The fall of Firefox: Mozilla's once popular web browser slides into irrelevance

When , it was a desperate move. Although Netscape and the Department of Justice had been , it didn't matter. Netscape, once the most popular web browser of all, was doomed. As for the code, as Jamie Zawinski, an early Netscape employee, pointed out, " and have everything magically work out." Still, the code was there, and the sprang up to turn it first into a universal internet client, and then into a pure web browser, , in 2002.

That same year, were using IE. Still, Firefox was on its way. First, Netscape loyalists and open source and Linux fans moved to it. Over time, it gained a mass following. By the summer of 2010, . It's been all downhill since then. Historically, it's been challenging to get hard data on which browsers really were the most popular web browsers.

True, many companies claim to have good numbers, such as and , but their . The US federal government's , however, gives us a . That doesn't tell us much about global web browser use, but it's the best information we have about American web browser users today. And the top web browser is, according to the DAP's 5.27 billion visits over the past 90 days, just as you'd expect: with 47.9%.

Firefox, with only 2.2% of the market, is sliding into irrelevance. Safari with 36.2%, thanks to the iPhone's popularity in the States, and Edge with 8.3%, are both more popular than Firefox. At least IE totally dropped off the list in 2022. There's nothing new about Firefox's decline.

In 2022, Firefox dropped to 2.6% from 2021's 2.7%. In 2015, when I first started using DAP's numbers, market share. By 2016, . It had . Chrome's numbers are actually even bigger than they first appear. Its open source foundation, Chromium, also . Except for Mozilla Firefox, all the other .

None of those other browsers, by the way, have any market share to speak of. Altogether they come to a mere 0.8% of DAP's numbers. So what happened? Well, the rise of Chrome, for one thing. As Hiten Shah, CEO of , a cloud security company, observed, . In 2008, Google started creating an entirely new operating system for a cloud based open web with its own extensions and applications.

To make that happen, Both Microsoft and the Mozilla Foundation were caught flat footed. Neither have caught up. Eventually, Mozilla figured it out. The keyword here is "eventually." In 2017, almost a decade after Chrome appeared, then Mozilla CEO Chris Beard admitted, "Firefox did not keep up with the market and what people really want.

A lot of " Many once true blue Firefox fans aren't happy with Firefox's current state. One user recently listed , which I've heard over and over again from other Firefox users. These include constant removal of features, bad coding paradigms, poor memory management, and hidden telemetry.

In short, Firefox simply doesn't work that well anymore for developers or ordinary users who just want to use their browser, thank you very much. Mozilla also has a frenemy relationship with Google. Mozilla only stays in business because . According to , of Mozilla's $593 million in revenue, $510 million comes from Google.

and that it seeks to "counterbalance the entrenched tech companies." The numbers tell a different story. This grates on some users For example, the Mozilla CEO, Mitchell Baker, earned $6,903,089 in 2022, a raise of $1.3 Million. According to , the . In Silicon Valley, those numbers aren't outrageous, but Firefox's market share continues to circle the drain.

Many users would rather those funds be spent on improving Firefox and not on executive salaries. Or, . I'd love to see Firefox rise from the ashes as its first name, Phoenix, had hoped for. I fear, however, that this time, Firefox is doomed to disappear..