@glyph Did you quote post something?
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@amethyst it *also* halved in usage from 2015-2020, so the people still using it in 2020 were almost certainly aware of some of its benefits and yet attrition continued, which is what I'm curious about.
I guess a better question for you might be: what made you want to *try* switching to Safari in the first place?
@glyph Most recently was because Apple Pay stopped working in Firefox on macOS (after working fine for a couple years), along with being tempted by some nifty-looking Safari extensions that—because iOS jail—would actually work on both the desktop and the phone browser, while my Firefox extensions only work on the desktop.
In the background, I've had growing concerns about Mozilla Foundation being stupid, doing/saying shitty things around crypto/ai/etc, along with repeated rollout of features I absolutely do not want in my browser, that were enabled by default, or the concern that Mozilla itself might be turning into enablers of various sorts and me losing trust in the foundation to follow its mission. Their most recent CEO announcement is adding an awful lot to that feeling.
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@mirth click around on https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/worldwide/2015 for various years, but you can look at other reports like https://radar.cloudflare.com/reports/browser-market-share-2025-q3 . Different absolute numbers by a few percent depending on where you source your data, but similar trends all around
@glyph Interesting. Their self-reported data shows a slow decline in absolute usage [1] while ITU data [2] shows a big increase in total usage, consistent with the reports of rapidly dropping share.
1. https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
2. https://www.itu.int/itu-d/reports/statistics/2024/11/10/ff24-internet-use/ -
@glyph Interesting. Their self-reported data shows a slow decline in absolute usage [1] while ITU data [2] shows a big increase in total usage, consistent with the reports of rapidly dropping share.
1. https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
2. https://www.itu.int/itu-d/reports/statistics/2024/11/10/ff24-internet-use/@mirth interesting! the idea that the total internet population was increasing had not occurred to me but I guess if we are looking over a decade that makes sense!
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@mirth interesting! the idea that the total internet population was increasing had not occurred to me but I guess if we are looking over a decade that makes sense!
@glyph I have observed but not followed closely the conversations about Firefox direction, "AI" features, etc. I'm not well-informed enough to have any strong opinions but one thing that's certainly different vs a decade ago is all of the major browsers work well in terms of compatibility, performance, stability, etc. There are differences, but they're all plenty usable. At the same time there a lot of smaller hurdles to switching (bookmarks, device sync, G acct sign-in).
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@glyph I have observed but not followed closely the conversations about Firefox direction, "AI" features, etc. I'm not well-informed enough to have any strong opinions but one thing that's certainly different vs a decade ago is all of the major browsers work well in terms of compatibility, performance, stability, etc. There are differences, but they're all plenty usable. At the same time there a lot of smaller hurdles to switching (bookmarks, device sync, G acct sign-in).
@glyph What that suggests to me is the usage dynamics are more like soft drinks, an inexpensive product where choices are driven by habit, brand perception, and distribution more than anything in the product itself. Not much different from how Coca-Cola and Pepsi are more or less interchangeable and equally bad for you.
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@glyph I recently (= after summer vacay or so) stopped using Firefox altogether in favor of Librewolf. However I've been using Vivaldi for a long time now for the webpages that don't work well enough in Firefox. The list is depressingly long. Librewolf is so uptight that I now have to use Vivaldi ever more often. I can foresee a time when it will only work on old sites.
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@glyph What that suggests to me is the usage dynamics are more like soft drinks, an inexpensive product where choices are driven by habit, brand perception, and distribution more than anything in the product itself. Not much different from how Coca-Cola and Pepsi are more or less interchangeable and equally bad for you.
@glyph @glyph On the one hand this is an uninspiring possibility because it implies that without an external stabilizing force the browser world will stabilize with just a few dominant brands. On the other, it suggests that succeeding with a new browser doesn't necessarily entail a massive technical effort, more a cultural, packaging, and marketing project.
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@glyph I am using https://duckduckgo.com/ more than firefox these days. Reason: more private. Or so they promise.
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@amethyst Trend lines suggest that at least half of Firefox users have stopped using it in the last 5 years or so, so I'm curious to hear from them — I was very surprised when I saw the public numbers because some version of the story you just related is the one I hear the most often *socially* from people who talk about Firefox at all, and I kinda assumed that their user population was holding steady as a result.
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@glyph Chrome -> FF about fiveish years ago, for fairly obvious reasons, but never liked FF — it was always super slow and buggy for me (even without extensions, and adding just a few extensions made it lots worse). Switched to Vivaldi 2-3 years ago and am very happy: it’s fast, stable, and has all the key features I want: built-in adblocking, multi-device tab sync, split pane windows, etc.
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@glyph I still use Firefox as my main browser, but I switched to librewolf some time ago to test it. If mozilla keeps pushing unwanted stuff into the browser, I may be tempted to switch permanently
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@glyph I used to run Firefox as my day-to-day browser, but I decided to give Safari a try when upgrading my laptop a while back and was pleasantly surprised by it.
The fact that anyone who cares about mobile (which is everybody) is forced by Apple's iOS policies into testing on Safari means I see fewer sites break than before, and while the privacy controls aren't as fine-grained or powerful as Firefox they still offer what I think is a reasonable baseline. Performance is also decent, and the battery-life impact is hard to beat.
I still keep Firefox installed, and I still use it for some things (especially browser-based games), but I'd say my usage of it has dropped probably 80% or more.
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@glyph I used to run Firefox as my day-to-day browser, but I decided to give Safari a try when upgrading my laptop a while back and was pleasantly surprised by it.
The fact that anyone who cares about mobile (which is everybody) is forced by Apple's iOS policies into testing on Safari means I see fewer sites break than before, and while the privacy controls aren't as fine-grained or powerful as Firefox they still offer what I think is a reasonable baseline. Performance is also decent, and the battery-life impact is hard to beat.
I still keep Firefox installed, and I still use it for some things (especially browser-based games), but I'd say my usage of it has dropped probably 80% or more.
@ubernostrum oh that's interesting. why browser-based games? do you find they perform better, or does the browser-game-dev community test more with it?
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@ubernostrum oh that's interesting. why browser-based games? do you find they perform better, or does the browser-game-dev community test more with it?
@glyph @ubernostrum As a very annoyed browser game developer today: Firefox still hasn't implemented the Web Share API (also for some reason Google doesn't allow it in Android WebView even though Chrome supports it just fine).
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@mario_angst_sci @glyph Even though it's been over ten years now since my last day at Mozilla, I still get irritated whenever salaries are brought up like this.
As just a developer (not an executive), after Mozilla I literally doubled my salary overnight by accepting a job with an ordinary for-profit company. And while you didn't mean it this way, what it feels like when a lot of people complain about Mozilla people getting paid is "you should have been happy to be significantly underpaid during some of your prime earning years, because you were working on an Important Societal Mission and that's more important than money".
And I extend that to discussions of executive pay. Demanding that people be underpaid relative to peers "for the misson" will always bother me.
Or more bluntly: if someone thinks working on important things has to involve being paid less (or even completely unpaid, as is too often the case with open source), I invite them to be the one who does it.
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@glyph @ubernostrum As a very annoyed browser game developer today: Firefox still hasn't implemented the Web Share API (also for some reason Google doesn't allow it in Android WebView even though Chrome supports it just fine).
@coderanger @ubernostrum wait they've had this feature-flagged for 4 years and still haven't enabled it? that's… weird
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@ubernostrum oh that's interesting. why browser-based games? do you find they perform better, or does the browser-game-dev community test more with it?
@glyph I find that on sites like newgrounds a lot of things that just show a blank square of no content in Safari will work in Firefox. Don't know why that is, just that it is. Maybe it's my own settings impacting that, but I still have a pretty locked-down Firefox setup, so I'm skeptical that Safari is somehow even more restrictive.
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@mario_angst_sci @glyph Even though it's been over ten years now since my last day at Mozilla, I still get irritated whenever salaries are brought up like this.
As just a developer (not an executive), after Mozilla I literally doubled my salary overnight by accepting a job with an ordinary for-profit company. And while you didn't mean it this way, what it feels like when a lot of people complain about Mozilla people getting paid is "you should have been happy to be significantly underpaid during some of your prime earning years, because you were working on an Important Societal Mission and that's more important than money".
And I extend that to discussions of executive pay. Demanding that people be underpaid relative to peers "for the misson" will always bother me.
Or more bluntly: if someone thinks working on important things has to involve being paid less (or even completely unpaid, as is too often the case with open source), I invite them to be the one who does it.
@ubernostrum @mario_angst_sci I feel the same way although in the case of the executives, the fact that they are so visibly and aggressively useless in recent years makes it hard to get too mad at people who feel the dissonance there. But "buffoonish mediocrities being paid nonsense disproportionate rates as executives" is of course not particularly a Mozilla-specific issue, as we head into 2026
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@ubernostrum @mario_angst_sci I feel the same way although in the case of the executives, the fact that they are so visibly and aggressively useless in recent years makes it hard to get too mad at people who feel the dissonance there. But "buffoonish mediocrities being paid nonsense disproportionate rates as executives" is of course not particularly a Mozilla-specific issue, as we head into 2026
@glyph @mario_angst_sci I generally avoid getting into arguments about specific executives or policies or whatever. I just think that people who work on societal good should actually be rewarded for doing so, and as far as I'm aware Mozilla exec salaries are still on the low end compared to other household-name tech companies.
And I understand it's a difficult problem: other companies can make huge stock grants to avoid needing to actually pay out hard cash, and Mozilla does not have that option. But I also know what I was making when I worked there, and what my peers at not-even-Big-Tech companies were making, and it really does get to me.
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@glyph I stopped using Firefox when they became an adtech company. Then they became an AI company and did I feel smug.
Gli ultimi otto messaggi ricevuti dalla Federazione
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@aeva *exaggerated hair shoulder toss* don't hate me because I'm beautiful!
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@luca a proposito, che ne pensi di questa idea? https://news.dyne.org/rethinking-r-i-funding-opting-for-continuity/
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@informapirata @informatica @filippodb
Fortunatamente l'iniziativa è dell'unità CNECT/E3 (che è molto collaborativa), e non CNECT/C3.
Con la C3 abbiamo avuto un'esperienza a dir poco surreale e sicuramente poco incoraggiante per l'open-source:
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@Sirchrism le consultazioni sono uno strumento frequentemente adottato dall'Unione
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This sign was a crowd favorite; people kept pointing me to it. The woman holding the sign hold me she was fine with being in the photo.
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Look what I found
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@rl_dane I once dropped my work Thinkpad down two flights of concrete stairs. Still worked. They're indestructible. 🔥
