Firefox Public Data Report

[______-]

Wow great to see uBlock Origin as the top addon installed:

    1 uBlock Origin 4.189%
    2 Adblock Plus - free ad blocker 2.462%
    3 Video DownloadHelper 2.397%
    4 Cisco Webex Extension 2.375%
    5 Facebook Container 1.735%
    6 DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials 1.434%
    7 AdBlocker Ultimate 1.415%
    8 Adblock Plus - kostenloser Adblocker 1.230%
    9 Grammarly for Firefox 1.160%
    10 Adblock Plus - bloqueur de publicités gratuit

Video Download Helper looks good, but I prefer `youtube-dl`[0] as there's more control.

[0] https://www.youtube-dl.org/

[nerbert]

Only 4.189%?! I find that amazing. I would have imagined a MUCH bigger number.

[pornel]

It's quite eye-opening how much lower-end hardware is out there. Too many users to ignore have either 2 cores, or 4GB RAM, or 768px resolution, 32-bit OS, and hardly anyone has a discrete GPU.

[apocalyptic0n3]

Random anecdote: we recently had to launch a fairly large site that targeted 800x600 because that was the resolution of the monitor the old guy who owned the company used and he refused to believe anyone was using anything different. It was really frustrating to work with them, to say the least.

[Tajnymag]

At least part of those machines could be VMs running in CI/CD.

However, you are right that we shouldn't overestimate the client capabilities in the global scale. There's a huge market in developing countries, where every working computer is taken as a blessing.

[ciberado]

Two hundred million computers actively using Firefox each month. How is it possible we cannot make it sustainable without the money from Google?

[thmzlt]

From Mitchell Baker's Wikipedia page:

"In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008.[14] On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to."[15]

By 2020 her salary had risen to over $3 million, while in the same year the Mozilla Corporation had to lay off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues. Baker blamed this on the Coronavirus pandemic."

There is no incentive to do so.

[woofcat]

I sometimes wonder if there is a market for paid browsers. As in software you pay for. I know it used to be a thing many moons ago, however I think I'd pay $20 or whatever to have a good browser that doesn't have anyone besides it's user base in it's mind.

* Out of the box adblocker

* Out of the box anti-tracking

* Decent sync options between devices

* etc.

[pornel]

It's a free product, and a commodity. Development is expensive, especially when the main competitor can make it so by playing Fire And Motion (see Joel's article) and treats their browser as a loss leader for their trillion-dollar business.

[jedimastert]

An audience does not a monetization strategy make. It can ONLY ever be a piece

[slightwinder]

Because B2C is a pain, while B2B is easy money. Business 2 Business means you work with professionels, people of your own kind, and with a small number. In B2C you work with huge number of unreliable customers, catering more to their individual whims. And you must invest more money for money transactions, legal procedures, chargebacks and whatever you are selling to those customers. That's just a bigger risk and pain as a company.

[ape4]

But how to monetize? Place ads somewhere in the application?

[mrpotato]

I would have thought the share of ad block users would be higher. That being said, it is pretty telling that 6 of the top 10 add-ons are ad blockers.

[picklebutter]

The number of people I see without adblockers in the wild is really high. When I ask, most people don't know what I'm talking about or they don't care... that is until I show them if they allow me to.

Most people just want to browse Facebook or their bank and don't have a clue about adblockers, add-ons, etc.

[WorldMaker]

Firefox's Enhanced Tracking Protection seems to serve my needs out of the box enough that I see a ton of nags to "disable ad tracking" on various websites. Why install a third party add-on when the in box tools are sufficient?

[twobitshifter]

It’s possible that people with Adblock are also often disabling telemetry.

[M2Ys4U]

I'm guessing, but I would expect that there's a fair few people using ad blockers that have turned off telemetry, and thus aren't included in the report.

[PrivacyDingus]

A list absolutely dominated by anti-tracking extensions, you love to see it.

[ephaeton]

I hate the fact that they collect so much data. It's just the next company saying "nah, we're not evil! Don't worry that the browser we make sends home five hundred columns of data about your box and your usage patterns! We really really do promise not to peel out your identity from the data mud and monetize it! pinky promise! Just like google, we're not evil!!"

To those who claim you can opt-out of the "experience":

You can spend quite some time configuring firefox not to check for updates, get rid of all mentions of mozilla's servers in the config, try to have it not phone home, opt-out of any data sharing .. then you start it, and it does nonetheless: "Hey, update me please!" And what data do they share when checking for updates? Too much - I instructed the software to shut the fuck up and not ask for a fresh version, and surely don't communicate that I'm just using version X on my OS under my IP for fuck's sake! And that's just the obvious part of data that'll have to be transmitted in order for an update check to work! See pinky promise, above.

And then, after an update, if you don't start it with -ProfileManager to force your old profile (under linux), it will start with a fresh profile and ... phone home. With fresh settings. Which, by default, share your data. Oh and you can't control what it does while it sits there in the profile manager window. I presume it phones home. How can we be so blind and think this is a good alternative?

I know for me, it's exhaustion, and the inability to quickly scan the obfuscation mess that mozilla calls firefox's source code. What is it for you?

[______-]

> You can spend quite some time configuring firefox not to check for update

Yeah I tried doing this once. I searched about:config for any mention of `mozilla.org` and deleted it. It still pinged Mozilla looking for an update.

You're probably wondering why I wanted to disable updates, well I have a few toy browsers I don't want updated because I like the specific version and some addons I have are not compatible with newer Firefox (due to the webextensions overhaul).

My solution was to use an older version of Waterfox (Waterfox Classic) which still supports older addons. I also use Palemoon for oldskool extension support, but don't use it as my main browser for obvious reasons.

[circularfoyers]

Are you not using the Firefox package from your distro's repo? If you were, it doesn't check for updates and I've never in all my years had it load into a new profile after an update. It sounds like you were using the official binary not from your package manager, which in most cases you really shouldn't do that.

[ece]

~20% of users are still on 32-bit, how?

[Narishma]

I still use a 32-bit Atom netbook from a decade ago daily.

[magicalhippo]

Actually just yesterday I was thinking maybe I could get 32bit Firefox to run on Linux instead of 64bit, so that there's a hard-cap to how much memory it uses (per process)... would be a less invasive option than disabling swapping like I'm currently doing.

[cptskippy]

Microsoft offered a 32 bit version of Windows 10 up until May of last year. 20% of users will still on Windows 7.

I'm surprised the number is as low as it is.

[picklebutter]

Most likely ignorance, but also maybe: can't afford or don't want to spend money on new hardware when the old one still works (this is a stretch but possible still), don't see the need for 64-bit, and I'm sure a few other reasons that elude me.

[martini333]

Not fair to compare Windows to MacOS, when Windows 10 has way more incremental updates. It would like be grouping MacOS 10.x

[jimmyed]

Heh, why do Indians use the browser only for ~3.5h? A typical work day would be longer I presume.

[input_sh]

You're severely overestimating the amount of people that interact with a computer during workdays.