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I find these stats to be more in line with what I'm seeing with many of my websites. The 12% you mention is high for Firefox. It's most likely closer to only 8%.

But you are correct, Firefox's market share does continue to decline month after month, with no end in sight.

My question is, when the fuck will Mozilla realize that everything they've done since Firefox 4 has been universally disliked?

I mean, how much further does Firefox's market share have to decline? Does it need to hit 5%? Or 1%? Or are they just going to drive head-on into 0%?

Mozilla totally missed the boat on mobile. Firefox for Android is universally disliked, and has at most 0.1% (yes, that's a fraction of 1%!) of the browser market. Chrome for Android has over 15%, and iOS Safari has over 5%.

Mozilla has repeatedly ignored what users have wanted for Firefox on the desktop. Despite a huge outcry from the community, all we've gotten is one unwanted change after another. Mozilla trashed Firefox's UI. They trashed Firefox's usability. They put ads into Firefox. They forced in totally unwanted and unnecessary social media integration. They still haven't done much to improve Firefox's remarkably slow performance or its excessively high resource usage.

Desktop Firefox is the only product that Mozilla offers that even has a small number of users. Since they abandoned Thunderbird, we've seen that gradually become avoided by users. None of Mozilla's other efforts have seen much success. Persona is a failure. Servo is perpetually going nowhere. Rust took forever to get to 1.0, and now that C++14 is out and is better there is no need for Rust. Let's Encrypt has been taking forever. Firefox OS has gotten some of the most scathing software reviews ever seen, and is seeing no uptake.

With its continually dropping share of the market, at some point soon Firefox is going to become completely irrelevant. It's close enough, as it is. Once that finally happens, Mozilla's influence will evaporate. The small number of remaining Firefox users are the only thing keeping Mozilla even remotely relevant. When Firefox's market share percentage is measured on one finger, nobody will care what Mozilla and its handful of users will think about the direction that the web is taking.

The saddest thing about all of this is that it's something that Mozilla has done to itself! It wasn't Microsoft, or Google, or Apple, or Opera, or anyone else who destroyed Firefox. It was Mozilla, and Mozilla alone! Even Firefox's users can't be blamed, because they did what they could and protested each and every awful change that Mozilla has forced. It's all so goddamn unnecessary!

When I look at the latest browser market share stats, I can't help but notice that things aren't looking good for Firefox at all.

Being generous, Firefox only has maybe 8% of the entire browser market. Firefox has almost no mobile presence at all (0.05%). We see Chrome for Android alone having about twice the market share that Firefox has across all platforms. iOS Safari has about the same market share as Firefox does on all platforms. Even Opera Mini has about the same market share. There are a couple of individual versions of desktop Chrome that have almost twice the market share of Firefox!

Mozilla is only relevant because of Firefox. It's the only product of theirs that still has at least some users. They pretty much abandoned Thunderbird, so its users have been slowly dwindling away. Bugzilla is a relic. Firefox OS has been a disaster. Servo is going nowhere. Rust blew its chance by taking so long to get to 1.0, and people have lost interest in it now that C++14 is a better alternative.

Given how we see Firefox's market share continually dropping, thanks to Mozilla screwing up the user experience so badly, I don't think it will be relevant 2 years from now. When Firefox is down at 0.5% of the browser market by that time, nobody will care about what Mozilla and Firefox users have to say about the direction that the web is taking.

It didn't have to be this way, of course. All Mozilla had to do was provide a good user experience. Like you point out, they used to know how to do this. But ever since Firefox 4, it has been a total disaster, and the next-to-nothing market share proves this. Users don't want to use Firefox any longer because it is so awful, even if the alternatives aren't necessarily that much better.

At least those behind Vivaldi seem to know what users want. Maybe Mozilla could save itself by imitating Vivaldi instead of imitating Chrome. Clearly, imitating Chrome has done nothing for Firefox but drive away its users.

The vitality of an open source project isn't defined by its developers. It's defined by its users!

Look at Firefox starting with version 4, or GNOME 3. They have a number of developers, but users just don't want to use Firefox or GNOME 3. GNOME 3 hasn't seen much use, due it being ineffective and almost unusable for many desktop users. Many potential GNOME 3 users have been opting to go with KDE, XFCE, MATE, and other environments instead of GNOME 3, even on systems where GNOME 3 is the default environment. We've seen something similar happen with Firefox, where many of its users fled to Chrome and other browsers, thanks to all of the unwanted UI reworking and other unwanted changes. This has left Firefox at only about 8% of the browser market.

While Firefox and GNOME 3 may still have developers working on them, and even have some users remaining, their dwindling number of users means their vitality is dropping significantly. They are, in essence, causing themselves to be "killed off".

At what point does a group of people, perhaps thinking they're working to create something good, but that actually results in something that maybe isn't so good, become a "conspiracy"?

Let's look to open source efforts like GNOME 3 and Firefox 4 (and later versions). Here we have well-established software products, with many users, and extensive communities built around them. While they'll take outside contributions, stewardship of such projects is quite tightly controlled. Yet at some point, very bad decisions start being made by the developers of the products, and not necessarily in bad faith. There comes a point where some influential members of the community think it's important to target "average users" or "mobile users" or perhaps to compete with a similar product from another vendor by imitating it.

But by doing so, they end up completely trashing their own products. A desktop environment like GNOME 3 becomes almost completely unusable on the desktop by power users, who make up the bulk of its community. A browser like Firefox throws away an intuitive and usable UI for one that's nonsensical in most ways, while long-standing performance problems, resource usage excesses and bugs remain unfixed.

Yes, many people can be and are involved in such debacles. But do we know that they were all acting maliciously? Do we even know that they actually knew what they were doing? Somebody pushing for Firefox's awful Australis UI, for example, may have thought he was helping design a good, novel UI. But rational outsiders and Firefox users thought very differently, clearly. That's why Firefox is now at only about 7% to 8% of the browser market, when it used to be above 30%.

We can't deny that GNOME 3, and Firefox version 4 and later, have been project-level failures involving many people. But despite the negative and unwanted outcomes, it's difficult to say with certainty that there was any sort of "conspiracy" involved. It could very well be people working together in good faith, who unfortunately only end up creating a very awful outcome.

When looking at the big picture, no, you don't exist. The huge majority (we're talking over 90%) of Linux desktop users are now using Unity, KDE, or XFCE, or MATE, or one of the many other window managers that exist. GNOME 3 and Cinnamon users like you are irrelevant, given your small number.

You guys are like Firefox users. You're loud and obnoxious, but you're also very small in number. Your single-digit share of the market makes you absolutely irrelevant compared to the other players.

I suppose it isn't surprising that GNOME 3 users and Firefox users are so much alike. Both GNOME 3 and Firefox are formerly-successful software products that had their UIs and usability totally trashed by hipster "designers", and whose developers have shown no interesting in improving the awful conditions they're subjecting their users to. GNOME 3 and Firefox are both very similar types of disasters that attract the same sort of failures as supporters.

This reminds me of what has happened with JetBrains, a Czech company who makes popular programming tools.

They recently announced some significant licensing changes that involved a subscription model. As any sane person would expect, the customers absolutely hated this decision. The uproar was significant, with an extreme level of dissent. Paying customers, many of them who had been customers for years and years, explained that they will move away from JetBrains' products immediately.

Given the extreme degree of public outrage regarding these completely unwanted licensing changes, JetBrains said they'd listen to the customer feedback.

In the end, JetBrains backpeddled somewhat and adjusted the licensing options. However, many customers are still unhappy, and severe damage has already been done. Lots of long time JetBrains customers are now suffering from the dreaded FUD: fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Because of this, many are still considering moving to alternate tools.

All it takes is one single change like this, doing something that the customers do not want, and everything goes to hell. Previously loved companies can become distrusted outcasts.

Mozilla could be considered an extreme case of this. Once considered among the most respected and beloved organizations, years of unwanted changes to Firefox have driven away many of Firefox's users (Firefox's market share across all platforms is likely in the single digits now). Users just don't like being treated poorly, especially if there are alternatives! Firefox's users got fed up with the constant and awful UI changes, so they moved to Chrome. Now Mozilla is facing irrelevancy, as they end up with fewer and fewer people using their software. It's a real shame, but that's what happens when you shit all over your users and customers!

Somebody comes in describing a serious problem affecting Firefox, and just like a typical Mozilla/Firefox supporter the first thing you do is deny that this very real problem exists. You don't try to find out how to reproduce it. You don't try to find out what might be causing it. You just flat out deny that it exists, even when others are experiencing it.

The experience I get when using Firefox 40.0.3 on Linux is similar to what that other AC described. Firefox's CPU usage is way higher than it should be, it uses almost 2 GB of RAM, the page loads slowly, and Firefox feels really sluggish when scrolling through the page. Yet when I load the same page in Chrome, it's a totally different story. Chrome barely uses any CPU, its memory usage across all of its processes is less than 1 GB, the page loads quickly, and I can scroll through the page without it feeling sluggish like it does in Firefox.

It's no wonder we see Firefox's market share down to about 8%. Firefox's browsing experience is inferior to that of Chrome and the other major browsers. Then when people report these problems, we have people like you who shit all over these bug reporters instead of trying to help figure out what's wrong. Of course people are moving away from Firefox! It's an awful user experience all around!

Sorry, son, you're the one who's full of shit in this matter.

Firefox's share of the market is plummeting because people are unhappy with it. It's likely under 10% at this point, across all platforms. IE 11 and Safari for iOS each almost have more users than Firefox does in total. Chrome for Android has far more. Even Opera Mini almost has as many users as Firefox does!

Fuck, even Mozilla's own Firefox satisfaction numbers show that its users don't like it. Over 80% of Firefox users are unhappy with it! That's an unbelievably bad rating, regardless of product and industry. Even the most despised politicians rarely see such poor satisfaction levels.

It's your kind of attitude that's directly responsible for what's happening to Firefox. Firefox's few remaining users are very clearly saying that there are some severe problems. Yet instead of doing the sensible thing and listening to these users and considering what they're saying, we have people like you who just deny that there are any problems.

While you and other Firefox advocates are spewing out denial, these long-standing bugs, performance issues, and idiotic changes remain unfixed. Each day some more of Firefox's remaining users will finally give up, and move to some other browser. Since no new users are bothering to use Firefox due to these problems, Firefox's market share dwindles.

Eventually it will get to the point that there are so few Firefox users that nobody will care what Mozilla thinks. After all, Mozilla's revenue and influence are only possible due to the size of its user base. But when Firefox has next to no users, nobody will do lucrative Firefox search deals with Mozilla, depriving them of their funding. Nobody involved with the standardization of web technologies will listen to them. Mozilla will go from being a respected, innovative organization to a totally irrelevant organization.

Personally, I don't want to see that happen. But thanks to people like you, and a complete lack of sensible action from Mozilla, I fear we're seeing the decline of Firefox and Mozilla getting closer every single day.

Even if this is a dupe, it's still well worth discussing again and again.

Here we have Mozilla, which was once one of the most respected and trusted open source organizations, right up there with the FSF and the ASF, making yet another set of dumb moves. This isn't the first idiocy we've seen from them. It's just the latest in a long line of really obviously dumb moves.

Let's ignore the utter fuckup that's Firefox OS, the abandoning of Thunderbird, the pathetic ouster of Mr. Eich, the Rust debacle, and the other such failures. Let's focus solely on Firefox.

Just a few years ago, Firefox used to have over 30% of the browser market. Firefox was a major player, which made Mozilla a major player. These days, Firefox is likely under 10% of the market, and we keep seeing its use drop and drop. We see single versions of competing browsers, like IE 11 and iOS Safari 8.4, alone nearly exceeding the market share of all Firefox versions, on both desktops and mobile devices. Chrome for Android is well beyond Firefox's total market share. Soon enough, we may even see minor browsers like Opera Mini having a greater market share than all versions of Firefox, on all platforms.

This drop was not necessary. People liked what Firefox used to offer. That's why people switched to it in the first place! Yes, Chrome did provide some competition to Firefox. But instead of facing this competition head-on, all Mozilla did was trash Firefox, for some inexplicable reason. From the very beginning, people were saying that they liked Chrome because it was fast, even if they didn't like the privacy implications of using it, nor its user interface.

Yet instead of listening to what Firefox users said they liked about Chrome, and using feedback that to improve Firefox, Mozilla did the complete opposite. People liked the Firefox UI, yet Mozilla turned around and imitated Chrome, reaching an almost identical state with the release of Australis, despite the protests of so many Firefox users. People didn't like the privacy implications of using a browser provided by a major player in the ad industry, so what did Mozilla do? They stuck ads in recent versions of Firefox, along with forcing integration wtih some third-party services that most Firefox users have no intention of ever using! And when it comes to Firefox's performance, we've seen next to no positive progress. Electrolysis, for example, actually feels slower than single-threaded Firefox!

Mozilla has systematically driven away a big chunk of Firefox's existing users by doing all of these stupid, unwanted things. Maybe this strategy would work if these changes brought in new users, but the evidence is that they aren't doing that at all. In fact, they've driven away the very users who were instrumental in getting others to use Firefox in the first place!

While we do often see organizations falter against external obstacles, it's rare to see an organization like Mozilla which appears to be doing everything in its power to destroy itself! It isn't Chrome or IE or any other browser that's drawing users away from Firefox. The problem is that Mozilla is changing Firefox in every way possible that will maximize the number of users who move to an alternative browser. These changes appear to be just another set that will drive away users. These users aren't stupid. They know that if they use Firefox, they're going to get an inferior Chrome-like UI, but without the performance benefits of Chrome. So although they don't want to use Chrome, and they'd rather use Firefox (at least as it once was), they do the only rational thing and use Chrome. At least then they get a less-inferior Chrome experience, plus they get to use a fast and light browser, too.

I truly though that when Mozilla hit only 20% of the market, they'd realize that something was wrong, and start making the sorts of changes that Firefox users actually wanted. But we didn't see that happen, obviously! Now we're seeing Firefox most likely under 10% of the m

I'm beginning to think that maybe, just maybe, panic has started to set in at Mozilla. They're starting to see that Firefox's marketshare has fallen through the floor.

We're talking about a browser that once had over 30% of the market reduced down to around 9% lately. Firefox for Android has been an abject failure at around 0.15% of the market. There's no presence on iOS. Firefox OS is totally irrelevant.

Chrome for Android alone has about twice as many users as all versions of Firefox have! iOS Safari has about the same number of users that Firefox does. IE 11 alone has almost as many users, and that's even after IE has suffered a similar freefall from its once lofty heights. Firefox's numbers are even approaching those of Opera Mini!

Mozilla only has any relevance today because of Firefox. We see very little use of Mozilla's other offerings. Thunderbird saw some use, until Mozilla essentially put it on life support. Firefox OS has been a complete failure. Bugzilla is seen as old and outdated. Servo is embryonic, and unusable. Rust was infected by Ruby hypesters fleeing the sinking Ruby on Rails ship, and took forever to get even a mediocre 1.0 release out.

Although Mozilla hasn't seemed too willing to acknowledge the massive problem facing Firefox, maybe it's finally starting to sink in. Maybe they've finally realized that when a browser has 30% of the market, then 25%, then 20%, then 15%, then 12%, and now only 9%, something is wrong.

When it gets to the point that almost nobody is using Firefox, Mozilla will lose what little influence they have left. The only reason that they have any influence today is because of their past success with Firefox, but that was an increasingly long time ago. Will Yahoo keep throwing money at Mozilla when Firefox only has 1% or less of the market? It's doubtful!

Maybe they're starting to realize the disaster that awaits them, as an organization. I think we're starting to see them panic. Instead of listening to their users, they're throwing shit against the wall in a frenzy, trying to see what sticks. That's what the ads in Firefox have been about. That's what Pocket has been about. That's what Hello has been about. That's what junk like this is about. It's just one knee-jerk reaction after another, as it becomes clearer and clearer that the future of Firefox and Mozilla is looking bleaker and bleaker.

I wanted to see Mozilla succeed. They used to be a very respected organization, up there with the FSF and the Apache project. Yet they've done so much to drive away so many of Firefox's users. Their smugness has become their undoing, throwing them into the self-destructive spiral we see now. The worst part is that none of this was necessary! If only they had listened to Firefox's users, rather than forcing one shitty thing after another upon these users, then Mozilla wouldn't be in such a bad position today. Firefox would still be seen as an innovative, powerful browser that people want to use, rather than the mockery and the awful Chrome imitation that it has become today. It didn't have to be like this!

The mobile space needs an open platform and, most importantly, an open app package standard that anyone can implement. Users benefit by being able to keep their apps even when switching platforms and new platforms benefit from a wealth of apps ready to go from day one.

This is something I keep seeing Firefox OS advocates parrot, but what does it actually mean?

App developers clearly don't have a problem targeting Android and iOS, given the huge number of apps that are out there already.

And pretty much every app that would be useful on multiple platforms already does run on at least Android and iOS, the only mobile operating systems that see significant use these days.

Users generally can keep their apps when switching between platforms, since they're already available on the major platforms.

As for Firefox OS being "open", I don't think there's anything to back that up. We regular users have just as much say about how it will develop in the future as we do about how Android or iOS will develop in the future: next to none. We've already seen Mozilla totally ignore the huge number of Firefox users who were upset with the direction they took the desktop browser. Why the heck should we expect them to listen to what we say about Firefox OS?

The same goes for JavaScript, CSS and HTML. We regular users and developers have no say over their futures. They will evolve as Google, Apple and Microsoft want them to. Now that Firefox's share of the market across all platforms is now likely under 9%, Mozilla can pretty much be ignored in practice. Their influence was only ever tied to them holding a significant share of the browser market. Now that their share has evaporated, their influence has evaporated, too.

In fact, as a developer, Firefox OS is much more closed to me than Android or iOS are. Both of those platforms give me a vast amount of choice regarding which programming language(s) I want to use, and which frameworks and libraries I can work with, and how I build my apps. But Firefox OS? It dictates to me that I must use the "open" (not-so-open, in reality, as we've seen) programming language of JavaScript, and I must use HTML, and I must use CSS. Or if I really want, I can waste my time with terrible hacks like Emscripten, which are just an indirect way of getting forced into using JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.

Firefox OS supporters talk a lot about "openness" and "freedom" and "choice", but then we just don't see any of those when we look at the actual situation. Compared to Android, iOS, and even some of the other mobile OSes, Firefox OS actually ends up being the one that's most lacking when it comes to openness, freedom and choice!

While there is the technology to do this on the web (the HTML ruby element), you won’t see it much. It just doesn’t work on all web browsers (like Firefox),

Wrong, in fact Firefox is the only browser with almost full ruby support and for older Firefoxen there have been ruby extensions for ages.

and few people choose to use it on their websites.

Their problem.

iOS actually sees relatively little use. Yes, selling a comparatively small number of rather expensive phones and tablets does give Apple some impressive revenue numbers, but the proportion of iOS users is very small. There are many more users using cheaper Android devices from a wide variety of manufacturers.

Look at these recent browser usage stats, for example. iOS Safari is only about 7%. The old Android browser is still at over 5%, plus there's Chrome for Android at over 13%, and UC Browser for Android is over 5%, and even the failed Firefox for Android is at 0.14%.

All of the mobile usage together still pales in comparison to desktop browser usage, even many years after mobile devices were alleged to have "killed" desktop and notebook markets. The number of people using Chrome 43 on non-mobile systems almost exceeds the total number of mobile users, across all platforms!

Even in other tests, Edge is still dead last among the four.

http://caniuse.com/#compare=ie...

Also run the acid3 test in Edge and compare to Chrome. In Edge it stutters a bit, so it doesn't *fully* pass the test.

As distasteful as I find DRM, at least we see Microsoft trying to improve their web browser. With Edge they're actually succeeding in creating something that average users do want to use!

Not exactly. Microsoft's Edge browser is still in fourth place in terms of being standards compliant,

Err.... standards? Look, HTML5Test leans heavily on W3C working drafts which are nowhere near finished. Edge doesn't implement Web Components, streams, service workers, web notifications, speech recognition and speech synthesis. These account for about 10% of the total HTML5Test score, but they're all drafts or proposals!

The fact that some browsers are implementing these drafts without a prefix is a PROBLEM, not a good thing. Library & web site developers end up taking dependencies on things that may very well change over time.

Meanwhile, if you want to stick to stable, published specifications, Edge is currently the leading browser for ES6 support in terms of percentage of features implemented. As for CSS, have a look at the list of CSS features Edge doesn't support and note that for most of them, at least one of Firefox and Chrome hasn't implemented them either..... and/or they're a working draft.... or other browsers have just implemented them in the last few months.

As distasteful as I find DRM, at least we see Microsoft trying to improve their web browser. With Edge they're actually succeeding in creating something that average users do want to use!

This should scare the living daylights out of Mozilla. They've been having enough trouble competing with Chrome. Now they'll be competing with Chrome, as well as this browser from Microsoft that people are pretty happy about so far.

Things don't look good for Firefox. Firefox's share of the market has dropped so much. Recent browser market share stats show that all versions of Firefox Desktop are only around 8% of the market. Firefox 38 is only at 7.45%, so we can expect Firefox 39 to be below that, possibly forever. Firefox for Android is at 0.14% (yes, that's a leading 0!), and Firefox isn't really a viable option on iOS.

To put things in perspective, the latest version of Chrome for Android by itself, at 13.77%, has almost twice the number of users as Firefox has in total! IE 11 at 7.60%, and Safari for iOS 8.3 at 6.42%, both almost exceed Firefox's total number of users!

Clearly desktop users are fleeing Firefox, and nobody wants to use Firefox for Android. Mozilla has no other projects of significance aside from Firefox. Nobody uses Firefox OS, even the third-worlders they tried to force it on. Bugzilla is a relic. They put Thunderbird out to pasture some time ago. Let's Encrypt has yet to deliver anything useful. Rust is unimpressive and unwieldy, even now that 1.0 was finally released after so many years. Servo is very experimental, and its progress is crawling along slower than even Rust's did!

This decline in the usage of Firefox, combined with the total lack of future prospects, should have everyone involved with Mozilla in a total panic! This is an organization that should be shitting its pants, so to speak. The only reason it still exists, Firefox, is rapidly evaporating. What, do they really think that Yahoo! will keep throwing money at them once Firefox has almost no users to target?

Yet instead of the unrestrained panic that we should be seeing out of Mozilla, we instead see them continuing down the same path of failure that has dogged them for so many years now. They make more dumb and unwanted social media changes to Firefox that nobody actually wants. Heck, they most notable part of this release is that they removed or disabled existing functionality!

I used to like Firefox. I want Mozilla to succeed. But son of a bitch, it's like they're doing everything they can to speed up their demise, while being totally oblivious to it the whole time! Why won't they, as a collective group of people, wake up to what's happening?!

I just don't get Mozilla. Firefox's share of the market has dropped so much. Recent browser market share stats show that all versions of Firefox Desktop are only around 8% of the market.

Have you allowed for the vast changes in the market i.e desktop no longer is the majority platform type? And the flaws in the reporting i.e. Firefox is counted as Firefox, but Iceweasel, PaleMoon, and a myriad of other builds of Firefox aren't.

Notes:- PaleMoon is listed as a type that is not listed - but others variants aren't even acknowledged. Mobile platform browser figure sources aren't given, Desktop platform figures come from StatCounter - I don't know who the fuck they are - and no one I know does either. Perhaps that makes their "figures" even more irrelevant than those from Alexis (every admin I know refuses to use Alexis). So I don't know that those figures are particularly meaningful - at least to me. Disclaimer: I go by awstats reports from sites I manage.

Netmarketshare says 12.06%, a 3% drop since August last year. Probably a more reliable figure for the broad range of web servers, and similar to other figures from the largest websites.

Apropos of the story - I've already disabled Pocket as it's of no interest to me.

I just don't get Mozilla. Firefox's share of the market has dropped so much. Recent browser market share stats show that all versions of Firefox Desktop are only around 8% of the market. Firefox 38 is only at 7.45%, so we can expect Firefox 39 to be below that, possibly forever. Firefox for Android is at 0.14% (yes, that's a leading 0!), and Firefox isn't really a viable option on iOS.

To put things in perspective, the latest version of Chrome for Android by itself, at 13.77%, has almost twice the number of users as Firefox has in total! IE 11 at 7.60%, and Safari for iOS 8.3 at 6.42%, both almost exceed Firefox's total number of users!

Clearly desktop users are fleeing Firefox, and nobody wants to use Firefox for Android. Mozilla has no other projects of significance aside from Firefox. Nobody uses Firefox OS, even the third-worlders they tried to force it on. Bugzilla is a relic. They put Thunderbird out to pasture some time ago. Let's Encrypt has yet to deliver anything useful. Rust is unimpressive and unwieldy, even now that 1.0 was finally released after so many years. Servo is very experimental, and its progress is crawling along slower than even Rust's did!

This decline in the usage of Firefox, combined with the total lack of future prospects, should have everyone involved with Mozilla in a total panic! This is an organization that should be shitting its pants, so to speak. The only reason it still exists, Firefox, is rapidly evaporating. What, do they really think that Yahoo! will keep throwing money at them once Firefox has almost no users to target?

Yet instead of the unrestrained panic that we should be seeing out of Mozilla, we instead see them continuing down the same path of failure that has dogged them for so many years now. They make more dumb and unwanted social media changes to Firefox that nobody actually wants. Heck, they most notable part of this release is that they removed or disabled existing functionality!

I used to like Firefox. I want Mozilla to succeed. But son of a bitch, it's like they're doing everything they can to speed up their demise, while being totally oblivious to it the whole time! Why won't they, as a collective group of people, wake up to what's happening?!

We've all been thinking safari is the new ie6 for a while now.
http://www.murga-linux.com/pup...
http://blog.millermedeiros.com...
http://quirksmode.org/html5/in...
http://caniuse.com/#cats=HTML5

The Edge Conference, which one can attend by invitation only, includes "delegates" from Google, Mozilla, Facebook, but not from Apple. Many of the web API's unsupported on Safari include functions provided by API's in iOS, or even Android. Some people want to create Web Apps, that create experiences very similar to iOS, but run on a mobile or desktop web browser. Apple would prefer you develop such Apps using iOS using Swift or Objective-C API's, which run natively with better performance in security. Why should Apple support API's on Safari, that allow Web apps to recreate the iOS experience on non-Apple devices? Why do you think Steve Jobs banned JAVA and Adobe Flash from iPhones?

BTW, you can see which web API's are supported on a given web browser by going to http://caniuse.com/

caniuse.com's background-size chart claims that Safari for iOS has defects in its handling of background-size: cover.

Mozilla used to be the Savior of the Web. But after these last few years, I fear they've lost that role.

The UI changes to Firefox were totally unwanted, and have pretty much killed it as a product. Its share of the market keeps dropping and dropping. When we look at global web browser usage stats like these, we see that Firefox is now maybe 10% of the market, if even that. Chrome for Android alone, Chrome 41 alone and Chrome 40 alone each have about the same or more users than all versions of Firefox. Heck, even IE 11 alone and Safari have about the same number of users these days.

Mozilla has also engaged in numerous other half-arsed efforts, like Firefox OS and Persona, that nobody wants. Every review I've seen of Firefox OS has been negative. Nobody likes it, and nobody wants it, even the third-worlders they've had to resort to targeting it to. With Android, iOS, and so many other alternatives that are so much better, why the heck would anyone sensible use Firefox OS? The only reason to use it is to try to conform with some weird fringe ideology that worships HTML5/JS/CSS above all else, even above usable, working applications.

Then there was the whole Eich debacle. Regardless of your stance, it's pretty disgusting that somebody had to lose his job merely because of his beliefs regarding same-sex marriages. It would be considered unacceptable if a homosexual was forced out of a job for supporting same-sex marriage, and it should be considered just as unacceptable if a heterosexual was forced out of a job for not supporting same-sex marriage. This is no place for hypocrisy or double standards.

Now there's this shit that will cause headaches and problems for so many Web users.

We need a new organization to save us, and the Web, from Mozilla. We need an organization that will put out a usable browser. We need an organization that focuses on doing what's right, and what the Web community wants, rather than what it wants. We need an organization that will listen and respect its users, rather than trampling on them and ignoring their pleas. We need a new Savior, and we need it now.

You aren't alone. Firefox is probably under 10% of the market at this point. Chrome for Android alone has more users than all of the Firefox-branded browsers on all platforms have. Even Chrome 40 has more users than all of the Firefox-branded browsers. Firefox is dying, and it's like Mozilla is doing everything they can not to stop this, and in fact to encourage it. This is really weird, because Firefox is the only reason that Mozilla has any relevance at all.

As a Firefox user, I'm very concerned when I see its market share dropping month after month.

These stats from US gov't websites show Firefox's market share at 11%.

Other global stats paint a very similar picture.

Globally, I suspect that Firefox's share of the market is only about 10%. That's pretty abysmal, especially for a browser that was so popular once. It used to hold well over 30% of the market at one time.

Chrome for Android alone now has a greater share of the market than Firefox on all platforms does. Even IE 11, by itself, has about as many users as Firefox does in total.

Why aren't trends like these scaring the living hell out of Mozilla, as an organization?

Because the Firefox devs think their browser should pander to the tablet-interface loving users, with advanced features hidden and the GUI dumbed down - while a large part of their user base specifically wants an "advanced" browser with lots of addons which does NOT look like Chrome. So lots of users are leaving, and the Firefox devs in their ivory tower wonder why nobody likes their "vision" of the perfect browser and why the users do not "get" that the devs KNOW what's best.

As a Firefox user, I'm very concerned when I see its market share dropping month after month.

These stats from US gov't websites show Firefox's market share at 11%.

Other global stats paint a very similar picture.

Globally, I suspect that Firefox's share of the market is only about 10%. That's pretty abysmal, especially for a browser that was so popular once. It used to hold well over 30% of the market at one time.

Chrome for Android alone now has a greater share of the market than Firefox on all platforms does. Even IE 11, by itself, has about as many users as Firefox does in total.

Why aren't trends like these scaring the living hell out of Mozilla, as an organization?

Don't they realize that Firefox is the only reason they have any sort of influence over the web? Nobody really cares about any of their other projects, I hate to say.

Why don't we hear more from Mozilla about this market share issue? The number of Firefox users keeps dropping month after month, probably because so many Firefox users are unhappy about the awful UI changes, and about how its memory usage and performance continues to lag Chrome and even IE. I want to see real results, not just unrealistic benchmarks showing mythical improvements that I don't actually get to experience as I browse the web!

Nobody will care what Mozilla thinks if the number of Firefox users continues to drop each month. This trend won't continue forever. At some point there will be a negligible number of Firefox users around, and Mozilla will be powerless at that point. Google already has enough power as it is. In that situation, they'd have almost full control over the web. That scares me a lot, and it should scare Mozilla, too!

While you may be moving back to it, it continues to bleed users.

The latest stats, from Jan. 2015, show Firefox at about 10% of the market, across all versions and across all platforms (including Android).

To put it in perspective how pathethetic that is, Chrome for Android alone has about the same number of users as Firefox does in total.

The desktop version of Chrome has well over twice the number of users that Firefox has in total. Even IE 11 by itself nearly has more users than Firefox has!

Firefox can only be considered a dying product at best, but realistically it's more of a total, self-induced (due to Mozilla repeatedly pissing off users for years on end with dumb changes) failure at this point.

The term "Big Data" is bullshit, but the concept itself is not. It's statistics, plain and simple. When you have sufficient data available, there is a lot of information and insight that can be obtained from these data.

A perfect example of this are the data that are available about Mozilla Firefox. Let's start by looking at Firefox's market share today. As we can see, it's only about 10% these days, on both the desktop and mobile platforms. Their mobile presence is particularly embarrassing, as it's much less than even mobile IE's! Even the ancient Android 2.3 browser has more users than Firefox for Android! Even more interesting is how Chrome for Android alone likely has more users than Firefox does in total!

Those browser stats are an example of "Big Data" that's tremendously useful. We can learn a lot about Firefox and its role in the modern world from that data alone. When you're dealing with data sets derived from absolutely massive collections of source data, remarkable observations are possible.

We can also look at Mozilla's own Firefox feedback results. These are very interesting! Over the past 7 days, over 10,000 people have submitted feedback. Across all of the Firefox-branded products, 87% of people report being "sad" with Firefox, while only 13% are "happy" with it! That's a huge gap, even when we consider that angry people are more likely to give feedback than happy people. There are 6.5 times more people who are sad with Firefox than there are people who are happy with it! We can correlate this feedback data set, which is statistically significant, with the results we derive from the browser market share data set. It becomes obvious that people are leaving Firefox behind because they are unhappy with it. Furthermore, Mozilla should already be aware of this displeasure with Firefox.

This is the beauty of statistics at work!

When we consider global data sets consisting of data from thousands or millions or even billions of people, we can see some stunning patterns and results. Clearly Mozilla needs to do a better job of listening to its users. Something is seriously wrong when 87% of them are unhappy with Firefox. The data are there, Mozilla! The results are obvious! Please, act on it! Listen to the users!

What you describe was only a "shit show" for end users. For Microsoft, it was likely very beneficial when it came to helping entrench Windows.

The "greatest shit show" when it comes to web browsers is, without a doubt, the destruction of Firefox by Mozilla. Not only did end users lose, but Mozilla has been losing, too.

A few years ago, Firefox held about 35% of the browser market. It was a well-respected browser that end users enjoyed using. It made their lives better.

Then Firefox 4 and later versions happened. Mozilla made a lot of bad decisions, from screwing up the release process for many months, to awful UI changes that most Firefox users did not want, to not fixing the memory leaks and slow performance that have hampered Firefox for so long, to totally missing the boat on mobile.

What's the end result of all of this? Firefox's users were driven away, and Firefox is now down to about 10% of the market, across both desktop and mobile platforms. Chrome for Android alone likely has more users now than all versions of Firefox across all of the platforms it supports.

These days, Firefox is detested. Firefox is even laughed at. Firefox is a dying browser.

The strangest thing about the fall of Firefox isn't that it was some competitor that crushed it. Firefox was ruined because of what Mozilla, and Mozilla alone, did to it. By not listening to Firefox users, and pushing one dumb change after another, while simultaneously not fixing the problems that users did have, Mozilla doomed Firefox to its current pathetic state.

Firefox's market share keeps on dropping, dropping and dropping. Now it's only around 10% as of December, 2014. That includes both desktop and mobile versions of Firefox!

Every one of these bad decisions that Mozilla has made over the past number of years has driven away yet more users. And we see no great migration of users to Firefox. After all, why should we? Firefox no longer offers anything that users want, and a lot that users absolutely don't want. It's worse than its competitors in pretty much every way.

If anyone is "just letting Google, Apple and Microsoft dictate the way the web evolves", it is Mozilla itself. Mozilla is doing everything it can to drive users away from Firefox. And every user that leaves Firefox for Chrome, Safari, Opera and even newer versions of IE means that Mozilla has even less influence that it had before, while its competitors have more influence.

Mozilla is destroying itself through these repeated shows of idiocy, even after so many Firefox users have yelled STOP! The total lunacy involving how they savagely attacked their former CEO, Brendan Eich, doesn't help, either.

Mozilla is destroying itself much more efficiently than Google, Apple or Microsoft could ever hope to destroy it.

I don't think that those are good stats to use. W3Schools isn't exactly the sort of web site that most people will visit.

Here are the most realistic browser usage stats I've come across. They put Firefox's global usage (both desktop and mobile, across all versions) at around 10% or so as of December 2014.

Chrome for Android alone has around the same number of users that Firefox has in total.

Firefox is dying.

LOL! I haven't looked for browser usage stats in ages, but I just found these ones: http://caniuse.com/usage_table.php

Firefox is only at about 10% of the market now on the desktop. But Firefox for Android? LOL, it's 0.15%! Hilarious!

LOL, Chrome 37 is at 15.73%, which probably puts it over Firefox. Chrome 38 is at 12.39%, which also probably puts it over Firefox.

Chrome for Android by itself, at 9.51%, almost has more users than Firefox does in total!

This is funny, funny, FUNNY! Individual versions of Chrome have more users than all versions of Firefox on all platforms!

Google didn't lose out on anything here. If anyone's the big loser, I suspect it's Yahoo. They're paying good money to get the attention of pretty much nobody!

There aren't just one or two people reporting memory leaks with Firefox. There are lots of people reporting these problems, even if some people don't experience them.

I don't think it's a "meme". I don't think it's people trolling. I see these comments all over the place online. I hear of similar experiences in person from co-workers, friends and relatives. This comes up far too much to just be a coincidence.

When people are reporting that fresh installations of the most recent version of Firefox end up consuming multiple gigabytes of memory after moderate browsing, then something is clearly wrong. Maybe it isn't broken on your system, and maybe it isn't broken on the systems of the Firefox developers, but it's apparently broken on the systems of a great many end users.

Yet instead of doing the responsible thing and accepting that there is in fact some sort of a problem, members of the Mozilla community (such as yourself) end up denying the problem exists, and then you ridicule everyone who does suffer from it. Sometimes you blame it on "extensions", even when the users are using a fresh installation of Firefox without any installed!

Responding to what's very likely a completely real problem in that manner only drives users away from Firefox. That's part of the reason why Firefox is only at around 10% of the browser market at this time, with that number continually dropping. It's because Mozilla doesn't listen to the users any longer, and the wider Mozilla community treats many other Firefox users with complete disrespect.

Users don't want to deal with bugs like memory leaks in the first place, and users don't want to deal with a hostile response when they report such problems. They'll just go and use Chrome instead, which doesn't even suffer from these problems in the first place, and which is also really easy to download and install.

Instead of responding how you just did, you and others in the Mozilla community need to acknowledge that this problem exists, acknowledge that others may be affected by it even if you aren't, and you need to try to help find a solution to these problems that doesn't involve ridicule and denial.

If Mozilla and the greater Mozilla community doesn't change their ways, then we won't be talking about how Firefox is only at 10% of the market. We'll be talking about how Firefox is at 3% of the market, assuming Mozilla still even exists as an organization at that point.

Most browsers actually support web-workers: http://caniuse.com/#feat=webwo...

And there are a bunch of wrappers to make them feel more like regular threads. Easy-peasy.

He's not alone. I'm sick and tired of what Mozilla has done to Firefox and its users, too.

I can't justify wasting my time installing all of these add-ons that just fix bugs that the Firefox developers have introduced under the guise of being new or reworked features. The UI is a very important piece of any software product, and breaking it like Mozilla has done is just plain bad for users.

I know we aren't alone in being angry about these changes. Recent browser usage stats show that Firefox accounts for only about 11% of the desktop market, and a whopping 0.14% of the mobile market. People just aren't used it any longer.

Mozilla needs to realize that without our support, and without our usage of Firefox, they are nothing.

Luckily I'm seeing more and more of these issues being solved with newer CSS standards:
http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-mult...
http://caniuse.com/#feat=multi...
http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-flex...
http://caniuse.com/#feat=flexb...

Luckily I'm seeing more and more of these issues being solved with newer CSS standards:
http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-mult...
http://caniuse.com/#feat=multi...
http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-flex...
http://caniuse.com/#feat=flexb...

None of those actually use CSS Grid Layout because no browsers fully support the current spec by default yet.

The "Web Sockets" spec is implemented in all current major browsers: IE 10+, Firefox 11+, Chrome 14+, Safari 6+ on both OS X and iOS, and current versions of Chrome and Firefox for Android. Among devices running the latest browser version available for the particular operating system, you're missing only IE on Windows Server 2003 (IE 8), IE on Windows Vista (IE 9), Safari on ancient iDevices, and Android before 4.

I just, like many others, wish someone would actually fucking *elaborate* on *concrete* *technical* hurdles of HTML5.

HTML5 has no guaranteed audio or video codec. Some browsers support only free codecs from Xiph and On2, others only patented codecs from Dolby and MPEG-LA. HTML5 implementations in use provide no consistent way for the application to request access to the camera and microphone. Neither IE nor Safari implements the Stream API at all, and Firefox and Chrome implement prefixed (that is, proprietary) versions of it. And on my laptop in Firefox 28, this particle system runs at 20 fps in Flash, 9 fps in HTML5 Canvas, and 5 fps in SVG. Unlike HTML5 JavaScript, ActionScript has static typing and class-style inheritance, and some developers prefer those. Finally, copies of old versions of Flash for making vector animations are sold on the secondary market; Edge Animate is available only on a rental basis through Creative Cloud. I'd be interested to see what workarounds you recommend for these.

IE is the most standards compliant browser which uses the least of W3C unsupported specs compared to webkit and mozilla

Wrong. Even IE11 can't match Firefox and Chrome. http://beta.caniuse.com/#featu...

I've seen 3D engines in Flash running on machines for which get.webgl.org displays only "Hmm. While your browser seems to support WebGL, it is disabled or unavailable. If possible, please ensure that you are running the latest drivers for your video card." The latest versions of Internet Explorer and Safari don't support cameras at all without Flash, and it's prefix hell on every other browser, meaning each web application has to be written once using "-moz" prefix for Firefox and once using "-webkit" prefix for Chrome.

Are there examples of software that are available for Android but not for iOS.

I can think of a few things Apple forbids under its guidelines:

• Apps to develop apps, such as AIDE.
• Wireless network analysis tools.
• Video game console emulators that run ROMs that you dumped using a Kazzo (NES) or Retrode (Super NES and Genesis) or CD drive (PlayStation) or homebrew ROMs that hobbyists are still creating for these platforms.
• Web browsers that aren't Safari wrappers with all the intentional limits of Safari, such as no uploads of media types other than pictures and videos and no WebGL and no getUserMedia. And yes, I mean "intentional limits": Apple has implemented WebGL on iOS but allows it only for iAds, not for web sites.

Listen, the web evolves and evolves according to standards.

And because Android allows multiple competing web browsers to compete for standards support, it picks up support for these standards sooner than iPhone. Firefox for Android appears to support WebGL as of version 24 according to this table. Safari and Safari wrappers, on the other hand, support standards only once Apple makes the business decision to no longer deliberately exclude them. For example, iOS supports WebGL, but only in iAds approved by Apple. The limits of Safari and Safari wrappers appear calculated to encourage application developers to buy an additional computer and a developer license and develop a native application instead of not buying a Mac, not buying a developer license, and developing a web application instead.

All proprietary lock-ins will naturally be kicked out eventually.

The universe will die of heat death "eventually". To exaggerate slightly less, anyone can make an iPhone "eventually" once copyright in iOS expires. To exaggerate even less, if I eat "eventually", I will die of starvation first. People making applications for the phones that exist now need to eat now. I was referring to the foreseeable future, not 95 years from now.

Why is Mozilla taking so long to fully implement Flexbox? Even IE11 supports it: http://caniuse.com/#search=flexbox

It feels weird to say it but Firefox is holding back the web. This is probably one of the most important changes to layout since designers/developers abandoned tables and moved to pure CSS based layouts.

Working on the web? Learn JavaScript. Learn jQuery. Do not use things like SharpKit to turn one platform into another.

That doesn't help if you have to target platforms, plural, and these platforms don't expose the machine's full functionality to web applications. For example, more than half of web traffic comes from browsers that don't give the user a button to grant camera and microphone access to a web site. Or the machine might allow connection of game controllers but the web browser is unaware. Or the latest version of a web browser for a given platform might not implement technologies that let web applications run offline (application cache, localStorage, and IndexedDB). Would you instead claim that offline use, gamepad input, and audio and video input are poor fits for a web application in the first place?

Use JavaScript / jQuery for user interface goodness, not your entire application logic. APIs / web services / interfaces are your friend

If you'd prefer to run all application logic on the server, what should be used for a web application that can also run while the user is offline, such as on the laptop of someone riding the bus? "Problem loading page: You are offline" is useless.

How should cross-platform web-based video chat applications have been made without Flash Player? Support for getUserMedia isn't even 50% yet.

FF and Chrome auto-update now. If you are on IE 8 or 9 you may experience some problems. http://caniuse.com/#agents=desktop&cats=HTML5&statuses=wd SVG appears to be supported in IE 9 so if you are XP and stuck with IE 8 you'll have to use a different browser. I didn't look at all the tags but SVG stood out. IE should not be tied with the OS, you should be able to update it independent of the OS version : /

Internet Explorer 8 is the newest Internet Explorer that will ever be supported on Windows XP. Internet Explorer 9 is the newest Internet Explorer that will ever be supported on Windows Vista. Internet Explorer prior to 10 does not support form validation, nor does any version of Safari for iOS. In fact, as of right now, more than 40 percent of users are using web browsers that don't fully support HTML5 validation. Besides, to what extent does HTML5 validation support interrelationships between fields, such as "exactly one of these two fields must be filled in and the other must be blank", or "if element 1 has a value matching rule A, apply rule B to element 2; otherwise, apply rule C to element 2"?

Consider getUserMedia/Stream API, necessary for use of a camera or microphone from JavaScript. That's still prefixed everywhere and unavailable in IE, Safari, Android Browser, and Firefox for Android.

Many times, the only reason an "app" exists for iOS (or Android) is to improve an experience that's just fine with a web browser on a Mac or PC, but winds up sub-par on a small touchscreen device. I'd put almost all of the "shopping" apps in this category.

One problem is that Apple has lagged in implementing a lot of HTML5 features in Safari for iOS, even when the feature would apply better to a handheld device than to a Mac. One of these features is the getUserMedia draft, which gives the user a button to turn on the camera and let the web site take pictures of things. Taking pictures is essential for scanning barcodes inside an application, such as price-checking a product in a store to see if it'd be cheaper on Amazon.