Firefox on the Brink?
canopic jug writes:
Retired self-proclaimed ordinary guy Bryce Wray has written an analysis of the situation with Mozilla's Firefox, the tipping point it is rapidly approaching, and the factors behind it heading towards that tipping point as it descends towards 2%. The U.S. Web Design System (USWDS) guides those building US government web sites, but the influence extends much further in practice:
With such a continuing free-fall, Firefox is inevitably nearing the point where USWDS will remove it, like Internet Explorer before it, from the list of supported browsers.
"So what?" you may wonder. "That's just for web developers in the U.S. government. It doesn't affect any other web devs."
Actually, it very well could. Here's how I envision the dominoes falling:
- Once Firefox slips below the 2% threshold in the government's visitor analytics, USWDS tells government web devs they don't have to support Firefox anymore.
- When that word gets out, it spreads quickly to not only the front-end dev community but also the corporate IT departments for whom some web devs work. Many corporations do a lot of business with the government and, thus, whatever the government does from an IT standpoint is going to influence what corporations do.
- Corporations see this change as an opportunity to lower dev costs and delivery times, in that it provides an excuse to remove some testing (and, in rare cases, specific coding) from their development workflow.2
...and just like that, in less time than you might think, Firefox - the free/open-source browser that was supposed to save the world from the jackboots of Internet Explorer (which had killed Firefox's ancestor, Netscape Navigator) - is reduced to permanent status as a shrinking part of the fractured miscellany that litters the bottom of browser market-share charts.
It also matters a lot in another way because without push back, due to either lack of will or lack of ability, there is not a counter balance to Google's Chromium / Chrome and thus the web has started to become[sic] under full control of a single entity, and a[sic] one which is a corporation at that.
For those that have been following the saga, the CEO of Mozilla Corporation has maneuvered the once great browser from being a major presence to being barely a statistical error in market share. During that time Mozilla has also shifted from having a diverse funding base to being more or less fully financially dependent on its most serious competitor, Google.
Previously:SN has covered various aspects of Mozilla a lot in the past.Read more of this story at SoylentNews.