Mozilla Firefox is Back in ~2% Territories, Jeopardising Its Status as Web Browser to Test/Target/Validate With
THE United States' law (and maybe some other countries' too) says that as long as Firefox - or any other Web browser for that matter - is estimated to be used by more than 1 in 50 visitors, it is imperative to ensure compatibility, at least for government sites. It's a form of accessibility requirement. As per this month's data, Firefox has fallen below 3% again, as one can see in the source of this data or the plot below.
Baker inherited a mess, but she made a bigger mess of it and a great personal fortune for herself (at the expense of geeks whom she kept laying off while hiring her friends to form a sorority). When Firefox no longer works with essential sites, its usage level will languish and Chromium-based proprietary browsers (e.g. Opera) will gain. It would harm Pale Moon, LibreWolf etc. The Web would become even more of a monoculture or OSPS.
Ryan says: "On most of the sites that record that stuff, Pale Moon claims to be Firefox. Even though it's not. In reality that 3.04% is probably under 3%. There's enough browsers out there that send a Firefox UA that they probably amount to over .04%."
LibreWolf is among those. It lies about being Firefox on Windows, even if it's LibreWolf on Debian GNU/Linux or whatever other distro, distorting figures in Microsoft's favour for accessibility's sake (to avoid discrimination).
Where the monthly active users are counted "Mozilla itself admits it continues falling," according to Ryan. Here we go:
"253.9 million MAU in 2019. 182.7 million now," Ryan said. "They have lost at least 71.2 million Monthly Active Users according to their own data. In 5 years. Firefox lost 14.24 million monthly active users every year, on average, over the past 5 years. 1.186 million per month. Out of the remaining users, their average time spent using Firefox has gone up. From 4.7 hours in 2019 to 5.36 today. The rate of new profile creation has fallen over 25%. Percentage using the latest version is down."
"Much of the time I use curl(1) and claim to be Firefox, for that matter," eidolon said in IRC moments ago. "You need to put in some UA like that for many sties."
"33.4% had at least one add-on five years ago vs. 41.75% now," Ryan says, citing the spying telemetry from Mozilla. "So they were saying most people don't use extensions. But it's becoming very clear you need an ad blocker more than ever. Adblock Plus has lost most of its users. Over two-thirds of ABP users as of February 2019 have switched to uBo over the past 60 months."
Google hates ad blockers - to the point of blocking some YouTube users for 'daring' to block ads.
Ryan says that 83% of Firefox users under surveillance telemetry have "an Intel CPU, 83% an Intel CPU. 10.106% of Firefox users still have Windows 7. 115 ESR will be the last version to run on Windows 7. 85.45% of Firefox users are on some version of Windows. 3.299% still have Adobe Flash (this would be China, where it's still in support through another company). Yes, you can install the Chinese version of Flash into Pale Moon. Do you want to? 1920x1080 is becoming the standard and 1366x768 is fading quickly as for resolution." █