Hardly anyone would have thought ten years ago that the Firefox browser would suddenly approach insignificance at breakneck speed. But exactly this scenario is emerging more and more if you look at the statistics. Numbers alone do not reveal anything about the reasons that led to this development.
User losses in the millions
Of all things, the “Firefox Public Data Report«Clearly shows the ongoing decline in users. The report covers the period from January 2019 to the end of July 2021. If you compare how the user numbers looked at the beginning of 2019 and where they were last, the loss is a little more than 46 million users.
When looking at the curve, it is noticeable that the number of users has always been subject to certain fluctuations, but a sustained downward trend cannot be denied:
Europey is one of the last remaining strongholds of the fiery fox. The browser came here in Europey according to Statista im June 2021 still in second place with just under 21 percent market share. That may sound good at first, but here, too, the curve has gone down steeply in recent years – in 2017 Firefox was still the front runner with just under 38 percent.
It’s not just Chrome’s fault
With such a development, of course, the question of the reasons is an extremely important one. In the case of Firefox, however, it is not just the competition that is responsible for the problem, even if it naturally plays an important role:
Chrome is everywhere: This point should not surprise anyone who has ventured into this ominous “Internet”. The browser from Google was almost omnipresent, especially in its early days, not least thanks to the search engine. People were constantly advised to try this great, new browser.
Today this advertising has been scaled back, but especially less tech-savvy users will certainly still be happy that Google helps you choose a browser. This ensured that Chrome grew rapidly – at the expense of Firefox, the top dog at the time.
Today Chrome is clawing according to the current statcounter data already overwhelming worldwide 68 percent of the cake, not least thanks to Android on smartphones. Even Microsoft’s Edge was now able to overtake the old competition by a wafer-thin layer.
Mozilla annoyed the regular users: Firefox’s reputation has also suffered somewhat in recent years. Many users were annoyed about the regular redesign of the surface and the well-known Fuchs logo, which the developers even did to a statement
But then the developers decided to lend a hand, of all places, to the greatest strength of Firefox for many users: its adaptability and versatility in the form of add-ons. Because the decision was made to switch to a new technical substructure called “WebExtensions”. Smaller add-ons in particular, which were nevertheless very popular, were not ported to the new interface by their creators and no longer worked:
more on the subject
Firefox extensions incompatible soon
It remains to be seen whether Firefox can turn things around again in the future and win more users again. One way to do this could be today’s hot topic of data protection. Because of numerous scandals in the past, many people are now paying more attention to their data on the Internet and want to know what is happening with it.
For this reason, the Firefox developers made the collection of user data completely transparent last year. All the telemetry data that has been collected can be viewed on a special website.
Which browser do you use? Are you still loyal to the old fox, or have you already switched to a Chromium-based browser? If so, what was the main reason for you? Let us know in the comments!
