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I don't think that 11.7% is a realistic number, at least across the board.

At the very least, it doesn't match with what I'm seeing on sites that target nontechnical users.

The linked-to stats do mention that they're for the "Desktop Browser Version Market Share". Ignoring mobile users is a big mistake today. It's not 2004. Today, mobile users make up a significant (about 30%, if not more) of web browsing activity.

These stats on the other hand are much, much closer to what I, and others I know of, are actually seeing.

Firefox is closer to 5% to 6%. It hasn't been near 10% for several years now. It has essentially no mobile presence, which drags its market share down when you consider the full picture.

Chrome is the dominant browser. It's around 50% of the market. Chrome has about 10 times the number of users than Firefox does.

Firefox is a niche player. It's behind Chrome, it's behind Safari, it's behind UC Browser for Android. It's almost behind IE/Edge. Even Opera nearly has more users than Firefox now, and this is even after significant disruption within the Opera ecosystem.

Firefox should not be called "widely used".

The only way that Mozilla can accomplish their mission is if they have influence. The only way they will have influence is if they have products that billions of people use on a daily basis.

Back when Firefox had 30% or more of the browser market, it gave Mozilla influence. It gave them an ability to help direct the development of the Web, which in turn gave them at least some influence over the direction the Internet as a whole was taking.

But they have pissed it all away. Now Firefox is about 6% of the browser market in total. Of that, only 0.03% (yes, that's much less than even just 1%!) is on mobile devices. Meanwhile, Chrome now has about 50% of the market, including sizable desktop and mobile presences. Even iOS Safari 10, just that one single version, now likely has many more users than all versions of Firefox on all platforms it supports!

Who is leading the development of the Web these days? It sure isn't Mozilla! It's Google, and to a lesser extent Apple. Everyone else is dragged along, thanks to how Mozilla destroyed Firefox's user experience, which destroyed Firefox's market share, which destroyed Mozilla's influence over the Web and the Internet.

Mozilla could have done so much for the Web and for the Internet. They had real influence at one time. But they threw it all away! Computing historians will look back in disbelief at this whole ordeal.

... "half a billion people around the world" use the browser ...

How do they figure that?

Firefox's share of the market is only about 5% to 6%, on all platforms (desktop and mobile).

Assuming Mozilla's number is true, we'll say that 5% equals 500,000,000 users.

So somehow they're saying that there are 10 billion people in the world? That's really weird, since there are only about 7.4 billion people on Earth, and a lot of them don't have any sort of a computing device, never mind Internet access.

Sure, some people might use more than one browser. But even then, we'd be talking about each and every person with Internet access using 3+ different browsers on a frequent basis! I don't buy it.

They should reveal more information about exactly how they're coming up with that number.

Why is the parent comment at -1? It makes a good point.

The latest browser usage stats show that Edge is only about 1.5% of the browser market.

Even Firefox, which is quickly becoming an irrelevant browser, has several times the market share that Edge has.

Then there's desktop Safari 10, which runs only on an OS that has perhaps around 10% of the desktop/laptop market, has almost the same market share as Edge, despite Edge running on OSes that have well over 20% of the desktop/laptop market.

Heck, even desktop Chrome 49 (yes, a single old version of desktop Chrome!) has about the same number of users as Edge.

And earlier this month Slashdot ran a submission entitled Windows 10 Gains 14% Desktop Market Share in 2016, Edge Continues to Struggle, again pointing out that Edge isn't seeing much use.

Edge doesn't matter.

The Vivaldi web browser (which the shitty, shitty summary doesn't even mention!) has a lot of potential. They really should focus on improving their browser. There are a lot of former Firefox users who have moved to Chrome or other browsers, but who don't really want to be using Chrome. If Vivaldi focuses on these users, and giving them the kind of browser that they want, then Vivaldi has a good chance of becoming popular. Wasting focus on Edge won't help with this at all.

Whoever mismodded the parent comment to -1 should never be allowed to moderate again.

Isn't anyone at Mozilla concerned about Firefox's ever-dropping market share? Doesn't it worry them that Firefox is now only about 5% to 6% of the market, across all versions of FF on all platforms (including mobile)?

Chrome 54 and Chrome 55 each have almost twice the market share that Firefox has in total. Yes, we're talking about single versions of Chrome here.

Firefox is well below Chrome for Android.

iOS Safari and UC Browser for Android are each probably above Firefox.

Even Opera Mini and IE 11 each nearly have more users than Firefox at this point.

Doesn't Mozilla realize that they're nothing without Firefox? They don't have any other widely used projects. The next biggest was perhaps Thunderbird, but they gave up on that a while ago. Firefox for Android has gone nowhere. Firefox OS was a total failure. Bugzilla is ancient. Their other lesser-known projects and services haven't seen much uptake, either. Servo, their next-generation rendering engine, somehow makes Mosaic look like a modern browser. The hype around Rust has pretty much died off.

What is Mozilla going to do a few years from now, when their latest search deal with Yahoo is over? Yahoo's situation isn't promising now, and it could be worse in a few years. Maybe they won't be willing to throw money at Mozilla any longer, especially if Firefox has pretty much no users at that point.

An incomprehensible logo doesn't help with any of this. In fact, it's perhaps the most useless thing they could waste resources on. It doesn't help make Firefox a browser that people want to use. It doesn't help their other projects get traction. In fact, they chose a logo that will likely just confuse most people into thinking the organization's name is "Moza".

All of this is unbelievable, yet at the same time it shouldn't be surprising given that we're talking about Mozilla here.

Is Mozilla worried about Firefox's dwindling market share at all?

The latest numbers are downright scary, not just for Firefox users, but for everyone who care about the diversity of the web. Firefox now appears to be around only 5% to 6%, across all platforms and all device types.

That puts Firefox well below Safari for iOS 10.1 (yes, just that one version!).

That puts Firefox below UC Browser for Android.

That puts Firefox in the same neighborhood as Opera Mini, even!

Of course, Firefox's numbers are a very tiny fraction of what Chrome's are.

Doesn't Mozilla realize that their future depends on Firefox having lots of users? Nobody will sign lucrative search deals with them if Firefox can't offer user attention in return.

I'm getting really worried. I fear that sometime during 2017 we'll see Firefox drop below 5%. I wouldn't be at all surprised if 2017 ended with Firefox down around 3%.

Most of the stuff you say is utter bullshit.

In many ways ActionScript is better [stackoverflow.com] than JavaScript

Actionscript doesn't have a modern execution engine and is terribly slow. Additional to that, that comparison is from 2010 and outdated by today's standards. If you really need those features, use the Typescript superset and compile it to javascript. Same result, just faster execution as js has actually fast interpreters and jit (ActionScript hasn't).

Adobe Flash just plays video/audio formats it's intended to play, vs. the dreaded HTML5 message, "Your browser doesn't support this media type" specially on platforms other than Windows.

This was an issue some time ago (when firefox didn't support h.264, but it changed in 2014...). Now you can use h.264: http://caniuse.com/#search=h.2...

93.01% of your users will support it, mobile users included. How many mobile users have flash?

Adobe Flash, at least on Windows, seamlessly accelerates video decoding and rendering vs for instance royalty free VP9 codec which drains your battery several times faster because it's decoded using only the CPU.

Most (maybe all?) modern hardware sold today has already hardware based VP9 decoding built in, so its more of an issue with legacy hardware. Your information is outdated!

And, if anything, its a problem with VP9 and not with HTML5. If you use h.264 for your videos (which flash uses as well), you get the same result.

If we (and Mozilla) should be focusing on anything at all, it is Firefox's rapidly declining market share.

Firefox 49 didn't manage to break 5%. That's a big deal. Even if we add in the usage of all other versions of Firefox, including on Android, we're only looking at about 7% in total.

Firefox is insignificant compared to Chrome. It's well below UC Browser for Android. It's now essentially below iOS Safari 10 alone. Even Opera Mini nearly has more users.

Firefox 50 will likely have an even smaller share of the market than 49 did. It could very well be the first release to peak at under 4% of the market.

Unwanted features like emojis, or minor features like a keyboard shortcut to cycle through tabs, won't keep more people from jumping ship to Chrome.

At what point will we see some real concern from Mozilla? When Firefox hits 3%? Or will it be 2%, or even 1%?

But it may not even matter at this point. With numbers so low already, there's very little chance of Firefox ever regaining any relevant share of the market again.

If you have modern browsers at both sides of the connection (supporting webrtc: http://caniuse.com/#feat=rtcpe...), there are many online sites that require no account setup or anything else, and where a connection can be done by clicking a link. No plugins required.

It needs a separate channel e.g. chat to set it up (where you can send your communication partner the link, or ask them to talk via the webrtc), but it works.

https://talky.io/
https://appear.in/
https://meet.jit.si/
https://apprtc.appspot.com/

If anyone is to blame, I think it would be Mozilla for making Firefox irrelevant by trying to imitate Chrome, even when Firefox's users said very emphatically that they didn't want that.

Firefox used to have over 30% of the market. Now the latest market share stats show that Firefox is down to maybe 7% across all versions on the desktop, with essentially no mobile presence at all.

When Firefox had 30% of the market, it was a force to be reckoned with! It held real sway over how the web developed. But then it's like the Firefox developers decided to throw it all away, for no good reason at all. I think that they trashed Firefox's UI, they added unwanted crap like Pocket and Hello. They even embedded ads into Firefox! Now Firefox is down to just 7% of the market, and this number is dropping. Nobody cares about a browser with only 7% of the market.

And don't waste your time trying to blame Firefox's decline in market share on Google advertising Chrome, or mobile becoming more widely used than desktop browsers (which isn't actually the case), or any other bullshit excuse like that. It was the numerous unwanted changes that Firefox's developers made that drove a large mass of Firefox users away.

Firefox users were faced with a really bad set of choices: either they could use Firefox and get a slow, bloated Chrome-like experience, or they could use Chrome and at least get a fast, lightweight experience. So they did the only sensible thing and used Chrome, even if they hated it. At least it wasn't as bad as the alternatives!

I think that the web would have been very different if Firefox had been developed sensibly, instead of what actually happened to it. Chrome would probably be much less used, and we'd see a more open and less commercialized web. Mozilla could have turned Firefox into a champion of privacy and an ad-free web. Instead all we ended up with was a shitty imitation of Chrome that has no influence at all on the web.

If Microsoft ported Edge to Linux and OS X, it would absolutely destroy Firefox, in my opinion. Firefox is already barely relevant. The latest stats show Firefox only has 6% to 7% of the browser market, and it has been losing users for a long time.

Many of the remaining Firefox users are using it on Linux or OS X. They aren't using FIrefox because they want to use Firefox; they're using it just because it isn't Chrome, and Firefox is really the only other option they have. Many of these users aren't happy Firefox users, either. They're disgusted by how Firefox's UI has been trashed, how so much unwanted functionality has been forced on them (Hello, Pocket, and even embedded ads!), and how Firefox still feels so much slower than Chrome.

Edge would provide them the modern, fast, efficient, non-Chrome browser they've wanted for so long. Even if it lures away only half of the remaining Firefox users, that would render Firefox almost totally irrelevant. Once a browser gets down to 2% or 3%, web developers just don't care about it. When major sites no longer work with such a browser the users move on to a different browser that does work.

Can somebody mod down the parent comment please? It's full of bullshit.

There is no stats about browser installations, but only website hits.

What the fuck are you talking about?

It doesn't matter how many fucking browser installations there are if nobody uses them!

I have Firefox installed. But I don't fucking use it because it's shit!

So I'm not a Firefox user, even if I have it installed.

The stats that the parent gave are very relevant.

Here they are in case you can't find them: http://caniuse.com/usage-table

The statistics include both, desktop and mobile, together.

It doesn't fucking matter what device somebody uses to browse the web.

A web user is a web user is a web user.

Firefox for desktop is doing fine, better than Chrome.

Desktop Firefox has about 7% of the market. That's for all versions.

Desktop Chrome 50 alone (yes, just a single version!) has about 20%. So that's about 3 times Firefox's share.

Even Desktop Chrome 49 alone has just over 4%. That means it's comparable to Firefox's total share.

And that's not including all of the users of other versions of Chrome!

Firefox is not doing well on the desktop.

But mobile is another story.

This also does not represent just how awful Firefox for Android is doing.

It has 0.04% of the market! That's even less than half of Blackberry Browser 7's share, which is 0.09%!

Chrome for Android is at 18%.

Since most websites today are viewed from mobile browsers

That's utter bullshit.

It's about 30% mobile and 70% desktop, even today.

Most mobile users use apps, not web sites, and there are still far more desktop users of the web than there are mobile users.

Even then it doesn't matter.

Firefox is getting its ass kicked on both the desktop and mobile.

It's no secret that Firefox's market share has dropped to almost nothing. The latest browser market share stats show Firefox at maybe 6% to 7% of the market. That's well below desktop Chrome and Chrome for Android, even when both are considered separately. Firefox, across all versions and all platforms, is used only about as much as Opera Mini, or individual versions of browsers like IE 11 and Safari for iOS 9.3.

Of course, Firefox is the only reason Mozilla ever had any relevance.

Yet it's like the Firefox devs have done everything they can to drive away Firefox users. They've forced many unwanted UI changes on Firefox users, while also not improving the performance of Firefox. Hell, they even embedded ads into Firefox itself at one point! As Firefox has tried to poorly imitate Chrome, more and more Firefox users have moved to other browsers. After all, if you're going to get a shitty Chrome-like experience when using Firefox, you might as well just use real Chrome and at least get a shitty experience that's fast and doesn't use as much memory!

The only way I think that Firefox could possibly redeem itself is if the UI was reverted back to a usable state (we're talking Firefox 3.5), and the focus veered hard to privacy. Firefox's salvation could come from providing users the most secure and private browsing experience possible. It should become their main focus.

I don't think they'll ever manage to, say, make a browser that's more lightweight and faster than Chrome. So they might as well at least focus on something they could potentially do, which is make Firefox as impregnable as possible to the online tracking that happens today.

I don't know about the companies you listed, but many other web developers no longer consider Firefox to be a relevant browser. That means they don't even bother testing their sites with it. Maybe the sites will work, maybe they won't.

The latest web browser market share stats paint a very unfortunate picture for Firefox. It's now only about 6% to 7% of the browser market, across all platforms and all versions of Firefox.

To put that into perspective, Firefox now has roughly the same number of users in total that individual versions of other browsers (like IE 11 and iOS Safari 9.3) have. Even Opera Mini nearly has more users than Firefox has!

Firefox has only about one-third the number of users that Chrome for Android has, and even Chrome for Android has fewer users than desktop Chrome. Even UC Browser for Android has more users than Firefox.

Yes, Firefox was once a significant player. But that's no longer the case, now that Mozilla has driven away so many Firefox users by making one unwanted change after another. Firefox essentially cloned the worst parts of Chrome (its UI and soon its extension system) while ignoring the best parts of Chrome (its excellent performance and low memory usage).

Some people will wrongly blame "Google advertising" or claim that Firefox still has a "large absolute number of users", but those are both just excuses.

People use Chrome because, despite its bad UI, it's a lot faster than Firefox is.

Firefox's absolute number of users is still so proportionally small that it's not worth spending time and effort to support these users. It makes a lot more sense to ignore a few million Firefox users and instead focus on providing a better experience for the billions of people who use Chrome.

Based on the current trends, Firefox will continue to see its market share shrink each month. If you think it's being ignored now, just wait until it's down to 1% or 2% of the market. At that point even the big players with resources to waste on supporting Firefox won't even bother trying to.

http://caniuse.com/usage-table

15% on IE 8 just isn't typical. I believe most IE 8 usage is in China. But they are supporting jQuery 1.0 for you. But you are still mad because they made something for everyone else?

It's kind of funny, it's a bit like websites many, many years ago. Every business is like: we want a website. What do you want to put on the website ? What is your audience ? What would you like to communicate ? Euh... I don't know. LoL.

You already mentioned it, but I think it goes deeper: a place on the home screen. Which is limited real estate. Something a browser bookmark to home screen could do too, which was harder to do in older browsers but more and more people are finding it now it has become easier in browsers.

Probably the biggest reason apps got such a jump over web is because of off-line support in browsers. HTML5 had offline support, but it didn't work well.

And maybe performance, but current new phones have no problems with that. CPU/GPU, etc. is not the most taxing part of a phone. It's networking and powering the screen.

Their is a new API which is now supported by all the latest browsers:
https://jakearchibald.github.i...
http://caniuse.com/#feat=servi...

Let's see if they got it right this time.

And people now know they don't want to install sketchy software. They even understand they don't want plugins any more on their desktop/laptop.

The biggest missing part of mobile web is: it's not easy to do payments. In many countries people can't use the app store either (no credit card).

Maybe this will happen: https://www.w3.org/Payments/

What worries me the most is how this feature could very well spell the end of Firefox if users run into problems with it.

The latest web browser market share stats show Firefox at only about 6% to 7% of the market. That puts Firefox, across all platforms both mobile and desktop, well below Chrome, and around where individual versions of other browsers like Safari for iOS and IE are at.

So Firefox has no leeway at this time. Mozilla really can't afford to lose any more Firefox users than they've already lost.

Electrolysis hasn't exactly been a smooth project. It goes back many years, and my understanding is that they actually halted/delayed the project at one point, before restarting it. Its release has been pushed back again and again and again.

There have been cases in the past where Firefox changes have not gone well, and this has resulted in even more users leaving than who would've likely left had there not been problems.

For example, around the Firefox 4 era, when they switched to their new versioning scheme and rapid releases, many extensions were broken with each new release. This caused untold problems for Firefox users. Many of them moved to Chrome or other browsers at this point. By the time the Firefox devs got their acts together, it was too late; these users would never again use Firefox.

We saw something similar happen with Australis. Despite widespread dislike from the Firefox community at the time, Australis was pushed on all Firefox users. This was a painful transition for many. In some sense it proved to many that Firefox as they knew it was long dead; Firefox was now just a bad imitation of Chrome. Many Firefox users, when faced with the choice of using a poor imitation of Chrome (i.e. Firefox) or Chrome itself, just chose the lesser of two evils and used Chrome directly. Even if its UI is shitty, at least it's faster than Firefox.

If Electrolysis ends up breaking extensions for a lot of Firefox users, or if it ends up slowing down Firefox even more for them, I think we may see yet another mass exodus away from Firefox to Chrome and other browsers. That could very well take Firefox from being irrelevant to being completely irrelevant. Nobody will care about Firefox when it has only 2% or even 3% of the browser market. Web developers won't test with it, and sites won't work with it. Search engine providers won't sign deals with Mozilla if Firefox has few users.

The only thing that might be more devastating would be the extension signing changes that the Firefox developers have talked about.

I really don't want Firefox to become irrelevant, but I'm getting an awful feeling in my gut that that's exactly what we'll see when the Electrolysis rollout ends up being a major disaster for a lot of Firefox users. This could very well be what finally pushes them over the edge and to other browsers, meaning that Firefox would become irrelevant.

I looked at the latest browser market share stats after hearing about this new version of Firefox.

Firefox now has only about 6% to 7% of the market. That's across all versions, on desktop and mobile.

To put that into perspective, Firefox is well behind desktop Chrome, which is over 25%, and Chrome for Android, which is at 18%. Even UC Browser for Android is well above Firefox now, at almost 10% of the market.

Firefox is about as popular now as Safari for iOS 9.3 and IE 11. That's right, individual versions of non-Chrome browsers that support pretty much just one platform now have roughly the same number of users as Firefox does across all platforms and devices!

Even Opera Mini nearly has more users than Firefox does!

This decline in Firefox's market share should be sending shockwaves through Mozilla. Firefox is the only product of theirs that sees any significant use. They basically gave up on Thunderbird, the only other product of theirs that saw much use. Seamonkey never had many users to begin with. Persona and Firefox OS were total failures. Bugzilla is a legacy product. Rust and Servo are going nowhere.

Why, despite becoming more and more irrelevant each day, do we see such a complete lack of action on the part of Mozilla? Don't they realize that their existence depends on people using Firefox? Why would any company throw money at Mozilla if there aren't any Firefox users to perform searches or otherwise advertise to?

In any other organization there would be massive changes going on right now. Something is seriously wrong when a product goes from having 30% or more of the market down to 6% within only a few years.

Yet the best we've seen out of Mozilla has been the rather pointless Rust and Servo. Rust doesn't really improve on C++14, while having a lot of drawbacks (like only one implementation, lots of bugs in that implementation, a limited standard library, a steep learning curve, and lots of dead library projects, among others) that C++14 doesn't have. Servo is decades behind today's browsers, with no obvious hope of catching up any time soon.

It's so surreal when I look at this situation. The loss of market share and the response to it are unbelievable. But it's no wonder why it's happening. All of the unwanted changes made to Firefox starting with Firefox 4 explain perfectly why Firefox's market share has dropped. Imagine that, if users are treated like shit then they'll move to a competing product!

It's no secret that Firefox has been losing users left and right. The latest stats show that Firefox has only 6% to 7% of the market across all versions and all platforms. That puts it well below Chrome, and around the same level as niche browsers like iOS Safari and Opera Mini.

Lately, Firefox has been Mozilla's only successful product. Mozilla basically jettisoned Thunderbird, their other successful product. Other efforts like Persona and Firefox OS have been total failures. Bugzilla is ancient history. Rust hasn't accomplished much. Servo isn't going anywhere. Firefox is the only thing keeping Mozilla barely relevant.

It's clear why people have left Firefox: numerous awful UI changes, the inclusion of other unwanted changes like Hello and Pocket, and poor performance.

But what could bring people back to Firefox?

Fixing the UI, usability and performance issues would be a good start, of course. But that wouldn't be enough.

I think that Mozilla and Firefox should embrace privacy. That doesn't necessarily mean using Tor, of course. But privacy should become one of their main focuses.

Instead of being known as the browser that's slow, bloated, and a cheap imitation of Chrome, Firefox could become known as the browser that maximizes user privacy. With an improved reputation and an improved user experience, Firefox could very well make a comeback against Chrome and its other competitors.

So if Mozilla gets rid of Thunderbird completely, what software will they have left that has actual users?

Firefox is the obvious one, but its users are fleeing left and right. The latest stats show Firefox is down to about 7% of the market on all platforms, across all versions.

Firefox for Android is basically not used at all. It's at 0.4% of the market. Yes, that's less than half of 1%!

Seamonkey probably has seen much less use than even Firefox for Android.

Firefox OS has probably seen much less use than even Seamonkey.

Persona never got anywhere at all.

Bugzilla is ancient tech, only used by legacy users.

Servo is a joke. Even for an "experimental" rendering engine, it's damn near useless.

Rust is nothing but hype. Its only major user so far has been Mozilla, and some high schoolers who tried it out on a weekend and put their mostly-incomplete libraries on GitHub to rot.

So with Thunderbird out of the picture, and their other software seeing minimal to no use, Mozilla will pretty much have no user base once the remaining Firefox users flee.

How do they expect to get lucrative search details when next to nobody is using their products?

How do they propose to survive as an organization with limited incoming funds?

So if Mozilla gets rid of Thunderbird completely, what software will they have left that has actual users?

Firefox is the obvious one, but its users are fleeing left and right. The latest stats show Firefox is down to about 7% of the market on all platforms, across all versions.

Firefox for Android is basically not used at all. It's at 0.4% of the market. Yes, that's less than half of 1%!

Seamonkey probably has seen much less use than even Firefox for Android.

Firefox OS has probably seen much less use than even Seamonkey.

Persona never got anywhere at all.

Bugzilla is ancient tech, only used by legacy users.

Servo is a joke. Even for an "experimental" rendering engine, it's damn near useless.

Rust is nothing but hype. Its only major user so far has been Mozilla, and some high schoolers who tried it out on a weekend and put their mostly-incomplete libraries on GitHub to rot.

So with Thunderbird out of the picture, and their other software seeing minimal to no use, Mozilla will pretty much have no user base once the remaining Firefox users flee.

How do they expect to get lucrative search details when next to nobody is using their products?

How do they propose to survive as an organization with limited incoming funds?

The latest browser usage stats show that Firefox has only about 7% of the market. That's for all versions of the browser, across all of the platforms it supports.

To put that into perspective, that's only slightly above each of IE 11 and iOS Safari 9.2. That's right, even individual, platform-specific versions of non-Chrome competing browsers now nearly exceed Firefox's share of the market. Firefox is nearly lower than Opera Mini, even!

Chrome is utterly destroying Firefox. On the desktop alone, it has 3 to 4 times as many users as Firefox does. Chrome for Android has about twice as many users as Firefox does.

I don't think it matters what happens at this point. Firefox will likely not recover. I would not be at all surprised if it was well below 5% by the end of this year.

Servo is not going to save Firefox. It isn't making sufficient progress. Not only do they have to match at least Firefox's functionality, but then they have to match Chrome's, and then they need to overtake Chrome just to see any growth!

Things have never looked bleaker for Firefox.

The real question should be, When the hell will Mozilla wake up to the reality they're facing?!

The browser stats from March 2016 are now available, and they show that Firefox has only about 7% of the browser market. That's across all desktop and mobile platforms that they support, too.

To put that into perspective, it's about half of each of the most recent versions of desktop Chrome. It's about half of Chrome for Android. It's close to individual versions of other browsers, including IE 11, iOS Safari 9.2. It's likely below UC Browser for Android. Even Opera Mini, with about 5% of the market, isn't far behind Firefox.

Firefox is clearly facing strong competition from numerous other browsers. Now it will be facing even more competition from Vivaldi, which is a very appealing and useful browser for power users.

Yet despite this ever-increasing competition, and the ever-dwindling number of Firefox users, we don't see Mozilla making the drastic changes they should be making. We continue to see Firefox's support for multiple processes sputter. We continue to see unwanted UI changes. We don't see any significant performance improvements. We now hear that Mozilla will be switching to a Chrome-like extension model, which could very well cause severe breakage of existing extensions, and a really horrible experience for the few remaining Firefox users.

Don't waste your time telling me about Servo. I've tried it recently, and the experience was abysmal. It's nowhere near ready for testing, never mind actual usage of any sort. Try it yourself if you don't believe me. It's decades behind even Firefox, which is well behind Chrome and other browsers.

And we can't go blaming Firefox's declining market share on "mobile". As the stats show, desktop browsers are still the dominant ones. Even then, it's Mozilla's fault that they can't get Firefox for Android above 0.05% of the market.

Doesn't anyone at Mozilla see the problem with their current situation? Doesn't anyone there have the guts to stand up and say, "Something is seriously wrong here!"? Doesn't Mozilla as an organization realize that Firefox is pretty much the only product of theirs that some people still sometimes use? Doesn't Mozilla realize that once Firefox has lost its few remaining users, which based on the current trends will happen eventually, that it, as an organization, won't have any influence of the future and the direction of the web?

Why aren't we seeing more panic from Mozilla? Why do we just see more of the same old, which clearly hasn't been working, as it has been driving away their existing users without attracting any new users? Why aren't we seeing more concern from Mozilla about the future?

One interesting thing we're now seeing is how a lot of software is getting worse. This includes not only commercial software like Windows 8 (and 10, to some extent), but also a lot of open source software. Firefox, GNOME 3, systemd and the Slashdot Beta site are good examples of how inferior software is being forced on users, without any benefit in quality, price, capability, or any other traditional metric.

Something else that's interesting about this situation is how it is being driven by hipsters/Millennials. In the past, technical changes would have to be backed up with a strong technical argument. A change just wouldn't happen if it didn't bring some important benefit to the users. But hipsters/Millennials have taken a different approach. They tend to ram through changes, "justifying" the changes by pretty much just telling the users that they are "wrong" when they object to such changes because such changes don't bring any benefit.

Firefox is perhaps the best example of unwanted changes being forced upon unwilling users. Nearly every release of Firefox features some unnecessary UI change that reduces its usability, or the removal of useful configuration options, or the addition of unwanted functionality (like Pocket and Hello), or even the inclusion of ads that are built into the browser itself. Now we're hearing that Firefox will be switching to a Chrome-like extension model, which will no doubt break many existing extensions. When the users of Firefox scream in pain, "No! We do not want these changes!", the Firefox developers ignore their pleas and force the changes on the few remaining Firefox users anyway. After being treated so poorly, we've seen many Firefox users flee to alternate browsers, leaving Firefox with only about 7% of the market.

All of this is contrary to what we'd expect to be seeing, and what we in fact did see for many years. From the advent of computing up until around 2005, when hipsters/Millennials started getting involved with industry, we did see continual improvement. Software would get better as it aged, as is developers learned more about what users actually needed, and what techniques worked best. Then the hipsters/Millennials came along, chose to ignore all of this accumulated knowledge, and in just a few short years they have trashed so much software and ruined the experience for so many users.

We can only hope that the generation that comes after the hipsters/Millennials will be able to undo all of the damage the hipsters/Millennials have caused. This is unfortunate, because instead of this subsequent generation being able to improve things, they will just waste their effort bringing us back to where we were in 2005. So not only do we have to contend with the wasted generation that the hipsters/Millennials are responsible for, we'll also have to contend with the waste they forced on the next generation(s)! The saddest part is that it's all so unnecessary.

I too, raised concerns to "Red Hat about the "tinkering" that they do within Gnome, and how they break existing functionality, even in Linux. I left off using Gnome for xfce. I also moved to using Scientific Linux, as their concentration is "if it's not broken, leave it alone".

One interesting thing we're now seeing is how a lot of software is getting worse. This includes not only commercial software like Windows 8 (and 10, to some extent), but also a lot of open source software. Firefox, GNOME 3, systemd and the Slashdot Beta site are good examples of how inferior software is being forced on users, without any benefit in quality, price, capability, or any other traditional metric.

Something else that's interesting about this situation is how it is being driven by hipsters/Millennials. In the past, technical changes would have to be backed up with a strong technical argument. A change just wouldn't happen if it didn't bring some important benefit to the users. But hipsters/Millennials have taken a different approach. They tend to ram through changes, "justifying" the changes by pretty much just telling the users that they are "wrong" when they object to such changes because such changes don't bring any benefit.

Firefox is perhaps the best example of unwanted changes being forced upon unwilling users. Nearly every release of Firefox features some unnecessary UI change that reduces its usability, or the removal of useful configuration options, or the addition of unwanted functionality (like Pocket and Hello), or even the inclusion of ads that are built into the browser itself. Now we're hearing that Firefox will be switching to a Chrome-like extension model, which will no doubt break many existing extensions. When the users of Firefox scream in pain, "No! We do not want these changes!", the Firefox developers ignore their pleas and force the changes on the few remaining Firefox users anyway. After being treated so poorly, we've seen many Firefox users flee to alternate browsers, leaving Firefox with only about 7% of the market.

All of this is contrary to what we'd expect to be seeing, and what we in fact did see for many years. From the advent of computing up until around 2005, when hipsters/Millennials started getting involved with industry, we did see continual improvement. Software would get better as it aged, as is developers learned more about what users actually needed, and what techniques worked best. Then the hipsters/Millennials came along, chose to ignore all of this accumulated knowledge, and in just a few short years they have trashed so much software and ruined the experience for so many users.

We can only hope that the generation that comes after the hipsters/Millennials will be able to undo all of the damage the hipsters/Millennials have caused. This is unfortunate, because instead of this subsequent generation being able to improve things, they will just waste their effort bringing us back to where we were in 2005. So not only do we have to contend with the wasted generation that the hipsters/Millennials are responsible for, we'll also have to contend with the waste they forced on the next generation(s)! The saddest part is that it's all so unnecessary.

How are you seeing that? Looks to me like Safari is still ahead. http://caniuse.com/#compare=ed...

Users are fleeing Firefox like there's no tomorrow. The stats show that Firefox is likely around 7% of the browser market on all of the platforms it supports. The stats clearly show that Firefox's users are going to Chrome and Edge.

All we need is confirmation from Netcraft. Firefox is dying and bleeding users, flowing like a river of blood.

You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict firefox's future. The hand writing is on the wall: firefox faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for firefox because firefox is dying.

I hope that Microsoft open sources Edge, and ports it to Linux and OS X. Although I don't use Windows, I do realize that Edge is a fine browser that's getting better and better. The only thing holding it back is that it only runs on Windows.

If it ran on the other major platform (OS X) and on minor platforms like Linux and FreeBSD, I could see it being the final nail in Firefox's coffin. In my opinion, Mozilla has repeatedly shown the user community that Mozilla doesn't give a damn about its users' wishes. That's why we've seen Firefox trashed, with one unwanted change after another, release after release, even after the community has begged Mozilla not to make these unwanted changes.

Users are fleeing Firefox like there's no tomorrow. The stats show that Firefox is likely around 7% of the browser market on all of the platforms it supports. The stats clearly show that Firefox's users are going to Chrome and Edge.

Open sourcing and porting Edge wouldn't be without precedent. Microsoft is open sourcing much of .NET, and porting it to other platforms. It's porting SQL Server to Linux. IE itself used to run on non-Windows OSes.

Now is the time to Microsoft to truly free Edge. Doing so would push it as the main competitor to Chrome on all of the major platforms, finally burying the rotting corpse of Firefox and finally giving some real options to web users.

I hope that Microsoft open sources Edge, and ports it to Linux and OS X. Although I don't use Windows, I do realize that Edge is a fine browser that's getting better and better. The only thing holding it back is that it only runs on Windows.

If it ran on the other major platform (OS X) and on minor platforms like Linux and FreeBSD, I could see it being the final nail in Firefox's coffin. In my opinion, Mozilla has repeatedly shown the user community that Mozilla doesn't give a damn about its users' wishes. That's why we've seen Firefox trashed, with one unwanted change after another, release after release, even after the community has begged Mozilla not to make these unwanted changes.

Users are fleeing Firefox like there's no tomorrow. The stats show that Firefox is likely around 7% of the browser market on all of the platforms it supports. The stats clearly show that they're going to Chrome and Edge.

This move wouldn't be without precedent. Microsoft is open sourcing much of .NET. It's porting SQL Server to Linux. IE itself used to run on non-Windows OSes.

Now is the time to free Edge. Doing so would push it as the main competitor to Chrome on all of the major platforms, finally burying the rotting corpse of Firefox and giving real options to web users.

How exactly is Servo supposed to get any traction within the browser market?

Riding on Firefox's coattails is the obvious way, but even that doesn't make any sense. Firefox's share of the market has been falling like crazy. The latest stats show that Firefox has maybe 7% of the browser market across all versions of it and across all of the platforms it supports.

If Servo is only entering alpha this summer, then it'll be years before it's fully usable. By that time Firefox could very well have almost no share of the market, especially after their upcoming extension changes which may very well be a total disaster given how disruptive they have the potential to be. These extension changes alone could be what will push Firefox well below 5% of the market.

The other browsers won't be standing still, either. Chrome, Edge, Safari, Vivaldi, and Opera will continue to evolve. So not only do the Servo devs need to catch up with these competitors, but they'll need to surpass them, too! If they don't surpass their competitors, then nobody will have any reason to switch to Servo.

Then there are the unpredictable scenarios that could happen. Let's suppose that Microsoft open sources Edge, and releases it for Linux and OS X. We've already seen them open source a lot of the .NET code recently so it could support those platforms. Hell, IE used to run on Macs years ago. So it's not unreasonable to think that it could happen. An open source and portable release of Edge would absolutely destroy Firefox, and likely Servo, too. Edge is quite a good browser, and there are many OS X and Linux users who would love to us it if only it supported their platforms. The few stragglers who still use Firefox could very well ditch it in an instant.

All in all, the future looks extremely bleak for Firefox and Servo. There's nothing compelling about them that entices users to switch to them, and to continue using them.

Instead of speculating, let's look at the actual browser market share statistics.

We can see that Firefox's market share has fallen off a cliff.

Firefox 44 has only 4.5% of the market.

Firefox 43 has 2.2%.

After that, Firefox has essentially no market share.

The Firefox developers totally dropped the ball on mobile.

Firefox for Android has 0.04%. Yes, that's a very tiny fraction of a single percent!

Meanwhile, desktop Chrome has over 26% of the market, and Chrome for Android has over 17%.

IE 11 and iOS Safari 9.2 alone each have just about as many users as Firefox does across all of the platforms it supports.

Why has Firefox seen such a steep slide in its market share?

It's because Mozilla has removed far too much useful functionality from Firefox, while putting in lots of shit that nobody wants, and making UI changes that ruin the experience.

Users are fleeing Firefox because it has become one of the worst browsers around.

It now offers the worst aspects of Chrome (its UI, and soon its extension system) without any of the benefits of Chrome (mainly its excellent performance).

So most users have just opted to use Chrome instead.

Overall, Chrome gives a much better experience than Firefox does.

So you're absolutely wrong.

People have left Firefox because of the many unwanted changes that Mozilla has made to Firefox.

It's no secret that Firefox is seriously losing market share. Firefox is likely under 8% of the browser market now, across all desktop and mobile platforms! To put that number into perspective, note that desktop Chrome 48 alone has over 3 times the number of users that Firefox has in total, and Chrome for Android 47 has over 2 times that number. IE 11, iOS Safari 9.2, and UC Browser for Android each have about the same number of users as Firefox does. Firefox nearly has fewer users than even Opera Mini has! And Firefox has essentially no mobile presence at all. Firefox for Android is only at 0.04%!

Despite being one of the most popular browsers several years ago, I think that Mozilla has gone out of their way to alienate Firefox users as often as they can. They've trashed Firefox's UI, turning it into an awful clone of Chrome. They've injected unwanted shit like Pocket and Hello into Firefox by default. They even put ads into the browser itself, although rumor has it they finally realized how fucking idiotic this was and are removing them. They've removed useful options from the preferences window. And despite making all of these changes that users don't want, they never seem to get around to fixing the longstanding memory and performance issues that have plagued Firefox for years.

The mandatory extension signing bullshit they've got in the works, along with changing to Chrome's extension model at some point, will utterly destroy Firefox's usability I think. The inconvenience these changes will bring to Firefox's few remaining users and extension developers will likely be enough to push them away completely. Firefox's 8% of the browser market will likely drop to the low single digits far quicker than anyone will have imagined.

To make matters worse, Mozilla has wasted a huge amount of time and effort on the Rust programming language and the Servo browser engine. In my view, Rust is a totally failed attempt to replace C++ with a "safer" language. I think that all they've managed to create is a language with an ugly syntax (even by C++'s standards!), an impractical ownership system, a single slow implementation (which itself is quite buggy despite being written in Rust, a language that's supposed to avoid this!), a rather awful standard library, and a questionable community that's highly focused on codes of conduct and censorship in the name of "tolerance" and "diversity".

Servo, which is written in Rust, is abysmal in my experience. I tried it last week, and I think I'd get better results using IE 3 today. Hell, Servo wouldn't even render any page for me for more than a minute before it crashed! Despite all of the hype around it, it fails to deliver even a 1990s browser experience.

In my opinion, things are looking extraordinarily bleak for Mozilla. They've ruined Firefox for so many users already. The replacement is going absolutely nowhere. And now it appears that they're going to make the Firefox experience even worse for the few users who remain! It's unbelievably sad what's happening to Firefox and Mozilla. Please, Mozilla, don't do this! Don't make yourself irrelevant! Please! For the sake of the web, please!

It's no secret that Firefox is seriously losing market share. Firefox is likely under 8% of the browser market now, across all desktop and mobile platforms! To put that number into perspective, note that desktop Chrome 48 alone has over 3 times the number of users that Firefox has in total, and Chrome for Android 47 has over 2 times that number. IE 11, iOS Safari 9.2, and UC Browser for Android each have about the same number of users as Firefox does. Firefox nearly has fewer users than even Opera Mini has! And Firefox has essentially no mobile presence at all. Firefox for Android is only at 0.04%!

Despite being one of the most popular browsers several years ago, I think that Mozilla has gone out of their way to alienate Firefox users as often as they can. They've trashed Firefox's UI, turning it into an awful clone of Chrome. They've injected unwanted shit like Pocket and Hello into Firefox by default. They even put ads into the browser itself, although rumor has it they finally realized how fucking idiotic this was and are removing them. They've removed useful options from the preferences window. And despite making all of these changes that users don't want, they never seem to get around to fixing the longstanding memory and performance issues that have plagued Firefox for years.

The mandatory extension signing bullshit they've got in the works, along with changing to Chrome's extension model at some point, will utterly destroy Firefox's usability I think. The inconvenience these changes will bring to Firefox's few remaining users and extension developers will likely be enough to push them away completely. Firefox's 8% of the browser market will likely drop to the low single digits far quicker than anyone will have imagined.

To make matters worse, Mozilla has wasted a huge amount of time and effort on the Rust programming language and the Servo browser engine. In my view, Rust is a totally failed attempt to replace C++ with a "safer" language. I think that all they've managed to create is a language with an ugly syntax (even by C++'s standards!), an impractical ownership system, a single slow implementation (which itself is quite buggy despite being written in Rust, a language that's supposed to avoid this!), a rather awful standard library, and a questionable community that's highly focused on codes of conduct and censorship in the name of "tolerance" and "diversity".

Servo, which is written in Rust, is abysmal in my experience. I tried it last week, and I think I'd get better results using IE 3 today. Hell, Servo wouldn't even render any page for me for more than a minute before it crashed! Despite all of the hype around it, it fails to deliver even a 1990s browser experience.

In my opinion, things are looking extraordinarily bleak for Mozilla. They've ruined Firefox for so many users already. The replacement is going absolutely nowhere. And now it appears that they're going to make the Firefox experience even worse for the few users who remain! It's unbelievably sad what's happening to Firefox and Mozilla.

HSTS support across browsers: https://www.owasp.org/index.ph...
Current usage stats: http://caniuse.com/#feat=stric...

IE: 11 (windows 7 and 8.1+)
Edge: all versions
Firefox: 4+
Opera: 12+
Safari: 7+ Mavericks (Mac OS X 10.9)
Chrome: 4.0.211.0

That will cover the majority of users.

Regardless, there is still no fallacy. Users can easily protect themselves from that situation by using a browser that supports HSTS, which simply means using a system that has been updated within the past several years. It also greatly reduces the attack footprint, which is the big selling point for this ad/article.

I want to thank the Slashdot editors for putting stories with realistic analyses of Mozilla and Firefox on the front page of Slashdot, and allowing some real discussion of these issues to take place.

This just isn't possible at other discussion forums. Take Hacker News, for example. Many people directly involved with Mozilla and Rust spend their time there. That, combined with Hacker News' broken and easily-abused mod system, means that any frank discussion about Mozilla, Firefox or Rust tends to get suppressed. If you dare to question anything Mozilla has done, or if you dare to point out something that may be construed as negative, you will find yourself mercilessly downvoted. My suspicion is that the downvoting is being done by the very people working on these projects, since there are so many of them on that site and their comments show they don't tolerate anything even just resembling dissent.

Reddit isn't much better. There are a lot of rabid Mozilla and Firefox fanatics there who will actively suppress any comment that doesn't fully support and worship Mozilla or Firefox.

It's a real shame that we can't openly discuss the various problems affecting Mozilla and Firefox at places like Hacker News and Reddit. Maybe if they pulled their fingers out of their ears, so to speak, and stopped downmodding truthful comments the people behind Firefox would begin to see why their product's market share has slid down to only about 7%, with nearly no (0.04%!) mobile presence. When people say negative things about Firefox, it's because the problems are real, they exist, and they need to be dealt with properly! Silencing such observations doesn't help; it just makes matters worse. It drives more people away from Firefox and Gecko, and typically over to Chrome, which just makes the Blink monoculture stronger and stronger. A Chrome/Blink monoculture is the last thing the web needs!

Right. Because you can tell how an app will perform by the looks of its interface...

Yes, you can. If it looks like Chrome, it's going to be shitty to use. That's because anything with a UI that looks like Chrome will have been designed by hipsters. And any UI designed by hipsters is inherently shitty.

Firefox is a great example of this. In the beginning, it didn't look like Chrome. There were real menus, there was a useful toolbar, there was a status bar, and there was no goddamn catch-all hamburger menu. Firefox was easy and efficient to use, by both beginners and power users alike.

Then hipster designers started mucking with Firefox's UI, and they promptly ruined it by making it look nearly identical to Chrome. The menus are gone. The toolbars are all fucked up. The status bar is gone. And there's a fucking terrible hamburger menu now! Firefox is an awkward, inefficient browser to use now. Users waste too much time trying to find functionality that has been hidden or even removed in some cases, and they have to resort to numerous extensions just to restore Firefox to a barely usable state.

The end result of these UI changes has been the destruction of Firefox. Firefox is down to about 7% of the browser market, and users are fleeing it fast. Some are going to Pale Moon, but others are going to Chrome. After all, if they're going to get the awful Chrome-style UI when using Firefox or Chrome, but Chrome at least isn't as goddamn slow and bloated as Firefox is, then these poor users might as well just use Chrome. At least it's the least horrible of two very horrible UI experiences.

Most have few, if any, any options.

Nonsense. The stats prove you wrong yet again.

Let's look at Android, which is by far the most widely used mobile OS today.

Android users have at least these web browser choices (there are others beyond these, too) available to them:

1. Android Browser
2. Opera Mini
3. Opera Mobile
4. Chrome for Android
5. UC Browser for Android
6. Firefox for Android

As we can see, mobile users have lots of choice.

The one browser they aren't choosing is Firefox for Android!

Opera Mini has almost 5% of the market. UC Browser for Android has over 8%. Android browser has over 3%. Chrome for Android has over 18%.

Firefox for Android? Well, it has 0.04%! Yes, that's right, it has a small fraction of a fraction of just 1% of the browser market!

Including mobile is deceptive.

No, including mobile just reflects the reality of how people use the web today.

People today are using a wide variety of mobile browsers.

They just aren't using Firefox for Android because it's total shit!

Browser market share stats prove you are totally wrong.

In August 2013 Firefox held over 16% of the browser market.

Australis was included in Firefox 29, which was released on April 29, 2014.

By August 2014 Firefox only held about 11% of the browser market.

By August 2015 Firefox was down to about 8% of the browser market.

As of January 2016 Firefox is down to around 7% of the browser market.

Australis has helped drive away over half of Firefox's users.

When I eyeball the January 2016 browser market share stats, it looks like Firefox is now at or just under 7% of the browser market. That's across all versions on all platforms!

IE 11 alone has almost as many users as Firefox does in total. The same goes for iOS Safari 9.2. Hell, even Opera Mini almost has more users than Firefox does! Desktop Chrome 47 has over 3 times as many users as Firefox does in total. Chrome for Android 47 has 2.5 times as many users.

These numbers should be scaring the living shit out of Mozilla. They should be in a constant state of panic right now. Firefox is getting decimated.

Maybe Mozilla doesn't realize it, but Firefox is the only product they have left that has any sort of a user base. Seamonkey, Thunderbird and Persona have been left to flounder. Firefox OS was a massive disaster, maybe even worse than GNOME 3 was. Rust and Servo are dead end projects. Bugzilla is a relic.

Why the fuck will anyone, especially the big players in the game, give a damn about what Mozilla thinks or wants? Mozilla already has so little influence. Soon enough Firefox will have so few users that nobody will give a fuck about it or its users, which in turn means that Mozilla will lose whatever small amount of influence it does have left.

It's fucking insane how Mozilla isn't reacting to this. It's fucking insane! It's like they're nearing the edge of a cliff, but they're running faster and faster!

I don't want Mozilla as an organization to vanish. They play such an important role in keeping the web free and open. Yet they also seem to be so intent on destroying themselves! Please, Mozilla, wake up! Please, Mozilla! PLEASE! Stop ruining Firefox! Stop making yourself irrelevant! Please, Mozilla! Please stop it!

I currently only use Firefox for a couple of specialty plugins, or extensions, and I use an outdated version at work as that's required by IT. Otherwise I use Chrome. That said I agree with you, I don't want them to die. I don't want a Webkit monoculture with a sprinkle of IE. It's bad enough that we already lost Opera. More players and more options is good for the user!

When I eyeball the January 2016 browser market share stats, it looks like Firefox is now at or just under 7% of the browser market. That's across all versions on all platforms!

IE 11 alone has almost as many users as Firefox does in total. The same goes for iOS Safari 9.2. Hell, even Opera Mini almost has more users than Firefox does! Desktop Chrome 47 has over 3 times as many users as Firefox does in total. Chrome for Android 47 has 2.5 times as many users.

These numbers should be scaring the living shit out of Mozilla. They should be in a constant state of panic right now. Firefox is getting decimated.

Maybe Mozilla doesn't realize it, but Firefox is the only product they have left that has any sort of a user base. Seamonkey, Thunderbird and Persona have been left to flounder. Firefox OS was a massive disaster, maybe even worse than GNOME 3 was. Rust and Servo are dead end projects. Bugzilla is a relic.

Why the fuck will anyone, especially the big players in the game, give a damn about what Mozilla thinks or wants? Mozilla already has so little influence. Soon enough Firefox will have so few users that nobody will give a fuck about it or its users, which in turn means that Mozilla will lose whatever small amount of influence it does have left.

It's fucking insane how Mozilla isn't reacting to this. It's fucking insane! It's like they're nearing the edge of a cliff, but they're running faster and faster!

I don't want Mozilla as an organization to vanish. They play such an important role in keeping the web free and open. Yet they also seem to be so intent on destroying themselves! Please, Mozilla, wake up! Please, Mozilla! PLEASE! Stop ruining Firefox! Stop making yourself irrelevant! Please, Mozilla! Please stop it!

So based on last month's stats, Firefox is down to about 7% of the browser market. That's across all versions, on all desktop and mobile (where Firefox for Android has a massive 0.05% of the market) platforms.

At this point, Firefox as a whole is nearly below iOS Safari 9.2, IE 11, and UC Browser for Android. It almost has fewer users than Opera Mini, even! Hell, even Chrome 46 still has almost as many users as Firefox has in total, and Chrome is up to version 48 now!

It's now clear that Firefox 44 introduces a lot of shit that users just don't want, and there's a lot more dumb shit in the pipeline, too.

Based on this, I'm going to make a prediction: Firefox will be at or under 2% of the market by the end of 2016.

So many of Firefox's changes only serve to drive users away to other browsers, and I don't see anything suggesting that they'll start listening to their few remaining users any time soon. Rust and Servo are total dead ends at this point, so we can't count on them to save Firefox.

Once Firefox hits such a low single-digit share of the market, it's likely that Mozilla will be considered completely irrelevant. This is bad for the web, of course, since it cements the WebKit/Blink monoculture.

It's not just Firefox that has become a bug-ridden disaster. Mozilla has managed to do the same with much newer projects like Rust and Servo.

It's particularly funny in the case of Rust. Rust is supposed to be a programming language that, according to its website, "prevents segfaults", "guarantees thread safety", and should make writing buggy code much, much harder. Yet the Rust compiler and standard library, much of which are implemented in Rust by the people who know Rust the best, suffers from thousands of open bugs!

Servo, which is supposed to be Mozilla's next-generation browser engine, also has over 1,000 open bugs. Servo is written in Rust, so theoretically it should have far fewer bugs than that, but because Rust is a disaster then Servo ends up being a disaster, too. And this is the foundation that Mozilla wants to build future versions of Firefox on!

Instead of wasting so much time and effort on Rust and Servo, both of which are proving to be quite lousy, Mozilla should have just taken Gecko and gradually transitioned it to C++14. C++14 is already well-supported by multiple C++ compiler systems which run on all of the major platforms, and it offers pretty much all of the benefits of Rust. As part of this transition they could have focused on fixing bugs.

Firefox OS needs to go. Rust needs to go. Servo needs to go. Mozilla needs to focus on salvaging Firefox, their only remaining project that still has users. Firefox's share of the market is now only about 7%, across all versions and platforms, and it's dropping each month. Soon it will be sub-5%. Once it gets there, Mozilla's influence will dwindle to next to nothing. Lucrative search deals will be pointless. Mozilla's say on web standards will evaporate.

Both Chrome and Firefox have adopted a policy not to use the prefixes anymore some years ago: https://www.chromium.org/blink#vendor-prefixes

Also, according to http://caniuse.com/#cats=CSS Firefox's support for CSS seems better than Chrome's

See this table for support: http://caniuse.com/#feat=getra...

It's great that they're finally improving Math.random(), but node.js should've had crypto.getRandomValues() from the start.

Considering that Vista is 9 years old now, it's not that surprising that the remaining 8% of users aren't well supported. But in any case, IE8 supports XP and HTML 5 video.

XP does (if using Firefox/Chrome), IE8 does not

Actually the usage statistics prove that the people who prefer the current Firefox UI are the minority. Firefox's usage has plummeted to less than 5%. Despite the cries of the Mozilla apologists, the numbers do not lie.

In August of 2013, Firefox had a market share of over 16%.

Today, Firefox has a market share of about 7%.

That tells us everything we need to know.

Two things have happened:

1. They've driven away a lot of their existing users with shitty UI changes, and a lack of progress when it comes to fixing Firefox's slow performance.

2. They haven't attracted any new users.

Together, they have resulted in Firefox's market share being cut down to less than half of what it is, in just over two years!

In other companies, this would be considered a huge disaster.

The latest browser usage stats are showing Firefox at only about 8% of the market. That's just the desktop market only, too. They have almost no mobile presence at all (Firefox for Android is at 0.04%).

Is Mozilla finally realizing that people are fucking fed up with all of the utter stupidity that has infected Firefox for the last several years?

Are they finally waking up to the fact that their whole organization will soon be irrelevant once the remaining Firefox users move to Chrome or the other browsers?

Fuck, I sure hope so! I hope that their next blog post talks about how Australis is being thrown away in favor of the Firefox 3.6 UI, which was actually usable.

And I hope the blog post after that is about them finally getting around to fixing the goddamn performance issues that make Firefox so much slower than Chrome.

I really do hope that Mozilla has realized that treating their users like total shit hasn't helped them.

Maybe they are learning that when you treat your users like shit, and force one unwanted change after another on them, that they'll move to the better products that competitors are offering!

I really hope that's the case.

I hope that Mozilla is getting a grip on the reality that they're facing.

Do what Firefox's users want. Don't force idiotic changes on them. Don't force ads, of all things, on them.

This new version of Chrome should be yet another reason for Mozilla to collectively shit its pants in fear.

Chrome consistently gets better with each release. So even if there isn't a new release of Firefox, Firefox has still gotten relatively worse compared to Chrome just by the fact that Firefox hasn't improved. It surely doesn't help that each release of Firefox has typically been seen as worse than the one before it, causing more problems and inconvenience for its ever-dwindling user base.

Just look at the recent browser usage stats. Firefox is only around 7% to 8% of the browser market now, across desktop and mobile platforms, and all versions. The desktop version of Chrome 46 alone has about 3.5 times the number of users than Firefox has. Chrome for Android has roughly 2.5 times as many users as all versions. Even Opera Mini almost has more users than Firefox has in total!

There should be nothing but panic at Mozilla right now when looking at those numbers. Then there should be even more panic when they realize that Firefox is the only product of theirs that sees much use. They're apparently looking to kill of Thunderbird, based on another recent Slashdot submission. Then their other projects, like Persona, Rust, Firefox OS, Servo, and Bugzilla don't have many users.

In my opinion, Mozilla's influence is dwindling as more and more users leave Firefox for greener pastures. At some point Mozilla will become completely irrelevant. None of the other browser vendors will give a damn what they think or want when they've only got 1% or maybe 2% of the market. When we see how quickly Firefox's share of the market has been dropping lately, the 2% mark will likely be hit sooner than a lot of people expected.

I think that Mozilla is reaching a fork in the road. One path leads directly to irrelevance. The other path leads to glory, but it involves going in a very different direction. This means the end to Firefox OS, Rust, Servo, and other failed projects. This means restoring Firefox's UI to what it once was. This means removing Pocket, Hello, and the ads from Firefox. This means listening to Firefox's users, rather than ignoring them, or worse, doing exactly what the users said they don't want to happen. I, for one, sure hope that Mozilla does not choose the current path that leads straight to irrelevance!

Yeah, the browser market share stats totally back up what you're saying.

16.74% of all browser users use Chrome for Android.

It's clearly outweighed by the whopping 0.05% of all browser users who use Firefox for Android.