It was only after Edward Snowden revelations and many cyber threats during the period of 2013 and beyond lots of people started becoming privacy conscious and were looking for browsers & softwares that are more privacy and user centric and one such browser was Firefox from the non profit organisation called Mozilla. But what is so shocking is their recent market share dropping below the acceptable level for almost all the platforms.
Take the user base of android for instance as of this writing chrome has over 10 billion users, opera after switching to chromium engine earned over 100 million users, similarly brave which started late got over 50 million users with microsoft edge is also catching up faster with 10 million users and counting firefox sitting with barely over 100 million users. There is a reason to bother about this because what once seemed to be a browser of choice now has its user base dwindling day by day.
For many who needed to know the history in short firefox started as netscape earlier when there was only one browser monopoly from microsoft called internet explorer. It was only after the rise of netscape (earlier version of firefox) web users started to have a sense of freedom, because they had no choice other than internet explorer at that time.
Right from those days until now firefox has been the most privacy focused and user centric browser which gives some tough competition even to browsers like chrome (the browser from google with most number of users) as the later doesn’t have privacy focused setting as default, also not to forget how users have less control of their data while using chrome even though it has its own advantages comparing to firefox.
As net users we should be concerned about this because tomorrow if firefox era comes to an end then there will be no competitors for the big monopoly browsers from companies like microsoft and google leaving us with no option but to go with their hardcoded default setting which will only worsen our browsing experience as they will have the upper hand.
Firefox
uses gecko/blink engine, if you had used tor browser you might have
noticed similar user interface to that of firefox as tor uses firefox
engine (since it is also a privacy focused browser) and also for this
reason we must notice that killing firefox kills tor too as there won’t
be a viable alternative engine other than chromium (not so private)
which will kill privacy all together as web browsers are the gateway to
access the internet for whatever reasons we have to.
Earlier when Mozilla (firefox parent organization) named netscape as firefox and had their own set of addons (a small piece of software that can be installed inside the browser for extra features) people began to notice that this browser is far different from internet explorer and other browsers. Those days firefox solely depended on user contributions and donations as it was ‘corporate free’ but as time flew by they started to notice that users need more features than privacy and security (even if it takes to sell their ‘data’), as a general rule of thumb one needs to be put down in order for the other to come up and it is true in firefox’s case too. They started noticing the drop in their user base as the users started to switch to chrome & other chromium based browsers like opera, brave, edge etc. as chromium based browsers began to gain popularity for their speed, ease of use, feature integration and stability.
So mozilla realized that in order to keep up with the competition and secure their user base it has to introduce other products and features that are privacy focused and also fulfill user needs and thus it gave birth to products like firefox relay, pocket reader, firefox vpn (currently in USA) and firefox send (not available anymore). Not all are free but firefox began to generate revenue apart from the $400 million they get from google for every few years for making their search engine their default. Even though firefox began to generate revenue from its products it still has a long way to go.
It is a no brainer that nothing nice (whether people or things) lasts forever and firefox is no exception as a result they too started to find ways to generate revenue by showing sponsored ads and promoting their paid products but you are given an option to opt out of it. They have no option but to do this to survive.
Also there are many fork browsers based on firefox source code such as palemoon, waterfox, librewolf etc., but they are all ‘forks’ not like the original. Also they can’t be trusted to provide the same level of privacy, security and support like the one provided by firefox (since it is backed by mozilla organisation with a huge team of developers, support staffs, volunteers etc.)
Even though what we saw about the problems faced by firefox there is still a long way to go for this browser to call it a day as still millions are sticking with and pouring support day by day to keep it going. Lets hope that the future of firefox turns out to be in the best way that we all want it to be.
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