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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Firefox's usage percentage is upsetting.

I hope they don't die, but this looks really bad for them.

It seems like this data is from Google analytics, which is not only blocked but also is being shimmed by Firefox, at least when strict privacy is enabled. So this do not show the correct number of Firefox user, only the users without privacy protection enabled and without any tracking blocker

I don't understand why large companies ban Gmail but allow Chrome. They should be using Firefox instead.

They aren't banning due to a dislike of Google. They are trying to stop unmonitored exfiltration of data.

> They are trying to stop unmonitored exfiltration of data.

This was always a pipe dream (preventing data exfiltration). The best any company do is to prevent accidental exfiltration of data. Like when someone attaches a spreadsheet with social security/credit card numbers to an email going out over the Internet. There's tools to detect that sort of thing (and stop it) but they don't work when the data is encrypted.

There currently exists no technology that can stop the human problem of data exfiltration. Here's a quick quiz to see if anyone in your company can exfiltrate whatever TF they want: Can employees play sounds on their desktop (as in, it emits sound)? Then they can exfiltrate any file they have read access to pretty damned quickly. Even huge, multi-gigabyte files!

Current data exfiltration methods can take advantage of a tiny corner of a monitor, the sound output (direct connect to line out or optical is ideal!), power lines (yes, this works! https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2018/04/13/data-exfiltration...), various USB tricks (even if entire categories of "storage" devices are blocked via software), and many, many more. Most of them are basically undetectable as well and can be executed with JavaScript in any browser that gives the user access to the developer console.

Obviously, if end users have access to PowerShell or Python that's even faster/better at exfiltrating the data.

My favorite one though has got to be the sound output... You can write a simple script that converts bits into inaudible sounds that can be picked up by a cell phone in your pocket! It's not nearly as fast as a direct connection to the line out jack but it is so cool! haha

Second place has to be data exfiltration, "by blinking the numlock LED"

Not gonna lie, sending out data via inaudible sounds is pretty fly!

Of course. It's similar to a store that wants to stop crimes of convenience or easy methods of theft, while knowing they can't stop all thieves.

Things are only getting worse in this regard as more and more devs don't even test on FF, and FF lags behind new features. Internal business apps are going to be Chrome only and it's only downhill from there.

It's Internet Explorer all over again. Except this time it's a walled garden by a benevolent dictator! (yeah, right)

Aren't they basically being kept alive by Google at this point? Almost 90% of their revenue is from that one deal at it has felt like they have been more concerned with other initiatives for a while now.

   yes.

14 years on and still haven't found a way to make themselves any less independent of Google's money. >90% of their revenue derived from their direct anti-privacy competitor makes them entirely on life support.

Rust was their opportunity to escape that, now they just threw it away and now they are back to where they started.

Firefox is in decline. Nothing has changed.

In what way did Firefox throw anything away with Rust? (Just don’t know the story.)

Mozilla gave all the Rust trademarks away and the opportunity to create a consultancy out of Rust (Since that has taken off) has been completely ruled out - which may have been a way out of not depending on Google's money fo 90% of all their revenue.

3% of almost billions(?) of browser users are still a fews millions of Firefox users. Millions of users is not "dead".

Right, but I think the overarching point is that 3% is awfully close to the 1% that is Internet Explorer, which many would consider dead. If usage decline continues, it just wouldn’t take much for no people to stop supporting it.

This is from someone who uses Firefox

Isn’t it open source? If the company behind it dies I’ll just compile it myself.

If the company behind it dies then development on it will likely drastically decrease and it will quickly become a less attractive option. There's probably a reason why you chose Firefox over any number of other open-source browsers that don't have much development activity.

I used to love Firefox, but fell out of love majorly. First there's a still long-standing bug (5 years and counting) that newly opened tabs don't have access to localstorage. Then 96.0 broke a lot of our code somehow. Cross-checked with 95 and everything still worked fine.

I hit and reported a very similar bug over a year ago. Try to add a cookie or localstorage entry in Dev Tools on a page that outputs JSON, such as: https://api.ipify.org/?format=json (Spoiler: it's broken)

The DX for firefox just isn't that great when compared to Chrome.

FF has presently 163 open bugs for localstorage-related issues. Some of them open for 3+ years. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=localst...

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