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?
Firefox has never been the most popular web browser. At its peak, in 2010, Firefox was used by 34.1% of the market. Today, the US federal government’s Digital Analytics Program (DAP), with its running count of the last 90 days of US government website visits, the most reliable web browser survey, shows Firefox with a mere 2.8%.
That’s not Firefox’s all-time low, but it’s still miserable. Chrome, as you might guess, is the leader with 54.5%, followed by Safari, thanks to iPhones, with 24%, and Edge with 14.2%. Only Internet Explorer — yes, some people are still running it — of the well-known browsers has a smaller number of users, with 1.7%.
Chrome’s numbers are even bigger than they first appear. Its open-source foundation, Chromium, also powers Microsoft Edge. Except for Safari and Mozilla Firefox, all the other web browsers that matter, such as Opera, Vivaldi, and Brave, run on top of Chromium. Altogether, these alternative browsers equal Firefox’s market share with 2.8%.
Even Firefox’s parent organization, Mozilla, show Firefox’s numbers dwindling. Since March 2020, Firefox has lost over 50 million monthly active users (MAU), dropping from 206 million to 155 million as of July 2024.
In a word, ugh.
So, why has this slide happened? Well, it all started when Google rolled out Chrome. As Hiten Shah, CEO of Nira, a cloud security company, observed, Google fundamentally reinvented the browser. In 2008, Google started creating an entirely new operating system for a cloud-based open web with its extensions and applications.
To make that happen, Google « poached » top web browser developers from Firefox, such as Ian Hickson, Darin Fisher, Pam Greene, and Brian Ryner. Microsoft and the Mozilla Foundation were caught flat-footed, and neither have caught up.
Eventually, Mozilla figured out what was happening. It took them much too long. In 2017, almost a decade after Chrome appeared, then Mozilla CEO Chris Beard admitted, « Firefox did not keep up with the market and what people really want. A lot of hardcore Firefox fans are now happy Chrome users. »
Since then, things haven’t gone well with Firefox.
