(2022-02-16) Is Firefox Ok

Is Firefox OK? At the end of 2008, Firefox was flying high. Twenty percent of the 1.5 billion people online were using Mozilla’s browser.

Almost 15 years later, things aren’t so rosy. Across all devices, the browser has slid to less than 4 percent of the market—on mobile it’s a measly half a percent.

Next year, its lucrative search deal with Google—responsible for the vast majority of its revenue—is set to expire

Since its release in 2008, GoogleChrome has become synonymous with the web: It’s used by around 65 percent of everyone online

“Chrome has won the desktop browser war,” says one former Firefox staff member, who worked on browser development at Mozilla but does not want to be named, as they still work in the industry. Their hopes for a Firefox revival are not high. “It's not super reasonable for Firefox to expect to win back even any browser share at this point.” Another former Mozilla employee,

Mozilla and Google have a complicated relationship. While they may be competitors, they are also business partners. Each year Google pays Mozilla hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties—reports say that figure is currently in the range of $400 million per year

Mozilla and Firefox acknowledge that for its long-term future it needs to diversify the ways it makes money. These efforts have ramped up since 2019.

some of these new bets haven’t worked out and can seem at odds with Firefox’s wider privacy aims.

The pressure to find new revenue streams comes at a time when Firefox faces more browser competition than ever.

Many of Chrome’s competitors look to differentiate themselves by not collecting data about your browsing history or tracking what you do online. Firefox, DuckDuckGo, Brave, Vivaldi, and Safari all join Tor—which is widely considered the most privacy-preserving option—in blocking tracking to varying degrees.

Jonah Aragon, a system administrator who also helps run the recommendation website Privacy Guides. The site, which focuses on open source software, ranks the Firefox browsers highly. “There's a lot of privacy features that aren't enabled by default, which is unfortunate, but it at least gives you the option to enable those if you think that you need them.”