Rudie V.Yikes. Unless Mozilla sees a notable increase of users switching from Chrome to Firefox, our beloved privacy-first browser may lose support on government and commercial websites, further cementing Google's death grip on web standards. https://www.brycewray.com/posts/2023/11/firefox-brink/
Ecolhombre ⏚ 
Mais qui sont ces gens qui n'utilisent pas Firefox ?! #OhWait @thegardendude
root42@thegardendude I use Safari at home, and I switched to Firefox in my work VM. Chrome is… not what it used to be. The switch is easy, people!
junkmanMaybe if they didn’t make so many disruptive changes to the UI people might have stuck with it. 🤷
iam-py-test@thegardendude Since the US gov's data comes from Google Analytics, I wonder if it's thrown off by the fact that many Firefox users block Google Analytics (even FF tracking protection blocks it when set to strict).
Doubt that would make much of a difference, but still curious.
Sorry for the dumb comment.
Doubt that would make much of a difference, but still curious.
Sorry for the dumb comment.
Richardus@thegardendude Oh no ! There's no replacement for firefox. Chrome is the browser you dump straight away. Edge could work but still bad. And not for android. Also many browsers not handle bigger fonts or some settings nice.
Horror !
Clive ThompsonI’ve been following this for a while – this is really bad news
Steven Zekowski@thegardendude
I like #Firefox a lot. And while I may be less sophisticated than some, especially here on Mastodon, I’m probably more aware than the average internet user. I can’t help wondering…
Why would anyone use #Chrome? Herd mentality?
This was a fun read. It’s a long comic book. https://contrachrome.com/chapters/
Janis La Couvée@steve_zeke @thegardendude I've been a Firefox user since 2004 because of RSS feeds, multiple tabs, privacy and I could go on and on. I don't get why people continue to allow themselves to be tracked like they are on Chrome. Never have understood.
Gabriel Pettier@steve_zeke @thegardendude i don't think it's herd mentality, but google has so much power to influence people, it's everywhere in people's usage of the web, and you kind of only need to get them to click an install button once, on the promise that it'll make something (usually a google product) work better…
Most people are not really tech savy (which is understandable, we all have things to care about).
Most people are not really tech savy (which is understandable, we all have things to care about).
@tshirtman @thegardendude
Maybe “herd mentality” isn’t exactly right. I think at a certain critical mass people look around and think, “I’m choosing what all my peers are choosing so it must be ok.” It’s just normalized, and, as you say, most people would rather think about other things.
Maybe “herd mentality” isn’t exactly right. I think at a certain critical mass people look around and think, “I’m choosing what all my peers are choosing so it must be ok.” It’s just normalized, and, as you say, most people would rather think about other things.
Michael Bishop ☕Firefox has been my primary browser since it was released. At one time it had a large market share but sadly it's in the single digits now.
@MichaelBishop @thegardendude seriously? Single digits? Source? I have seen numbers recently that were more hopeful than that.
Ugh (“ugh”)@thegardendude @WJBL seems like a good case for salting the shit out of the .gov GA data with a couple hundred thousand slow and steady automated semi random web sessions
The other m@thegardendude
With Google's ongoing war on adblockers, they might just push enough users back to Firefox for it to matter to a greater audience again.
With Google's ongoing war on adblockers, they might just push enough users back to Firefox for it to matter to a greater audience again.
Liz Ellis She/Her🌳@thegardendude so Firefox doesn’t charge to use, doesn’t sell my data and it doesn’t carry advertising. So why does it matter that it has low numbers? Explain like I’m 4 years old.
Orc@LizEllisPhD @thegardendude a distressing number of sites do user agent peeping and if your browser isn’t on a shortlist will redirect you to a “you need to update your browser” page.
So, for instance, if your bank does this bullshit, firefox drops below 2% and suddenly you can’t access your online banking w/o browser gymnastics.
Raptor 
@LizEllisPhD @thegardendude same as when it was netscape/mozilla vs internet explorer, when most people use a single browser and that browser has commercial interest in the lockin, they freely create their own non-standard extensions, html versions, etc, websites start being made that ONLY support the more popular browser. (lots of banks bought into active-x, which was windows/internet explorer ONLY). Chrome is already trying to do this with their anti-adblock they've been proposing
ipsquiggleSerious question: why are all the hip modern browsers based off chromium instead of Firefox or Edge? I feel like "Chrome Proper" is shattering, but it's all still chromium, and that's really what's killing Firefox: that the people who would "look elsewhere" are finding Vivaldi, Brave etc. and not actually moving as far as standards are concerned?
ShadSterling@thegardendude I knew it was bad news when Microsoft stopped making their own browser, but I didn’t think something like this would happen so soon. It’s almost enough to make me hope that Amazon makes a browser. Almost.
@thegardendude It would be catastrophic, firefox is more needed than ever for privacy and freedom respecting browsing, everything else is at the mercy of google.
Virginicus@thegardendude What really makes me sad is the idea that a website has to support one browser or another. That’s not how the Web is supposed to work!
Amaya 🌹@thegardendude My university administration actively discourages the use of Chrome due to privacy concerns. I wonder how this would affect things.
Lance, Enjoying Copious Pollen@thegardendude @apkeedle That would be a great loss to the world. Firefox has been my default browser for many years; I won’t abandon it easily.
Kenneth Been@thegardendude @futurebird Shouldn’t the federal government be designing to standards not browsers? Is anyone lobbying to change this?
davidrfeinberg@thegardendude it doesn't work on all.the webpages. If they made it work, maybe people would be able to use it.
Out of Control 
🇨🇦@thegardendude @brbcoding One stumbling block with Firefox for me was the look and feel of it. Until, that is, someone said, “you know you can make it look like your fave browser?” And I did that and now use Firefox about 50/50 with my regular browser, Safari. I have zero Google apps and zero Adobe apps installed on any of my machines. Aiming to move more and more to Firefox in the coming weeks. It’s a great browser.
@outofcontrol Right? I have a theme that gives it the appearance of the old Netscape browser. I also love the Firefox syncs so smoothly between my desktop and FF on my phone.
@thegardendude Haven’t tried Firefox on the phone yet. Using safari still there too, because mostly of the sync. 🧐
🇦🇶 Placebo Domingo@outofcontrol @thegardendude Huh, I never had a problem with FFs UI, but I've been using it since the dawn of time so I guess I'm biased.
Paradoxically, I prefer Chrome's dev tools UI, though most people say FF is better.
Dave/Loebas 
@[email protected] i use firefox both at home and work
Ian Kluft 🖥️📡@thegardendude Perhaps this is a downside to Firefox's ability to fend off trackers. We're invisible to these analytics.
🅺🅸🅼 🆂🅲🅷🆄🅻🆉:~$ ▓@thegardendude The real problem is that the government sites use google analytics and many firefox users block this by default - hence their stats show less firefox users.
⛧ veee ≽^•⩊•^≼@thegardendude while i agree with the notion that firefox losing popularity is worrying, calling it privacy first is silly. it's unfortunately very far from that. at this point, it's essentially just "not chromium"
@thegardendude
telemetry enabled by default
google as default search engine
their entire ai bullshit and using your data for it, see for example https://mozilla.social/@mozilla/111562605874551611
firefox sending address bar keystrokes and more info to mozilla https://www.howtogeek.com/760425/firefox-now-sends-your-address-bar-keystrokes-to-mozilla/
telemetry enabled by default
google as default search engine
their entire ai bullshit and using your data for it, see for example https://mozilla.social/@mozilla/111562605874551611
firefox sending address bar keystrokes and more info to mozilla https://www.howtogeek.com/760425/firefox-now-sends-your-address-bar-keystrokes-to-mozilla/
@vee I'm not aware of Firefox doing anything close to sucking up my data and either storing it at Mozilla or sending it elsewhere. I guess there's also LibreWolf but I had issues with it incorrectly rendering some websites.
@thegardendude i used librewolf in the past but was unsatisfied for some reason i don't remember. curious how it's incorrectly rendering websites?
@vee I can't quite remember, it was a while ago. I just remember one or two sites I use regularly didn't function correctly in LibreWolf but when I pulled up Firefox they were fine. I suspect maybe it had something to do with a feature specific to LibreWolf that interferes with the site's coding in order to protect from tracking but that's just a guess.
ator robot@thegardendude I'm welcoming Firefox for Android's re-activated extensions ecosystem as a genuinely exciting selling point which I can tell potential users about