially become the decider of what is and isn't a web standard. Google will now decide the future of the web.

Based on the reactions I've seen to it so far, I think that Firefox 57 is shaping up to be a complete disaster. Perhaps even the worst disaster Firefox has faced yet.

There is a lot of negativity surrounding it. It's very evident when you read the comments here at Slashdot for the various stories about Firefox 57. People are not happy. Lots of users are reporting broken extensions, as was to be expected. I see very few comments suggesting it's faster, and the comments I do see are questionable (they seem to be from biased fanatics). The UI changes have not been well received.

There has also been a lot of negativity in the discussion at Hacker News and Reddit, although it may not be as obvious because of all of the downmodding and censorship that often occurs at those sites.

Now, we should remember that we've come to expect a negative reaction to new Firefox releases. Most of them have been awful. But the negativity in this case is worse than I think I've ever seen, except maybe around when the terrible Australis UI was forced on Firefox's users.

Firefox's market share is already really atrocious. It has only about 5% of the desktop market, and 0.25% of the mobile market. Those are absolutely terrible numbers. Even though they can't go much lower, I think they will be lower by the time next month's stats are out.

This was supposed to be a hugely important release. But so far it looks like everything about it has been a flop. Users are unhappy about the broken extensions. Users don't find it any faster. Users don't like the new UI. It's clear that a lot of users are now moving to Chrome or some other browser instead of dealing with these problems affecting Firefox 57.

I think we'll soon be looking back on Firefox 57 as the release that finally ruined Firefox beyond salvation.

At 65% at the moment, if you look at usage you'll see it's only iPhone 10.3 and Edge that's likely to switch... Opera Mini, UC Browser, Samsung Internet etc. are old phones that occasionally are used for the web and IE11 is also just for compatibility. I think it's to the point where you could have WebAssembly + fallback the same way you should have JavaScript + fallback for NoScript users today. Or if it's dependent on new functionality, just say you need to upgrade. Not every site needs to support 100% of the users.

We are just a few short steps from asm.js becoming a reality, and all the benefits that will flow from there.

Webassembly is here NOW and available in all major browsers. The major drawback right now is that it can't access the DOM, but that will change in the future.

I don't think that Google is embracing-extending-extiguishing the web. They can't really help it that Chrome has over 50% of the browser market. It's not a monopoly situation; there are numerous other competing web browsers out there, including from major vendors like Microsoft and Apple, that have a sizable share of the market.

I know a lot of people mistakenly think that Chrome is successful because Google advertises it. Well that's not the case at all. The reality is that people use Chrome because it's the least worst of all of the browsers. They typically don't like Chrome's UI, but the other browsers don't offer a better UI, either. Where Chrome really shines is that it's fast and light. While Edge and Safari aren't slow, Chrome still often feels faster. If there's one browser that consistently feels slow and bloated, it would have to be Firefox, in my experience. So users do the sensible thing: they use Chrome, or sometimes Edge and Safari. They avoid Firefox.

If anyone is to blame for the current situation, I think it would be moz://a. Firefox was well on its way to becoming what Chrome is today: the majority-used browser. Firefox was up there around 35% of the market around its peak. But then the Firefox developers started making so many unwanted changes to Firefox, even after users begged them not to make the changes. The Firefox developers trashed Firefox's UI by trying to imitate Chrome's rather awful UI. The Firefox developers even put "sponsored tiles", which is a deceptive way of saying "advertisements", into Firefox for some time! Then it took them many years to get multi-process support working. More recently they've made changes that will soon break a lot of extensions. Yet during all of this time we've seen little done to address the performance and excessive memory usage complaints users have been pointing out for many years.

It really doesn't help that moz://a has wasted time and resources on failures like Firefox OS, Rust, and Servo, instead of directing these resources toward improving Firefox.

Even if Chrome crawled along at a snail's pace, they'd still be leading the direction of the web because the competitors, especially moz://a, just can't seem to get their acts together.

We should have been living in a 2017 where Firefox was used by 60% of browser users, IE/Edge was used by 20%, Safari was used by 15%, and the remaining 5% were various niche browsers like Opera. But I think moz://a made some serious missteps along the way, and instead we live in a 2017 where Chrome dominates the browser landscape. Thanks, moz://a!

It's amazing how quickly Chrome is being developed. Each release brings about significant changes. If any browser is dictating the future direction of the web, it's Chrome. The other browsers are stuck playing catch-up. While we see Safari and Edge making good progress, it's Firefox that I'm most worried about. I just don't think it can keep up with the other browsers. While browsers like Chrome, Safari and Edge keep improving, Firefox keeps falling further and further behind.

There's been a lot of hype building about Firefox 57. It's supposedly faster, but I've been using it for some time now and I haven't noticed any difference. What I did notice was nearly all of my extensions breaking, now that Firefox uses a poor imitation of Chrome's extension model. Firefox 57, which last I heard is supposed to be released in mid-November, could very well be the release that effectively ends Firefox's usability for many users. I don't think that regular users will put up with the broken extensions. They'll think that Firefox is completely broken and they'll just switch to Chrome or Edge or Safari instead.

It didn't have to be like this. Firefox was doing great not so long ago, when it had well over 30% of the market. Now it's down to about 5% of the market. Firefox could have been leading the direction that the web takes. But they squandered all of this! Firefox's unwanted imitation of Chrome's appearance ruined it for many users. Failed efforts like Firefox OS, Rust and Servo have taken away resources that could have been used to improve Firefox.

What's the end result? Google, and to a lesser extent Apple and Microsoft, will decide the future of the web. Firefox will be dragged along, with no real say of its own.

What's more interesting than that is that this trend will likely result in the total destruction of Firefox.

Just look at the most recent browser market share stats.

Yeah, Firefox only has about 5% of the browser market. But nearly all of it is on non-mobile platforms! Firefox for Android has only 0.09% of the market! Yes, that's right, that's 0.09%!

To make matters worse, it's clear that Chrome for Android, at nearly 30%, and iOS Safari, at around 10%, and UC Browser for Android, at about 7.5%, and Samsung Internet, at about 4%, and Opera Mini at about 3%, already control the mobile market.

Any decline in the number of desktop PCs will mean a decline in the usage of Firefox. And any increase in the use of mobile devices will result in almost no growth for Firefox, as it's at best the 6th-place mobile browser.

It seems really unlikely that Firefox will be able to recover in any meaningful way. Its only market is declining, while it's not making any inroads into new markets.

The death of the PC means the death of Firefox.

I think it'd be far more likely for Mozilla to disappear long before Google does.

Firefox is the only product of Mozilla's that really sees much use, and even it's losing market share. The latest browser stats show it has only about 5% of the market now, and essentially no presence in the mobile market (0.04%!).

If I'm not mistaken, their search deal with Yahoo expires in 2019. Given Yahoo's state, and Firefox's almost non-existent market share, I wouldn't be optimistic about it being extended.

After that, the rest of Mozilla's products could, in my opinion, be seen as failures, including Persona, Firefox OS, Rust, Servo, Thunderbird, and Pocket. I can't really see how any of them help bring in revenue.

What's their greatest accomplishment as of late? Obfuscating their logo into "moz://a"!

I think the future looks very bleak for Mozilla.

According to the latest browser usage stats, Firefox for Android has only 0.04% of the browser market! To put that in perspective, Chrome for Android has 29.5%. iOS Safari has about 10%. UC Browser for Android has 7.9%. Samsung Internet has about 3%. Opera Mini has 2.7%. Android Browser 4.4 has 0.81%. Even IE Mobile 11 has 0.29%!

Firefox for iOS isn't listed among those stats, as far as I can tell. Maybe that could be because it has pretty much no market share at all? I can't see it being higher than Firefox for Android.

Mozilla has totally dropped the ball on mobile web browsing. It's pretty sad when Firefox for Android has 0.04% of the market, but even an obscure browser like IE Mobile 11 manages to get 0.29% of it!

Maybe the situation would be different if the resources wasted on Firefox OS were instead dedicated toward real improvements for both the desktop and mobile versions of the Firefox web browser. That said, desktop Firefox isn't doing too well either. It has only about 5% of the market, and its percentage is expected to drop soon thanks to the disruptive Firefox 57 release that's due out in November which will end support for non-WebExtensions extensions.

Your attitude is a perfect example of why Firefox is on its way out. If you knew anything about Firefox 57 you'd know that it could very well be the final nail in Firefox's coffin. You would not be recommending that users look forward to it!

Firefox 57 is due in November, and it's the first release that's supposed to only support WebExtensions extensions. This will very likely break many existing extensions. Due to differing capabilities between the existing extension model and WebExtensions it may not even be possible to reimplement some existing extensions!

So I think we'll see two things happen:

1) A small number of Firefox users will continue to use pre-57 versions, so they can continue to use extensions that won't be or can't be supported in Firefox 57 and beyond.

2) A much larger number of Firefox users will move to Chrome (or Chromium) and never look back. If all of their extensions use a Chrome-like model, there's no reason to use Firefox. In my experience, and that of many other people, Firefox is very slow, bloated, and memory-hungry compared to Chrome. I'm sure you'll parade some bullshit "benchmarks" showing otherwise, but these benchmarks don't correspond at all to the actual experience of using Firefox and feeling just how less responsive it is than Chrome.

Firefox's market share is already pretty pathetic. Firefox 54 has only 2.94% of the market. Firefox 55 has only 1.19%. Firefox 52 has 0.49%. The rest of Firefox's releases, including Firefox for Android, are well under 1%. Many of them are in the 0.01% to 0.05% range.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if Firefox 57 knocks Firefox down to the 1% to 2% range.

Firefox is already pretty irrelevant now that's down to about 5%. When it's down to the lowest of the low single-digit percentages, the chance of a recovery will basically become non-existent. And once the Yahoo search deal expires, it's doubtful that any other organization will want to sign a search deal with Mozilla. Why would they, if Firefox has only 1% or maybe 2% of the market at that time? Firefox's future will be even bleaker than it already is if Mozilla were to lose out on their main source of income.

You hype Firefox 57 as if it's a good thing. The evidence suggests otherwise. It shows that Firefox 57 has the potential to be the most disastrous release in Firefox's history, even worse than the early rapid-release extension breakage debacle and even worse than the Australis debacle.

My opinion is that Mozilla is to blame for this happening.

It wasn't long ago that Firefox had 35% or more of the browser market, and this allowed Mozilla to exert a lot of influence over how the web developed. They could take a given web standard and say, "No, we don't like this. Either change it or we won't implement it." Since their browser was being used by 1 in 3 web users, them deciding not to support a standard could basically render that standard irrelevant.

But that's no longer the case. Now Firefox has only about 5% of the browser market, and even that may be a generous figure. Firefox has only 0.04% of the mobile market. Yes, you read that right! 0.04%! Not even half of a tenth of one percent!

Its 5% market share puts Firefox well, well, well behind Chrome. It puts Firefox well behind Safari. It puts Firefox well behind UC Browser for Android.

With its 5% of the market, Firefox is now down in the region of browsers like Opera Mini and Samsung Internet. It's getting to the point where even web developers don't care enough to test with Firefox, because it just isn't worth it.

Keep in mind that this is before Firefox 57 is released. Firefox 57 has been touted as only supporting WebExtensions extensions, which could very well break a lot of existing extensions. I could see this sort of breakage being the final straw for many of the few remaining Firefox users, who will likely move to Chrome, Safari or Edge, thus sending Firefox's market share even lower than it already is.

Nobody cares what the developers of a browser with 5% or less of the market think. Such a browser is seen as irrelevant, its users wishes are seen as irrelevant, and its developers' desires are seen as irrelevant. None of its competitors have to give a damn what Mozilla thinks these days. This means that Mozilla has limited influence over the future of the web.

It didn't need to be this way. Firefox was doing so well until Mozilla started making change after change that Firefox users did not want. I know a lot of people will claim, "But Google advertised Chrome!". But that's just an irrelevant excuse. People continued to use Chrome instead of Firefox because Chrome gave a much better experience. It became even sillier to use Firefox after Firefox started imitating Chrome's appearance and behavior more and more, but not Chrome's superior performance and small memory usage.

If Mozilla had only listened to its users, and not made unwanted changes to Firefox, then Firefox would likely still have 30% or more of the browser market. If they had gotten the performance of Firefox fixed up, Firefox could probably have even had over 50% of the market. But now it's at 5%, and this number is decreasing.

Mozilla could have influenced the future of the web. But now that Firefox has lost so much market share those driving the development of the web (Google, Apple and Microsoft) no longer have to care what Mozilla thinks or wants!

You're missing the point. This topic isn't really about specific individuals taking a vacation.

Sometimes it's like entire organizations are collectively "taking a vacation", and are oblivious to their ongoing downfall.

An example I'm thinking of is moz://a. While they had some success with Firefox about a decade ago, and this landed them some lucrative search deals with Google and then Yahoo, things have gone down hill for them since then.

Firefox has lost a lot of market share. Recent browser stats show it now has only about 4% to 5% of the market. It has 0.04% (not a typo!) of the mobile market. This puts it well behind Chrome, Safari, and UC Browser for Android. So it's quickly becoming irrelevant.

After Firefox, moz://a doesn't really have any products that see much use.

Thunderbird had a number of users, but moz://a essentially gave up on it.

SeaMonkey never had many users to begin with.

Persona was a failure, I think.

Firefox OS was a huge failure, I think. In my opinion it may be one of the biggest software debacles in history.

Bugzilla is pretty much dead.

Servo is failing. I tried a recent build of it about a week ago, and it crashed on me almost immediately. It also had a lot of rendering glitches.

Rust is failing. It had a lot of hype early on, but nothing much came of it. Contemporary new languages like Go and Swift are seeing far more adoption, and are being used for real software systems. C++17 is often a better choice than Rust, too.

Now we see moz://a venturing into idiocy like "battling information pollution", which everybody else just calls censorship.

While all of this is going on, it's like moz://a is oblivious to what's happening. It's like they don't realize that once Firefox is gone, nobody will care what they're doing or what they're working on. Firefox is literally the only thing keeping moz://a relevant, and its market share keeps on shrinking.

It's like the entire organization is "on vacation", and they're unable or unwilling to see what's happening to their organization as it gradually slides into irrelevance.

What do you think about an organization like moz://a?

At first they didn't have much success. Mozilla Suite didn't see much use.

But then they got lucky with Firefox. It actually managed to get approximately 35% of the browser market at its peak. This allowed them to sign some lucrative deals with Google, and then Yahoo.

However, since then we've seen Firefox's market share drop off severely. The latest stats put it at maybe 5%, if we're feeling generous. They have essentially no mobile presence.

We haven't seen much happen with their other projects. Thunderbird was mildly successful, but it has essentially been abandoned. Bugzilla is seen as a relic now. SeaMonkey is quite irrelevant.

They've had a project like Persona, that really went nowhere. Firefox OS was pretty much a disaster.

Now we see them wasting resources on their Rust programming language, and the Servo browser engine they're writing in Rust. Neither of these projects is making any impressive progress.

Lately we've seen them expand into questionable things like "battling information pollution", and changing their logo to the absurd "moz://a".

Should these various efforts, including the failed ones, be considered "pivots"?

Their current deal with Yahoo is to end in 2019, I believe. With Firefox's ever-dropping market share, and no mobile presence, I find it hard to believe that any company would want to sign a similar deal with moz://a. Even if a deal were signed, I can't see it being as lucrative as their past deals. After all, a browser with 2% or less of the market is pretty much irrelevant.

What would they "pivot" to doing if Firefox ends up with essentially no users?

If they "pivot" to so-called "social justice" initiatives and other politically-driven causes, should they even be considered a software or a technology company any longer?

The latest web browser market share stats show that Firefox is in a terrible position right now.

And that's why I use Firefox.

The latest web browser market share stats show that Firefox is in a terrible position right now. The desktop versions of Firefox only have about 5% of the market. Firefox for Android has only 0.04% (yes, that's way less than even just 1%!) of the market.

Chrome is over 50% of the market. Safari is at about 12%. UC Browser for Android is at about 9%. IE/Edge are at about 6%. So even in a best-case scenario, Firefox is now the 5th place browser.

With the Opera family of browsers and Samsung Internet at about 4% each, Firefox could soon find itself as the 7th place browser if it keeps losing users.

Firefox 57 is shaping up to be a disastrous release, due to the planned switch to only supporting WebExtensions extensions. This could very well cause breakage of a lot of existing extensions, some of which there are no WebExtensions-compatible equivalents of. This will likely cause many users to ditch Firefox in favor of some other browser. Some might use Pale Moon, while others will probably move to Chrome, Vivaldi, Opera, Brave or some other browser based on Blink or WebKit. So the possibility of Firefox losing a few more percentage points of market share in the near future is, I am afraid, very real.

In any sort of a real company, anything close to this kind of market share loss would result in panic and action. Heads would have rolled long ago. The existing staff would have been shaken up, if not completely removed and replaced. At the very least, a significant and in-depth inquiry would have been performed to figure out exactly what was going on to cause the drop in market share.

Yet I don't think we've seen any of this. It's like Mozilla is perfectly fine with Firefox's dropping market share. This is particularly strange, as Firefox is really the only product of theirs that people use. So many of their other projects have essentially been left to rot (Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, Bugzilla), or were soundly rejected by potential users right off the bat (Persona, Firefox OS, Pocket, Firefox for Android), or have been spinning their wheels endlessly accomplishing very little (Servo, Rust). It's even stranger when we realize that Firefox is likely their only source of income. So keeping Firefox's share of the market up should be their biggest concern.

I don't know what the hell is going on at Mozilla, but it's almost as if they have no idea that they're becoming irrelevant at a very rapid pace. Or if they are aware, it's like they're not taking any sort of action to prevent Firefox from losing the rest of its users. In many ways it's like the opposite is happening; they're making changes that will only serve to annoy and drive away the few users who do continue to use Firefox.

It's almost surreal. Given how low Firefox's market share is getting, Mozilla should be in a state of total panic right now.

I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but the latest browser usage stats show that more people use Safari than use Firefox.

iOS Safari has just over 10% of the market. macOS Safari has about 2% of the market. So 12% of web users are using Safari.

Firefox for Android has 0.04% (yes, that is much less than 1%!) of the market. Firefox for iOS doesn't even register, and probably shouldn't even be considered because it uses WebKit instead of Gecko. Firefox for desktop, despite supporting far more OSes than Safari, only has about 5% of the market. Since Firefox has essentially no mobile presence, its total market share is only about 5%.

As we can see, Safari has about 2.5 times as many users as Firefox has!

You joke about Opera, but it's actually very close to Firefox's usage. Opera Mini has about 3.2% of the market, and desktop Opera has about 0.8%. So Opera has about 4% of the browser market.

Rumor has it that Firefox 57's switch to the WebExtensions extension model will likely break a lot of existing extensions. This could be disastrous for Firefox's already-dwindling market share. If this breakage drives away more users, as it very well could, it's very possible that Firefox's 5% will drop below Opera's 4%. If some of these former Firefox users switch to Opera, it will be even worse for Firefox.

When you factor in how UC Browser for Android has about 9% of the market, and IE and Edge have about 5%, Firefox may soon be behind Chrome, Safari, UC Browser for Android, IE/Edge, and Opera in terms of market share.

Yes, Firefox could easily become the 6th place browser in the very near future! If that happens, I think it's safe to consider it to be "dead". It wouldn't be as irrelevant as Servo, mind you, but it would still be quite irrelevant.

As a long time Firefox user, I'm scared about the upcoming Firefox 57 release. According to that Mozilla blog post, as of Firefox 57 "Firefox will only run WebExtensions." So that could mean a lot of existing extensions will no longer work.

Firefox's market share has already fallen precipitously. The most-used release, Firefox 54, only has 3.75% of the market. The next most popular release of Firefox, Firefox 52, has only 0.52%. Firefox for Android has only 0.04% of the market. Overall, Firefox has only about 5% of the market.

5% is dangerously low. Chrome, for example, is over 50%. Safari has over 10%. UC Browser for Android has over 9%. Firefox is now in the range of Opera Mini, with its 3% of the market.

I think that Firefox 57, and this switch to WebExtensions, will be what finally eliminates Firefox as a viable web browser. Broken extensions will no doubt anger many of Firefox's few remaining users. I would not be surprised if many of them will move to some other browser. And these are users that Firefox can't afford to lose.

Firefox 57 takes away one of the few remaining strong points of Firefox: its flexible and powerful extension system.

Firefox doesn't even have privacy working in its favor any longer. Firefox's privacy policy shows that it sends a lot of information to Mozilla and others. For example, it indicates that even Firefox's geolocation capabilities can use Google's service, and this involves sending information to Google.

So Firefox will soon become an almost identical clone of Chrome, including its own imitation of Chrome's UI, Chrome's extension model, and Chrome's privacy concerns. Yet Firefox still can't match Chrome's performance, even if some Firefox fanatics claim otherwise. Firefox users have clearly indicated that they find Firefox to be too slow, too bloated, and to use too much memory.

For all intents and purposes, we should probably consider Firefox to be a "dead" browser at this point. Its market share is dropping, and could very well be under 1% by this time next year. It has dropped to such a low range that web developers no longer test with it. This will likely result in more and more web sites that don't work well with Firefox, making the Firefox user experience even worse.

Users won't waste their time with Firefox when they can just use Chrome instead, and get the same UI and privacy experience, but with much better performance and reliability.

The worst part of all of this is that it didn't have to be like this. Firefox's developers didn't need to copy Chrome. They didn't need to ruin the Firefox user experience that Firefox users had come to love. Firefox could have been its own independent browser. Yet all of this potential has been discarded, and the end result is disturbing: Firefox is, or soon will be, an unusable browser for most of its users.

Long time Slashdot readers will know how it was always Microsoft, and then later on SCO, who were accused of causing harm to Linux distributions, and open source software in general.

Yet it's now becoming more and more apparent that it's not outside influences that are most harmful to Linux and open source, but rather it's the open source projects that destroy themselves by making idiotic and unwanted changes, which in turn causes the best users to flee to alternatives.

This gedit nonsense is just a small part of the GNOME project destroying itself through the disastrous GNOME 3 released. GNOME 3 is a complete regression compared to the GNOME 2 user experience, forcing its best users and developers to seek alternatives. It wasn't Microsoft that made this happen. It wasn't SCO that made this happen. It was the GNOME project itself!

Firefox is another example. Years of unwanted changes forced on its users by the Firefox developers have caused these users to flee to Chrome and other browsers. Now Firefox has only about 5% of the browser market. That puts it well below Chrome, well below Safari, and well below UC Browser for Android. Even Opera Mini, at 3.26%, has about as many users as Firefox 54's 3.75%! Now Firefox has become an irrelevant, fourth- or fifth-tier browser that's ignored by users and web developers alike. It wasn't Microsoft that made this happen. It wasn't SCO that made this happen. It was the Firefox project itself!

The Linux distros that have forced systemd on their users is another example. Debian was once known as a solid, robust, trustworthy Linux distro. But it has lost that reputation now that it has switched to systemd. Lots of users have reported problems with systemd, as seen by the bug reports and mailing list postings begging for help with problems affecting systemd. Many of these Linux users have had to switch to FreeBSD, macOS, or even Windows in order to get a reliable OS. It wasn't Microsoft that made this happen. It wasn't SCO that made this happen. It was these Linux distros themselves!

The worst enemy of open source projects isn't Microsoft or SCO. The worst enemy of open source projects are their own leadership and developers!

Also Mozilla, implement the HTML5 Form Input Tags for date time month etc. That would be useful.

Indeed, finish adding support for at least the following:

• datetime tags
• webp images
• Universal Second Factor (U2F) devices

Also Mozilla, implement the HTML5 Form Input Tags for date time month etc. That would be useful.

Indeed, finish adding support for at least the following:

• datetime tags
• webp images
• Universal Second Factor (U2F) devices

Also Mozilla, implement the HTML5 Form Input Tags for date time month etc. That would be useful.

Indeed, finish adding support for at least the following:

• datetime tags
• webp images
• Universal Second Factor (U2F) devices

Despite being a relatively minor product from Apple, and one that these days only really runs on macOS or iOS, it turns out that a lot of people use Safari.

According to recent browser stats, iOS Safari has about 10% of the browser market.

This is well above Firefox for Android's 0.03% (yes, that's right, it's way less than even just 1%!) share of the market.

macOS Safari has about 2% to 3% of the market.

To put that into perspective, macOS Safari has more users than Edge does (which has about 1.5% of the market).

Even Firefox, which also runs on macOS, in addition to many other platforms that Safari doesn't currently support (like Windows, Linux, *BSDs, Solaris, and so on), only has about 4% to 5% of the market.

While Chrome is clearly the dominant browser, it's safe to say that Safari is now the second-most used browser across all platforms.

Firefox has made itself irrelevant, by totally dropping the ball on mobile and by driving away so many of the users of desktop Firefox.

Most web designers today test in Chrome, Safari and IE/Edge. More and more of them are ignoring Firefox just because its share of the market has fallen so much. Firefox has essentially become a "dead" browser in the eyes of many web developers and web users.

Here's the thing that's really pathetic about this whole situation: FF users have been complaining about performance problems for many, many years.

Yet FF's most ardent supporters have always denied or dismissed these complaints, claiming that "FF is fast" or "FF doesn't suffer from performance problems", despite so many users experiencing horrible performance when using FF.

So if these performance problems allegedly didn't exist, then why the fuck did Mozilla need to create this "Quantum Flow" project to fix FF's responsiveness?!

And if there allegedly weren't performance problems, then why have these recent changes resulted in significant performance boosts?!

It's no wonder we've seen FF's market share drop down to only about 5%.

FF's worst enemy isn't Chrome. FF's worst enemy is its own advocates, who treat FF's regular users like absolute shit.

When regular FF users reported very real performance problems with FF, these FF fanatics denied these problems, driving away most of these other FF users.

Yet here we are, with it being shown that earlier versions of FF did in fact suffer from very poor performance. The FF users who were driven away have been vindicated. The FF fanatics have been proven wrong.

It's really pathetic that it took this long for these problems to be taken seriously, and even longer for some initial fixes to be made. Maybe FF would still be up around 30% of the browser market, if not higher, had the complaints about FF's performance been taken seriously years ago, and the users who reported these performance problems not been ridiculed and dismissed.

Other open source projects should learn from the mistakes that FF has made: when a large number of users repeatedly report performance problems, take these reports seriously! There probably is a performance problem that should be fixed! Don't dismiss these users. Don't ridicule and insult these users. Take them seriously! Look into the problems that they're reporting.

There have been reports saying that the upcoming FF 57 will likely only support WebExtensions add-ons.

Once released, it could mean that a lot of FF users would find their old extensions no longer work.

I suspect that this will be the final nail in FF's coffin.

Recent stats put FF at about 5% of the market.

After FF 57, I wouldn't be surprised if it lost 2% to 3%.

That will put it well within the irrelevant territory.

The whole Rust-in-FF situation may become moot.

FF may become completely irrelevant before it really starts using Rust code.

I've seen some places where they could have the files sizes of their images cut in half without impacting quality.

Until you view the picture on a high-DPI monitor, at which point the images become a blurfest compared to the adjacent text. To work around this, some sites send photos at double resolution in case the user is on a Retina display or in case the user chooses Zoom. The srcset attribute is supposed to fix this but still doesn't work correctly in IE or Edge.

This. It's very common to have separate "development" and "deployment" versions (the latter often with a title like ".min.js"), the latter having been run through a program that mangles it not to "hide" things, but to minimize bandwidth. Part of the mangling can be undone on the client side. Part of it can't.

Honestly, I think it'd be best for everyone if we'd finally get around to standardizing Javascript compilation, with servers being able to request both compiled and uncompiled versions. Then everyone's happy. Developers can code in a nice, easy to read format, don't have to deal with maintaining two versions, and have the smallest-possible bandwidth use on deployment. Web users have their pages load fast, run fast, and can in development mode request the raw code. Having the raw code as a delivery option allows for backwards compatibility with older browsers. What's the drawback?

There's a push in the direction of WebAssembly, but it's not the same. It has no "backwards compatibility mode and support is currently limited. It doesn't give users the source code. It doesn't allow for using today's massive JS codebase. Etc. Emscripten isn't much better.

Neither IE nor Firefox supports pointer:coarse.

Opus is superior to MP3

I agree with you that Opus is technically better. But technically better means little if your listeners' playback application does not support it. Among major web browsers tracked by Can I use..., WebKit-based web browsers do not support Opus sources in <audio> elements. This includes Safari for macOS and every browser for iOS.

When we look at recent browser usage stats we see that Chrome has 50% or more of the market. Safari has about 10%, but it's mainly on mobile devices. Other mobile browsers like UC Browser for Android, Samsung Internet and Opera Mini are about 15%. IE and Firefox are both down to around 5% or 6%. Then there are various minor players.

"Web browser" today means Chrome. If Chrome doesn't support some web technology, then it may as well not exist. If Chrome supports a technology, then Chrome's level of support effectively defines the standard.

So what's the point of the W3C these days?

Is it just to document how Chrome behaves, so the other lesser browser vendors can imitate it more closely?

With such a lack of competition when it comes to web browsers, an organization like the W3C seems to be toothless. Before moz://a ruined Firefox's user experience for so many of its users, at least there was some competition. But that has evaporated.

I don't see how the W3C can be anything other than a glorified documentation writer at this point. Maybe things will change in the future, but it seems unlikely to happen any time soon. Nobody else has been able to compete with Chrome in any meaningful way. The most likely competitor is Firefox, but it seems unlikely to turn its boat around soon. Users keep leaving Firefox, and their Servo effort is going nowhere.

Things are looking really bleak for the web, and I don't think that there's anything that the W3C can do to help.

I can't see how the Firefox 57 release could possibly go down in a good way.

These changes have the potential to be the most disruptive ones to date, probably even worse than the Australis UI changes that drove away so many of Firefox's users earlier.

We aren't just talking about highly annoying UI changes here. We're talking about the risk for broken functionality, and in ways that aren't easily fixed. This is stuff that users can't just ignore or learn to work around.

If Firefox 57 does turn out to be the disaster that it could very easily become, I'm not certain that Firefox could survive it.

Firefox is already down to only about 5% to 6% of the browser market. It has almost no (0.03%) mobile presence.

Firefox really can't afford to lose any more users.

What's really bad about this situation is that it will likely be addon authors who are the most affected. These are the users that Firefox really, really can't afford to lose.

I mean, if I have to write my addons in a way that's compatible with Chrome, why would I even bother using Firefox at that point? Firefox is slower and more bloated that Chrome, in my experience. Firefox can also send a lot of info to Mozilla and others, so it's not like it's really any better when it comes to privacy.

If I'm going to get a Chrome-like UI experience from Firefox, and if I'm going to get a Chrome-like addon development experience from Firefox, and I'm going to get a Chrome-like privacy experience from Firefox, but Firefox's will feel slower than Chrome, then I might as well just use Chrome (or Chromium) directly.

I really don't like making this prediction, but I think that by this time next year we could see Firefox down around 1% or 2% of the browser market. At that point I think we'd have to consider it a lost cause. It's already close enough to being a lost cause as it is, while it's still around 5%.

Once Firefox gets below 5%, it just won't matter to web developers. They won't bother testing their sites in a browser that has so few users. The Firefox web experience will just end up getting worse and worse, until most of its users end up using Chrome.

We've seen this happen with Netscape Navigator, and it's looking like it's happening to Firefox now, too.

This version is again designed to run in a Web browser (just Chrome for now)

Targeting Chrome as the only supported browser has become possible thanks to Firefox's decreasing market share. It's now down to about 5% or 6%, across all versions and all platforms. It has no mobile presence of any substance (0.03%).

Targeting only Chrome really wasn't feasible back when Firefox had 30% or more of the browser market. But thanks to one unwanted chaneg after another, users have fled Firefox and moved to Chrome instead. Now Chrome has 50% or more of the browser market, including a significant share of the mobile market.

I think we're just going to see more of this happening. It'll be like the "Best Viewed With Netscape Navigator" and "Best Viewed With Internet Explorer" days of the 1990s, except there won't be an alternative. There will only be, "Viewed Only With Chrome". As more and more sites require Chrome, even fewer people will have a reason to use Firefox. Firefox's already small usage share will continue to drop, perhaps even until it effectively reaches 0% of the market.

The saddest part is that it really didn't need to be like this. Firefox was a major player at one time. People liked using it, more than they liked using Chrome. But then the Firefox devs had to throw it all away! It hasn't just hurt their product; it has hurt the web as a whole.

The latest Firefox market share stats are out, and things are looking pretty bleak. It looks like Firefox is now around only 5% to 6% of the market. It has next to no share of the mobile market (0.03%).

What's more, there are big changes that are supposed to be coming in Firefox 57. That's when there are plans to switch to the new WebExtensions approach for creating browser extensions. This system basically just imitates Chrome's approach.

There have already been concerns raised about broken extensions. Reportedly this new approach is much less capable than the existing approach, so it may not even be possible to port or recreate some existing Firefox extensions.

If this transition doesn't go smoothly, it could very well be the final nail in Firefox's coffin. Many of the remaining Firefox users are only still using Firefox because of legacy or custom extensions.

They may have to stop upgrading, if the switch to WebExtensions prevents their existing extensions from working. This, of course, would open them up to security risks.

The other alternative is to try to port these extensions of the WebExtensions API, which isn't much different than porting these extensions over to Chrome. If this happens, then there is absolutely no reason for these users to continue using Firefox. If their custom extensions now work with Chrome, they might as well just use Chrome directly, as it's a faster and lighter browser than Firefox.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if there were other teething pains that only become apparent when the final release is out.

The Australis UI changes a few years back were disruptive enough, and drove a lot of users away. The WebExtensions changes have the potential to be far more disruptive. Much like Australis, the WebExtensions changes are not something that users have asked for, but instead they're changes that are being forced on the users.

Perhaps the Firefox developers know that the WebExtensions switch could very well become the biggest disaster Firefox has ever faced? Perhaps it would even get to the point where these changes will have to be undone? Having a shorter release cycle would help mitigate the magnitude of this disaster. If everything does go to hell and the WebExtensions work needs to be thrown out just to save what's left of Firefox, then being able to get a new version out much quicker could really be a matter of life and death for Firefox as a viable software project.

Firefox really can't afford to lose any more users. Yet nothing about WebExtensions leads us to believe that it will attract new users, while it will surely drive away at least some of the remaining Firefox users.

Firefox 57 won't just be a turning point in the history of Firefox. It will be a turning point in the history of the web itself. It could very well be the release that takes Firefox down from 5% of the market down to the 2% or 1% range, at which point it would have to be considered completely irrelevant, instead of just mostly irrelevant like it currently is. If Firefox becomes irrelevant, then the future looks very bleak for Mozilla, too, as Firefox is pretty much the only project that Mozilla has that sees much use.

This was the most interesting part of the article (ignore the "Firefox operating system" error):

Commissioned by Mozilla - the organisation behind the Firefox operating system - the study was designed to find out what it is that limits people in the developing world from grabbing the opportunities offered by the web.

This is a great reminder of why I won't donate to moz://a.

Instead of spending money to improve Firefox, which badly needs some real improvement, moz://a squandered money researching the gullibility of third-worlders.

With Firefox now only around 5% of the browser market, and having only 0.03% (yes, a very small fraction of just 1%!) of the mobile browser market, wasting money on nonsensical "research" like this is the very last thing they should be doing.

Moz://a won't be able to have any influence on how third-worlders use the Internet if these third-worlders are using Chrome or some other non-Firefox browser. Since most third-world Internet users use a mobile device, Firefox's 0.03% of the market already means they're irrelevant.

Improving Firefox's performance, and reducing its memory usage, would be a lot more beneficial for these third-worlders than doing more "research" like this into their gullibility.

The page on caniuse.com about srcset states that IE 11 does not support srcset, and Edge will display distorted images until the majority of Windows 10 users install the Creators Update. Is it considered acceptable to show distorted images to users of pre-Creators Edge and force users of IE 11 to gulp data transfer allowance while allowing Chrome, Firefox, and Safari to sip it?

I don't think that users subjected to the awful UIs of Millennials are "apathetic".

In fact, I've seen the exact opposite: these users are very outspoken against the UI changes that have been made.

A close-to-home example is the Slashdot Beta site from a few years ago. It embodied so many characteristics of Millennial-designed UIs: it was less intuitive, it was less efficient, it wasted a lot of space, and users hated using it. There was a massive backlash here, with many people leaving, and not returning, even after the Beta project was finally terminated.

We've seen the same with Firefox. It once enjoyed 30% or more of the browser market. After many awful UI changes, most of Firefox's users have left for Chrome, Safari, or even Edge. Firefox is now down to only about 5% or 6% of the browser market. Now the UIs of these other browsers aren't all that much better than Firefox's (they've also been influenced by terrible Millennial UI "design" practices). It's just that they aren't as bad, and there's not much choice for users to begin with.

And we've seen the same with GNOME 3. GNOME 2 was among the most widely used Linux desktop environments in its day. Then GNOME 3 came along, and users expressed their dislike of it so loudly. The GNOME developers didn't act on this feedback, and many of the users jumped to desktop environments like MATE, KDE, or Xfce.

And yet again, we've seen the same sort of response from users to Windows 8 and 10. They express their displeasure very loudly, and they continue to use Windows 7 or even XP, assuming they haven't moved to macOS.

The users aren't apathetic. They do provide lots of feedback. When this feedback goes ignored, they do the only thing they really can do: they stop using the software with a Millennial-ruined UI and move on to the next best alternative. This isn't apathy or inaction; it's completely action.

I often ask myself, would the web be like it is today if Firefox had remained a viable, popular web browser?

It wasn't even all that long ago that Firefox had about 30% of the market. After a long period of time with IE running the show, Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox coming onto the scene was a welcomed change. During its early days, Firefox was a browser that people wanted to use. Each release made its users happier and happier.

Then it all changed with Firefox 4. I'm not going to speculate as to why it started happening, but the Firefox devs started making changes that the users did not want. It started with small things like the menus and the status bar being removed. Then it moved on to much bigger changes, like the UI (and the user experience) being destroyed by the Australis project. It really didn't help when things like Hello and Pocket were forced into Firefox. And many users finally had enough when "sponsored tiles" (advertisements) were added.

We all know what has happened since. Firefox's share of the market is now around 5% to 6%, across all versions and on all platforms. Firefox pretty much missed the mobile revolution completely, with Firefox for Android seeing a small fraction well below 1%. Chrome, on the other hand, now has about 50% of the market. Even Safari, despite supporting far fewer platforms than Firefox, has a greater share of the market than Firefox does.

Some people will wrongly claim that Chrome is only popular because Google promotes it, but the reality is that people use Chrome because it provides a much better experience than Firefox does. Although its UI isn't very good, it at least provides a fast, light browsing experience. It doesn't bundle a lot of useless crap that most users don't want. Radical changes that destroy the user experience tend to be avoided.

Chrome has become the dominant browser, and it determines where the web will go. Firefox just plays catch-up. After all, a browser with only 5% or 6% of the market is generally ignored by web developers, so any new functionality it introduces on its own will tend to be ignored.

Things could have turned out very differently if Firefox had remained a browser that users actually wanted to use. The web of today would look very different if there were a 35% Firefox, 25% IE/Edge, 25% Chrome, 10% Safari, 5% Other breakdown.

It really is a shame that Firefox ended up developing in the way that it did. It had so much potential, only to have it squandered. Its future isn't looking bright, either. It has taken the Firefox devs ages to get their multiprocess support even barely usable. Lately there has been talk about reworking the extension system, with extension breakage being expected. And so many resources have been wasted on Rust and Servo, with so little to show.

Perhaps someday we'll finally get a more diverse browser ecosystem, without there being one browser that holds a majority of the market. We were so close back when Firefox was a major player, but those days are long gone, I'm sad to say.

With over 1 billion users, it's a major platform that web developers have to consider. In fact, with Chrome's regular additions and changes, developers have to keep up to ensure they are taking advantage of everything available.

Web developers: You should be avoiding non-standard browser capabilities like the plague. Period.

You are aware that Chrome defines the de facto standards due to its share of the market, right?

Look at recent browser usage stats. Chrome has around 50% of the market, with excellent representation on both desktop and mobile platforms.

Safari is perhaps the next largest player, around 10% of the market. UC Browser for Android has seen a surge in popularity, too.

Firefox? It's barely around 5% to 6% on the desktop, and Firefox for Android only has 0.04% of the market. That's not a mistake: Firefox for Android is at 0.04%. That's a very small part of just 1%.

We should keep in mind that recent versions of Opera, and other browsers like Vivaldi, are based on Blink, Chrome's rendering engine. So we can generally consider them to just be Chrome, from a rendering perspective.

It doesn't matter what W3C "standards" have been written. They're useless to most web users and developers until they've actually been implemented in Chrome. So Chrome defines what is standard web functionality and what isn't.

If you develop for what Chrome supports, then you're developing for the standard web browsing experience.

In fact, if you're targeting a minor player like Firefox, then you're actually developing for the non-standard browser!

A lack of users is the problem, but it affects Firefox more than Windows XP and Windows Vista.

With Firefox now accounting for around only 5% to 6% of the market, across all platforms and all versions of Firefox, it makes no sense for Moz://a to limit the number of users that could potentially use its browser.

Chrome, which has about 50% of the market, can afford to discontinue platforms that see relatively little use. But Firefox? I don't think it has that luxury. It needs every user it can get, just to keep the project alive.

Retaining desktop users is particularly important given how Firefox for Android has only 0.04% (no, that is not a typo; it's a small fraction of just 1%) of the market.

Supporting XP and Vista could give Firefox a big advantage over Chrome and the other browsers, for those users who still need to use XP and Vista.

Moz://a just can't be driving away users from its main product.