This is the second report I have seen dealing with the demise of FF. Who knows?
Why Google's legal troubles could hasten Firefox's slide into irrelevance
Fewer people than ever use the once popular web browser, but Mozilla remains profitable thanks to Google. How long can that trend continue with the Department of Justice coming after Google?www.zdnet.com
Why Firefox may be soon gone.
- Thread starter kc1di
- Start date
Whilst the article is an interesting read, it has one significant omission: it fails to factor in how free and open source software (FOSS) works in the linux world. The article is really examining the relationships between corporations and the possible consequences of commercial decisions by companies and regulators, in this case for firefox.
In the FOSS world, corporations don't have the field to themselves. Rather, FOSS is sprinkled with numerous different sorts of entitities that create and maintain software. These include solitary individuals, informal groups, small organised groups which may or may not be companies that may or may not be incorporated, LUGs, researchers and scientists, educational establishments, independent research institutions etc. There are numerous ways that people who write software are organised, or not, in the FOSS world. The consequence of this proliferation of production is that software that works tends to be continued as long as someone somewhere keeps it going. Forking software is a major way in which software develops. For example, browsers forked from firefox like librewolf, palemoon, waterfox etc. Factoring in the FOSS realities, why would one predict the demise of firefox? A corporation can be liquidated, but the people who worked there aren't. The FOSS world includes many of these people both when they work in corporations, and when they work in other forms of organisation. Although corporations have played very significant roles in FOSS development, e.g. Mozilla and Red Hat, it's not the case that large corporations such as those examined in the article are necessary for FOSS software.
Well, of those three, only one is a true fork, Pale Moon. The other two are just clones. If Mozilla fails, my question is how would security threats be handled without Mozilla's CVEs? I'm thinking things don't look good.
I understand the distinction you are drawing here, but it's going to depend on one's definition of the term "fork". In common usage, the term as used in post #2 is quite normal and easy to understand. See for example here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreWolf
CaffeineAddict
Well-Known Member
Firefox is not going anywhere, regardless of what some blogger says.
How can you be so sure? I'm sure there were people who thought Netscape Navigator wasn't going anywhere either.
I hope this is not true. We need something that works well and is not using google technology. Firefox is almost integral to many linux distros and it would be sad to see it go. Although maybe replaced by something even better? Anything on the horizon that is new and good?
It is my opinion that, though the percentage is fairly low, there are enough individuals and corporations using Firefox so that it's likely not going anywhere anytime soon. When we look at the overall numbers, there are still millions of people using Firefox as their default browser.
So, my opinion is based on history and relative numbers. It's just that, an opinion - but I think it has merit as the situation is presently.
So, my opinion is based on history and relative numbers. It's just that, an opinion - but I think it has merit as the situation is presently.
so my question again is.... are there any non google options?
Do you mean not based on Firefox? Well there's this, but it's still a long ways off: https://ladybird.org/
I don't care if it is based on firefox as long as it works well and does not go away. Just not based on google engine.
Unfortunately, I don't know of any. Not that are really practical, anyway.
Google (with Blink) and Mozilla (with Gecko) have for long enough had the browser market sewn up between them. Sure, there's outliers like Apple's Safari - very much entrenched in their "walled-garden" approach to software - and a few other Webkit/Webengine-based browsers - like the KDE Project's Falkon, for instance - but the Webkit/Webengine browsers have no kind of extension system. And that's one thing most users make use of to a greater or lesser degree.
As others here have noted, all the alternatives to the Blink-engined hegemony are mostly re-packs or 'forks' of Mozilla's long-developed Netscape Navigator ancestry. There just aren't any other real alternatives, unless you want to get to grips with text-based items like Lynx.
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Some years back, there was a beautiful wee browser called QtWeb. Anyone remember that? For older/resource-challenged hardware, you couldn't beat it. Although it WAS Webkit-based, it was as light as a feather, and its developer had re-wrangled it enough (to the extent of actually writing some brand-new, unique & 'one-off' Webkit libraries just FOR QtWeb) to give it its own, independent, perhaps primitive yet nonetheless functional extension system (of sorts). An ad-blocker, a cookie-cruncher, a simple screenshot tool, stuff like that.....basic functionality had been "thought out" & catered for, after a fashion.
Alas, it "fell by the wayside" some 7 or 8 years ago. Many of us in Puppyland mourned its passing, as we'd become rather attached to the thing....
Mike.
Very much a work in progress:
www.falkon.org
About Falkon
Falkon is a KDE web browser using QtWebEngine rendering engine, previously known as QupZilla. It aims to be a lightweight web browser available through all major platforms. This project has been originally started only for educational purposes. But from its start, Falkon has grown into a...
www.falkon.org
CaffeineAddict
Well-Known Member
Firefox is open source project, even if Mozilla gives up from FF, there might be others willing to take over without having to rewrite a browser from zero.
See statements like that... When I saw that I thought what so many have already mentioned in this thread: it's FOSS. Google ain't even default on Debian, DuckDuckGo is. Heck for my mobile browsing I use "DuckDuckGo Browser", which I think is FF based. So is "Tor Browser" incidentally.
I'll take that bet, easily. Currently, Tor Browser Bundle is FF based, so you think that project alone won't have enough volunteers to keep it alive. And just remember as an analogy of how "deprecated" things may still maintain significance, Vinyl came back despite digital music services (in fact recently, I think it's more popular than CDs, lol), people are starting to read physical books again, and there's been a surge in interest in "retro games" in the last decade or so. Simply put: If there is a demand, be it a large one or a niche, there will be a product to meet that demand.
That all aside, optional rant about the article's accuracy:
Edge is Chromium-based so, already that indicates a poor research. Unless we're not counting it for Bing being default? But then if FF ships with Google as default, what does that measure as? What about browsers like Tor Browser that are FF based? All those "others" in market share count on either side. Anyway, there's no citations, so we don't know how this was measured. Lots of privacy features spoof user agents, too. And Chromium is the most common, so there's that. Anyway my thoughts:
- Mozilla is basing some metrics on new user profiles created [1]. IDK if that's a good measure, many people copy+paste / export+import their profiles or simply never run in anything but private mode (which I would think prevents a profile being created, but I may be wrong on the latter).
- Mozilla's metrics on OS show a massive dip in Win10 users and a near-equal rise in Win11 users: It's natural for the user-ship to drop on older OSes. Win10 is going down, but Win11 is up at a near equal rate [1]. Not sure what that means to overall numbers other than "no change"?
- Because the article doesn't like to primary sources (the research) it is hard to say how these measures are done. While Mozilla does have a measure its userbase per OS, and acknowledges Windows makes up 75% of its userbase [1], neither Mozilla nor the article provides an evenly distributed sample; example 50% Windows, 50% Linux (illustrative oversimplification). Why do we do this in research? Because lets say Group A is 15000 of which 13000 people who prefer pop to jazz and Group B is 5000 of which 2000 prefer pop. For pop, Group A has 86.7% market share whereas for Group B a 40% market share. If we add both groups, ie 20k people, we get a 75% market share for pop (15k / 20k). "But then that makes sense, right?" Wrong. For an accurate sample group, there would need to be equal measures of demographics within that group. So we need 10k Group A and 10k Group B. Let's assume both groups are homogeneous to make this simple. So now Group A is 8667 who prefer pop and Group B is 4000 who prefer pop. Now pop only has a 63% market share. That's a 12% or 2400 person difference when doing research accurately. When working with percentages of anything, there's a stark difference between just numbers as opposed to trends. A light example: in a classroom of 40 girls and 10 boys, where 30 girls were crushing on Justin Timberlake, you would not say 60% of total teens have a crush on Justin Timberlake. Your sample group is in this case biased... At least that's what I was taught in school.
[1] https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
And there's my rant. In closing, I'd like to point out that while correct research methodology does not necessarily mean those stats would change, it does call them into question. Remember not every user in every country has had their primary browser measured. Remember mobile users often use the default browser due to lock-ins and that's often Chromium on Android, which has an excessively high market share in consumer electronics in general. While we can't slice 'n dice everything, we can do better than sweeping statements, or at least state how we reached our numbers.
I saw this today.
They are asking for donations and it seems they are at about 90% of their goal.
They are asking for donations and it seems they are at about 90% of their goal.
Terminal Velocity
Well-Known Member
If Firefox go away, I will go with the browser they will have preinstalled in Debian, my guess it will be a FF fork
It won't be the first time either, lol.
