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Comment by dcabrejas | Hacker News Reader

I love what Firefox stands for. They are not the only one but for sure they are keeping the balance of the web when it comes to privacy and security. Unfortunately as their market share drops, they have less and less say in the future of the platform.

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Given firefox users massively block trackers, way more than chrome which actually links your google account with your browser login, I wonder how accurate are the stats.

Firefox did lose market shares, but it's possible we see lots of chrome users also because they are more visible.

Related, although a different problem, one of the biggest stat providers is Google analytics, and a lot of sites make decisions based on those, but Google has no incentive to check if they are missing some non chrome users.

Mozilla's own public data shows an ongoing decline in usage.

https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity

Good link. Declining from 880M in Mach 2017 to 805M in December 2019. Declining indeed, but not very fast.

The Monthly Active Users metric is more important, and it has been declining by around 10% each year. That’s very significant. Roughly 25k users lost every day. Mozilla had to lay off almost 10% of its staff this year, and will probably have to keep doing that every year now (unless the decline in users stops). And firing your employees doesn’t usually lead to better products.

On the contrary, the drop is tremendous. Consider that the number of internet users worldwide has grown way up in that timespan!

I think (but I have no idea) that browsers are tracked by their user agent, which they always send.

Many browsers start "freezing" the user agent.

But the user agent isn't that important when we talk about tracking.

https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/467#issuecom...

Indeed, however Firefox often masks its user agent as websites falsely report broken and missing features for non-chrome browsers. User agent is growingly meaningless as a metric.

One of the first things I do on a new Firefox install is add a user-agent switcher and set it up to tell sites I am using chrome for exactly this reason.

Somehow we have gone back to the dark ages of web where sites complain unless you are using one specific browser.

It was the more technical minded people who spread the word and mindshare of browser choice back then to get us out of that mess, and now the same group has gotten us back into it worse than ever.

I'll never understand how this happened.

User agent override is a builtin feature in firefox for ages.

Thanks for that info! I had no idea about this.

A quick (though not very user friendly) method to change Firefox's User-Agent string is to create a new about:config pref (string type) called "general.useragent.override" wit the new User-Agent string.

You can see Firefox's current list of User-Agent overrides in Firefox's "about:compat" page.

The website has the user agent but it cannot send it to the analytics platform because requests are being blocked.

The user agent header is passed to whatever server your browser originally talks to, that server is free to do whatever it wants with the header (including forwarding it or storing it in logs that are analyzed somewhere at some point). Blocking on the client or even client network level has no effect on that. If you receive any content at all, there is a chance the UA header will be looked at.

But as others pointed out, the header will be rather meaningless in the foreseeable future anyway.

Theoretically what you're saying is true, but practically speaking many websites are behind CDNs, like Cloudflare, Cloudfront or Akamai, with static content being cached aggressively to reduce costs and latency and it's pretty cheap and easy to do so nowadays, so most requests aren't even going to hit a backend.

You can work around this by installing a tracking pixel on every page you have, a pixel that always hits your backend, which can then generate a log line that can be analyzed. But this requires extra development and it's much easier to just install Google Analytics.

So I'm pretty sure that most browser stats are not coming from analyzing 1st party data that's logging the user agent.

And speaking from experience in this space, the error margin for such analytics is somewhere around 10% - 20%, which is roughly the percent of people having ad-blockers installed and this number is growing — you can extrapolate of course from those that don't have ad-blockers installed, but then you have a selection bias issue, because you're not talking about the same kind of user; e.g. people that use ad-blockers are the people that are more likely to be computer literate and capable of installing their own browser.

While you in turn are of course correct as well I wasn't trying to imply that every business out there is sitting in front of their server farm and analyzes httpd logs anymore.

With the prevalence of ads being served from the customer domain on larger sites these days I'd just think that enough parties have incentive enough to implement a tracking pixel or put a few lines of measurement protocol code somewhere to make sure that request data ends up in GA. But granted, I'm not in that space, the assumption that this data does not end up in the hands of some interested party for B2C sites just seemed weird, even in modern architectures.

Thanks for the error margin btw, that's far higher than I would have expected.

Tools like GA will be blocked by Firefox in tracking protection mode. They won't register a Firefox user.

But Google Analytics is typically (always?) done through JavaScript in the browser. And if the browser blocks any call to the Google analytics servers, Google won't know the user agent.

Sure, but most people don't analyze their server logs, they rely entirely on analytics, and if not done correctly (noscript tag) won't fire even a tracking pixel. Even then, most blockers will block those requests too.

The server is free to do anything with UA, but it doesn't, because google analyticts already takes care of that.

May also be that a privacy minded person is likely to use the internet less and is also more likely to use Firefox as their primary browser.

I'm not sure whether to agree with your last statement. While historically, Firefox lost troves of market share to Chrome, currently they seem to be fairly stable [1]. While tech boards are definitely a small fraction of users, the general notion around Firefox seems to be more positive recently than say, a few years ago, so I wouldn't be surprised to see them take back at least some of the lost share. While Chrome is currently a very dominant player, it's around the same level of usage that Internet Explorer was historically so market shifts of that scale are definitely possible.

[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-2010...

Well your example is kind of perfect.

Around 70% of the Firefox users are blocking trackers. And Statcounter is using trackers for their stats.

So the stats are very misleading.

They might even prove that Firefox is very privacy aware.

It would be good if Cloudflare would publish browser stats.

They collect stats from user agents that are likely to be more accurate and probably cover more of the web than Stat Counter.

Plus Google may want to keep them alive like MSFT with Apple or Intel with AMD to keep the regulators away.

Well, that's true, "may".

Why, though? As far as I can tell the only part of Google that competes with Firefox is Chrome, and Chrome doesn't seem to be profitable, or even intended to be profitable. As far as I can tell Chrome's just a moat to keep people from using the Facebook app instead of a web browser. So... why? Tell me why I'm wrong, teach me something today.

They might face regulation e.g. in the EU (but also the US) based on antitrust or competition laws, as they would effectively be dominating the browser market. That would limit their freedom to operate, so I can believe that it's in their best interest to "allow" competitors like Firefox to capture a small market share. Effectively they could kill them easily as a large percentage of Mozilla's revenue (I think more than 50 %) comes from the Google search deal, and I don't think that deal is really vital to Google. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation

But if Firefox only competes with Chrome, and the regulators are angry because of Chrome, why would Google not simply shut Chrome down? I mean that I don't see any reson why Chrome needs to compete against Firefox.

I can see arguments why Google needs to compete against Facebook: Those two compete for advertising customers. Funding one, two, a few browsers makes sense if the goal is to keep eyeballs on the web rather than letting Facebook tempt them into a walled garden. But why would Google care which of the browsers has most success? And if Google doesn't, why would regulators care?

>Why would Google not simply shut Chrome down?

Because they'd get less tracking info and have a harder time tracking people across the web? That seems the biggest point here.

Google keeps Chrome around because the alternative is just too risky for their core business. If (for example) everyone used IE then Microsoft would be able to shut out Google's ads.

It's not just ads. It's also Microsoft's ecosystem around Windows and Office. From Outlook, Sharepoint, to XBox, to 3rd party automation tools like BluePrism, UIPath, AutomationAnywhere that are tools built around IE and are getting a lot of traction in corporations at the moment. And probably a lot more tools I don't know about.

That's what I thought too (ie. that Google is critically dependent on web browsers that don't discriminate against Google somehow, and is paying for two such browsers). But so many people say that Chrome and Firefox are competitors that I'm curious to hear arguments for that.

Owning a browser is a business as every search engine wants to be the default. I think google is forking several billions a year to be the default on Safari and is probably Firefox’ primary source of revenues.

I don’t know if Microsoft has any other motivation for Edge other than being the front end for Bing.

Chrome is a strategic tool for Google that they use to funnel users to their services, collect data and influence web standards in their favor (among other things).

You are asking why controlling the default search engine and the client infrastructure for tracking users is valuable to Google?

No, not at all.

I am asking why people (appear to) think that Google's own browser is competing against the other browser that Google also funds.

Otherwise it would lose market share and money.

Why?

I may be stupid here. Please excuse if so. But I don't see why Google would lose market share in a market that provides income if Firefox' market share were higher and Chrome's lower.

firefox users are also much more likely to use a search engine other than google too, so more than just the browser is affected. Search is Google's primary money maker so firefox users not using google search would cut into their ad revenue. I would think Google would won't to eliminate firefox, but in doing so they would just prove firefox users' point as far as privacy/openness is concerned.

I had no idea Firefox users are much less likely than others to use Google as search engine. Interesting. How much is much — do you have numbers for it?

EDIT: I'd also like to know whether this is a robust difference, in the sense that someone who has both Firefox and Chrome is more likely to search using Google when running Chrome than when running Firefox. Do you know?

If Firefox keeps being relevant for software developers, by continuing to improve their dev tools and providing an API that yields more potent extensions (like the Tree Style Tabs), then I believe Firefox will continue to be very relevant, because its market share will continue to be made of users with the ability to influence policies, in corporations, public institutions and inside their own family, not to mention compatibility with Firefox will be preserved.

Firefox has nearly lost developers to Chrome, because (1) Chrome was designed for web apps and you can see this in their process per tab model and isolation, features which took a loooong time to be implemented by their competition, (2) Chrome's dev tools have been for a while superior and still are in some areas, (3) Chrome is popular, it makes sense to target the browser that's most popular, so might as well use it as a default and (4) Chrome really had better performance than Firefox, or at least perceived performance, especially when it comes to Google's own apps.

Nowadays Firefox has finally moved to having a permissions system for its add-ons and to using multiple processes for its tabs, while still being better in terms of memory usage, especially with a lot of tabs open, a use-case that was and is still viable on top of the latest Firefox.

I'm now more familiar with its dev tools and they've gotten better. Performance is sometimes on par with Chrome, sometimes better, sometimes worse ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ... people complain about the performance of Gmail, but truth be told the performance of Gmail is now crap on top of Chrome too and I'd rather use native clients.

And I'm super pleased with many of the privacy changes they've been doing — built-in blocking of trackers, DoH (yes, I think DoH is great), multi-account containers which also allows for sandboxing Facebook or Google, plus I'm pretty sure they'll continue to support uBlock Origin, which isn't something we can say about Google and their deprecations in manifest v3.

They still have a lot to work on — better dev tools, battery life on MacOS could be better, a customizable interface that doesn't rely on "legacy stylesheets" (primarily thinking of hiding main tab bar while using the Tree Style Tabs add-on), etc, but I'm sure they'll get there and I'm happy with how it is right now.

I used to use Firefox because I wanted to keep them relevant, but nowadays I feel like Firefox is simply the better browser and it will continue to be relevant for as long as software developers such as myself keep using it.

NoScript (block by default) is the most potent extension a software developer needs in a browser.

It's also nice that on FF you can disable JS on a page (I use the Disable JavaScript addon) but still have addons run JS on that page. On Chrome, either you allow JS from any source, or you block it from all sources, which is a bummer.

Apple has some good muscle in the privacy war too, if for no other reason than to reduce Google's advantage.

Not sure what Microsoft's game plan is though, apart from preloading Windows with spyware.

DOn't you dare call all these freemium games bloating my default installation spyware! :D

No, it's not the games.

The spyware is on a lower level, linked to the OS in a way that you can not remove.

Don't confuse marketing with how the company actually acts.

Do you want to fill in the details about how you see the company acting? It's a pretty glib statement otherwise.

Them and how going to Chinese market is a fair example.

I will fill in..

Google never "sells" your data to third parties. They keep the data themselves for advertisement purpose. On the contrary, apple shares any collected data with advertisement partners. Apple fanboys don't realize this.

Apart from agressive and deceptive marketing, Apple is a shitty company that asserts patents on rounded corners of phones and optional chaining in programming languages (Swift). They are objectively more evil than Google in my book.

Apparently I am biased. I would not have been in CSE if Google didn't commoditize the market. My first encounter to programming was on an Android terminal. But that's another story.

None of that is true, aside from maybe your first encounter with programming.

Bullshit.

Read Apple privacy policy properly. They share data with "advertising partners".

Apple sued Samsung for billions on a ridiculous patent case on rounded corners in smartphones.

Apple patented optional chaining in Swift. Although there is lot of prior art, and the thing is fucking obvious for any PL designer.

People like to shit on Google. But Apple is just more evil than Google any given day.

You do not need to balance privacy with security. That is in most cases a false dichotomy. On the contrary, real security needs privacy and the other way around. Especially on the web there are nearly no exceptions to this.

Don't think too much of my ranting against the security argument, but I see it as a pure invention of politics from "hard liners" with a solid extroverted inferiority complex and a bad emotion driven risk assessment.

Otherwise I agree that Firefox stands for privacy and security.

For me it’s about the dev experience.

I’ve noticed that Firefox dev tools are getting better over the last year or so.

They’ve got some neat things like their CSS Grid editor and websocket inspector.

I still find it easier to clear application data in Chrome and Google Hangouts echos for me in Firefox but I’m moving towards Firefox by default on every platform.

I love CSS Grid inspector in FF! I also like the "Changes" tab in Inspector that lets me play with CSS in browser and copy-paste it in editor later.

The only thing I miss from Chrome is "emulate focused page" checkbox, it's useful when you're debugging dropdowns, for example.

Some reasons for decreasing market share:

https://news.softpedia.com/news/microsoft-begins-showing-an-...

https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...

This also means decreasing referral revenue from Google, so fewer resources available.

I believe Mozilla should strike back with https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/open-letter-mozilla-please-of...

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