Firefox is more irrelevant now than IE6 was

> (On an even more pessimistic note, I’m sure the bean counters at every advertising agency are weighing the odds that, if they block Firefox when Manifest v3 rolls out, they will be victorious and kill it altogether, resulting in a web where only handicapped ad blockers are available.)

Some of the market share numbers are wrong, because they're based on privacy-violating trackers that Firefox users are more savvy about blocking, rather than (say) `User-Agent` headers.

But that doesn't matter to people who only care about what the trackers and/or ads show.

I love Firefox. And still use it from time to time. But I think that the only reason they are still alive is that Google needs Firefox to cover up its monopoly in browser market.

Hope they start to innovate again and give us some new ways to use the web. Or at least try, like Arc does. Because their catch-up game with Chrome is a lost cause. No way they can just build a better browser engine.

IE6 was irrelevant because it stagnated. Microsoft did nothing with it for years, and pulling support was just sometimes necessary for people like Google who wanted to build apps that pushed the web to new capabilities.

Firefox in contrast has continued a fairly aggressive level of development, and most importantly supports new standards as they become available (which IE6 in its late life absolutely did not).

Apple Maps meanwhile is in beta and specifically states "Support for additional languages, browsers, and platforms will be expanded over time."

Google and Apple may hold the lead in browser share right now. So did IE 6 at one point. Like Microsoft in the early aughts, Apple has a financial interest in limiting development of the web as a platform (to protect its app store profits and device lock in) and Google has an interest in steering that development in a pro tracking, advertising direction. Firefox is the biggest browser that (I'd argue) is actually well aligned with a robust web growing organically.

Firefox in absolute numbers may seem irrelevant, but in other contexts it's actually the best or only browser by far. A couple of examples just in my usage:

Running Fedora in a VM on my Mac mini. Firefox seems to perform much better/less crashy than other browsers.

Brought an old MacBook Pro with drive issues out of mothballs and reinstalled OS X up to Sierra. Got a semi-recent build of Firefox working on it just fine and the computer is now essentially as usable as a Chromebook.

And that's the thing about the web. You can't just point at numbers and say "well, most users are on A, B, and C, so we'll only support those." Some of those users may actually be multi-platform and will get pretty upset when your product is broken in 1 or 2 out of 4 or 5 places they try to use it.

For what it's worth, I am skeptical of anything that compares worldwide numbers that include IE6. For a long time almost all of China and parts of Africa were using a pirated version of Windows that only had IE6 and was stuck at a specific version because Windows update was disabled in the pirated image among other things. I would personally rather see numbers that only include the EU and US. Not perfect, but perfect is the enemy of good.

Not saying the situation is much better but 2.6% isn't the right number depending on what you care about. There's not much point in comparing against mobile browsers since it doesn't really compete in that segment so it's really 6.5% by the author's source.

I have heard it said that the side that wants to win will always beat the side that just wants to be left alone, and I think Firefox market share is a great example of that statement in action.

I gotta be honest, the only reason I use FF is because of tab tree extensions. I usually defend it for that reason + some privacy benefits but I do all my professional work in Chrome because it's way more popular and I grew up on it's dev console. If Chrome supports tab trees I'd probably move over so I can do less context switching.

Firefox might be irrelevant in terms of market share but is more relevant now than ever as it is one of the few browser that is independent from Chromium.

Mozilla really need to get its shit together and double down on Firefox development and improvement.