Firefox on the brink
by BenCollver from LinuxQuestions.org on (#6H111)
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.
From: https://www.brycewray.com/posts/2023/11/firefox-brink/
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.
From: https://www.brycewray.com/posts/2023/11/firefox-brink/