Is Firefox OK?

The Mozilla building, Friday, Jan. 19, 2018, in San Francisco, California, Mozilla is the maker of the web browser Firefox. (Photo by Santiago Mejia/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)

Enlarge / The Mozilla constructing, Friday, Jan. 19, 2018, in San Francisco, California, Mozilla is the maker of the net browser Firefox. (Picture by Santiago Mejia/San Francisco Chronicle by way of Getty Pictures) (credit score: San Francisco Chronicle | Hearst Newspapers | Getty Pictures)

On the finish of 2008, Firefox was flying excessive. Twenty p.c of the 1.5 billion folks on-line had been utilizing Mozilla’s browser to navigate the net. In Indonesia, Macedonia, and Slovenia, greater than half of everybody logging on was utilizing Firefox. “Our market share within the areas above has been rising like loopy,” Ken Kovash, Mozilla’s president on the time, wrote in a weblog put up. Virtually 15 years later, issues aren’t so rosy.

Throughout all gadgets, the browser has slid to lower than four p.c of the market—on cellular it’s a measly half a p.c. “Wanting again 5 years and taking a look at our market share and our personal numbers that we publish, there is no denying the decline,” says Selena Deckelmann, senior vice chairman of Firefox. Mozilla’s personal statistics present a drop of round 30 million month-to-month energetic customers from the beginning of 2019 to the beginning of 2022. “Within the final couple years, what we have seen is definitely a fairly substantial flattening,” Deckelmann provides.

Within the twenty years since Firefox launched from the shadows of Netscape, it has been key to shaping the net’s privateness and safety, with workers pushing for extra openness on-line and higher requirements. However its market share decline was accompanied by two rounds of layoffs at Mozilla throughout 2020. Subsequent yr, its profitable search take care of Google—chargeable for the overwhelming majority of its income—is about to run out. A spate of privacy-focused browsers now competes on its turf, whereas new-feature misfires have threatened to alienate its base. All of that has left business analysts and former workers involved about Firefox’s future.

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