That’s terrible. How can Firefox usage rates be declining? It seems like every day there’s some new scammy feature being rolled out in all the other browsers.
Most people have no idea that there are differences between browsers, or how the internet even works for that matter, and as such, generally use either Chrome or whatever the default installed browser is.
More people than should still think ‘smartphones’ are all called ‘iphones’
Try asking a random person about any of those features. They’ll have no idea
Mozilla hasn’t been putting any effort into making firefox a proper competitor despite their 400M+/year from Google.
They haven’t pushed the envelope in any way, haven’t invested in a Rust browser engine, haven’t moved away from XUL, haven’t fixed their oldest bugs, haven’t made Gecko more easily embeddable, haven’t added added better documentation to Gecko, haven’t improved speed or memory use, haven’t invested heavily in their android version (it’s slow af on older devices), only just now are starting to enable extensions in firefox on android, …
Their biggest changes are buying up a few useless startups (Pocket, some analytics company?), multiprocess firefox, manifest, containers, looking more chrome-like, firing 400 developers or something during COVID and paying their CEO 5M (?).
All they do is exist. The only reason people switch is because other browsers fuck up. IMO, that’s not a strategy to get more users, but a strategy to collect the Google cheque.
Their ceo pay keeps going up. Even as their market share declines. And they’re still entirely dependent on Google for revenue, who at this pint is basically donating to them to avoid more anti trust issues. It’s a precarious system.
I’m just switching back to Firefox given all the bullshit that’s coming in Chrome. Hopefully others follow suit and that number starts climbing back up.
Who cares? I use Firefox but why do I care if the US government does? I thought they were still using Netscape on Windows ME
When I worked for the USDA in 2010 we had several web applications that depended on Internet Explorer 6.
I took the liberty of reading the article but I’m gonna say the title is quite… tendentious. Makes it sound like it’s yet another one of those FUD / nutjob clickbait that have been coming at the privacy community for a few days with sensationalist titles such as “The CIA will stop funding Signal” (never has been) or “FBI wants to sell Wikipedia” (never has been).
What is going on?
EDIT: Cosmic Cleric has provided the definition of “tendentious”, which I have linked.
“When did you stop beating your wife?”
Your adroit incorporation of the term “tendentious” exemplifies lexical virtuosity. Impressive articulation. Truly seamless weaving of a sesquipedalian polysyllabic term.
Someone call 911, I think I’m having some kind of medical issue with how this post looks.
So everyone using FF just had to start visiting more .gov websites (using the correct user agent) ?
Pretty sure those Edge numbers are from using it under duress…
Some of you need to stop spoofing browsing agents. We need to show people that Firefox is used. This telemetry can help Firefox support and become a big competitor to Chrome and other Chromium based browsers.
I only use fake user agent for snapchat, because they block firefox lol
Solution: fuck snapshit.
I tried doing my annual vehicle registration online on FF yesterday and the dmv site kept throwing an error and bringing me back to step 1 when I submit my payment information. Tried turning off all my extensions and still wouldn’t budge. Finally tried it in Chrome and it worked instantly. You’d think government websites of all places would have compatibility with most popular browsers.
dude i work with one that just recently added support for non-internet explorer… major. government. entity. places that are the reason for the required legacy i.e. code in edge.
this government shit is based on ‘lowest bidder’ mentality.
Horrific but strategically inevitable, switch to chromium engine, and do your own privacy related fork . Like all the other browsers.
fork
what if google chrome decided to close the fork by changing the license to something restructive, i mean the fork can goes on for a little while but we are still depending on the resources of a Big $$ corporation…
firefox is the only way for a free web…
Then they’d be alienating the open source community that makes a lot of contributions (though much of chromium is still essentially built internally). They also wouldn’t be able to lock down the code that’s already been released under the more permissive BSD license.
Now, a fork of Chromium is its own beast. Some searching shows that just to build it takes 30 minutes on a decent workstation. It’s huge, which makes me think it’s the kind of project that could only really be maintained by a large company. Not necessarily a Google sized company, but a large one nonetheless if you seriously want to remove the dependency on Google.
EDIT: turns out it’s Chrome that takes that long to build, which includes things not in Chromium like Widevine, licensed codecs, telemetry, sync, that kind of thing.
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The U.S. Web Design System (USWDS) provides a comprehensive set of standards which guide those who build the U.S. government’s many websites.
Now I know what to blame for every single US government website being so poorly put together they they barely function, if they function at all.
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The Free Software Foundation Europe has an awesome initiative called Public Money Public Code where they try to convince lawmakers to use as much open source software as possible when using public funds. I really hope they succeed.
What about security? If it’s open source, anyone can poke around in the code and find vulnerabilities to exploit way easier.
If it’s open source, anyone can poke around in the code and find vulnerabilities to
exploit way easierpatchFTFY. Open source software is more secure than closed source, not less
Security through obscurity doesn’t, work the vulnerabilities are still there. Also if the vulnerabilities are visible they’re also easier to close.
And 100% of it is dog shit. I have seen custom products from Accenture, Deloitte, and E&Y, and they were passable prototypes at best.
Accenture doesn’t make shit. They bring in expensive ass consultants with 25 years of experience (on paper), then they sell something basically off the shelf. What’s left of the budget goes to a subcontractor, who now has to glue the already purchased pieces together with spit and gum, now on a very tight timeline before the funding runs out and your tiny company gets the blame
Haven’t worked directly with the others, but the Accenture story was the same everywhere
I am personally unaware of any serious reason to believe that Firefox’s numbers will improve soon.
Yeah about that. Manifest V3 will infuse Firefox userbase nicely come next summer.
Get out of the lemmy Foss bubble and ask again. I don’t know anybody that actually gives a fuck about manifest v3 tbh.
They will care about their adblocker no longer working
Given the amount of people all too happy to use Chrome on Android where you can’t block ads easily, I doubt it.
That’s usually not because they don’t care but because they don’t know that ads can be blocked on the phone as well
They don’t make the effort to find out.
