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Comment by micromacrofoot | Hacker News Reader

safari has been implementing new spec faster than firefox in some cases! they’ve really gotten their act together

That's what I said, Webkit has recently sped up their development, for all the wrong reasons.

As for Firefox, as much as I sentimentally align with it and still use it, it's a dead browser. I have access to some analytics of websites with a billion+ views/year and it doesn't even show up. It has like 0.5% market share on mobile.

They're irrelevant in this iteration of the browser wars.

Maybe Firefox usage statistics could be distorted, because of its various mechanisms of blocking trackers.

It would surprise me greatly if Firefox were sending invalid User-Agent headers.

User-Agent headers are mandatory; and it would be counterproductive for everybody, including Mozilla, if Firefox were sending invalid User-Agent headers.

For years I sent a blank UA string. It worked surprisingly well until about 2010. Only real issue was some Tomcat servers would just barf out stack traces.

UA switcher is a pretty popular addon in the Mozilla ecosystem. So it may well be more popular than UA stats alone can surmise. (Though probably not enough to matter to businesses too lazy to test anything besides the top two.)

According to Mozilla only like a third of all Firefox users have installed any add-on at all. So multiply the number by 150% and you have the highest possible Firefox usage rate.

Similar experience. :-P It didn't seem to be mandatory until suddenly it was.

> Maybe Firefox usage statistics could be distorted, because of its various mechanisms of blocking trackers.

I didn't think that that blocked the user-agent header. But I guess I could be wrong.

A lot of the specs firefox hasn't added are of questionable value like WebUSB which exists to make chromebooks less useless.

It's a different thing. Apple doesn't care about implementing them whereas Mozilla wants to strangle Google with their bare hands and would rather die before they implement them out of principle.

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