Retired self-proclaimed ordinary guy Bryce Wray has written an analysis
of the situation with Mozilla's Firefox, the tipping point it is rapidly approaching, and the factors behind it heading towards that tipping
point as it descends towards 2%. The U.S. Web Design System (USWDS)
guides those building US government web sites, but the influence extends
much further in practice:

With such a continuing free-fall, Firefox is inevitably nearing the
point where USWDS will remove it, like Internet Explorer before it,
from the list of supported browsers.

"So what?" you may wonder. "That's just for web developers in the
U.S. government. It doesn't affect any other web devs."

Actually, it very well could. Here's how I envision the dominoes
falling:

* Once Firefox slips below the 2% threshold in the government's
visitor analytics, USWDS tells government web devs they don't have
to support Firefox anymore.
* When that word gets out, it spreads quickly to not only the
front-end dev community but also the corporate IT departments for
whom some web devs work. Many corporations do a lot of business
with the government and, thus, whatever the government does from an
IT standpoint is going to influence what corporations do.
* Corporations see this change as an opportunity to lower dev costs
and delivery times, in that it provides an excuse to remove some
testing (and, in rare cases, specific coding) from their
development workflow.2

... and just like that, in less time than you might think,
Firefox--the free/open-source browser that was supposed to save the
world from the jackboots of Internet Explorer (which had killed
Firefox's ancestor, Netscape Navigator)--is reduced to permanent
status as a shrinking part of the fractured miscellany that litters
the bottom of browser market-share charts.

It also matters a lot in another way because without push back, due to
either lack of will or lack of ability, there is not a counter balance
to Google's Chromium / Chrome and thus the web has started to
become[sic] under full control of a single entity, and a[sic] one which
is a corporation at that.

For those that have been following the saga, the CEO of Mozilla
Corporation has maneuvered the once great browser from being a major
presence to being barely a statistical error in market share. During
that time Mozilla has also shifted from having a diverse funding base to
being more or less fully financially dependent on its most serious
competitor, Google.

From: <https://www.brycewray.com/posts/2023/11/firefox-brink/>

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Ben Collver <bencollver@tilde.pink> wrote:

Retired self-proclaimed ordinary guy Bryce Wray has written an analysis
of the situation with Mozilla's Firefox, the tipping point it is rapidly approaching, and the factors behind it heading towards that tipping
point as it descends towards 2%. The U.S. Web Design System (USWDS)
guides those building US government web sites, but the influence extends
much further in practice:

The web page mentions the source of that data as:
https://analytics.usa.gov/

Ironically, in my preferred browser the graphs there don't display
because they requires Javascript, which it doesn't support. I could
read the following statement though:

"The data come from a unified Google Analytics account for U.S.
federal government agencies known as the Digital Analytics Program."

I suspect that a higher proportion of the remaining Firefox
user-base are using script blockers or privacy extensions that
block Google Analytics, than users of Chrome. Therefore that source
is probably under-reporting Firefox usage. It's also clearly a
potentially biased source for the information, run by a company
that develops the most popular web browser.

The solution would of course be to take the data out of server logs
instead of using one of Google's big brother spy services to
collect it separately, but apparantly they're too lazy for that.
That's inexcusable in my opinion, but such are so many things done
by governments.

* Once Firefox slips below the 2% threshold in the government's
visitor analytics, USWDS tells government web devs they don't have
to support Firefox anymore.
* When that word gets out, it spreads quickly to not only the
front-end dev community but also the corporate IT departments for
whom some web devs work. Many corporations do a lot of business
with the government and, thus, whatever the government does from an
IT standpoint is going to influence what corporations do.
* Corporations see this change as an opportunity to lower dev costs
and delivery times, in that it provides an excuse to remove some
testing (and, in rare cases, specific coding) from their
development workflow.2

The effect of this depends on how successful Firefox is at being
compatible with Chrome, so that someone writes a website just for
Chrome, but then gee whiz it seems to work in Firefox still too.

--
__ __
#_ < |\| |< _# | Note: I won't see posts made from Google Groups |

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Computer Nerd Kev <not@telling.you.invalid> wrote:

Ben Collver <bencollver@tilde.pink> wrote:

<snip>

The web page mentions the source of that data as:
https://analytics.usa.gov/

Ironically, in my preferred browser the graphs there don't display
because they requires Javascript, which it doesn't support. I could
read the following statement though:

"The data come from a unified Google Analytics account for U.S.
federal government agencies known as the Digital Analytics Program."

I suspect that a higher proportion of the remaining Firefox
user-base are using script blockers or privacy extensions that
block Google Analytics, than users of Chrome. Therefore that source
is probably under-reporting Firefox usage. It's also clearly a
potentially biased source for the information, run by a company
that develops the most popular web browser.

That is me, I have google-analytics.com blocked since
I do not what google spying on me.

<snip>

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John McCue <jmccue@qball.jmcunx.com> wrote:

Computer Nerd Kev <not@telling.you.invalid> wrote:

Ben Collver <bencollver@tilde.pink> wrote:

<snip>

The web page mentions the source of that data as:
https://analytics.usa.gov/

Ironically, in my preferred browser the graphs there don't display
because they requires Javascript, which it doesn't support. I could
read the following statement though:

"The data come from a unified Google Analytics account for U.S.
federal government agencies known as the Digital Analytics Program."

I suspect that a higher proportion of the remaining Firefox
user-base are using script blockers or privacy extensions that
block Google Analytics, than users of Chrome. Therefore that source
is probably under-reporting Firefox usage. It's also clearly a
potentially biased source for the information, run by a company
that develops the most popular web browser.

That is me, I have google-analytics.com blocked since
I do not what google spying on me.

There are five permanent, global, block rules in UblockOrigin in my
firefox:

doubleclick.net
google-analytics.com
googleoptimize.com
googletagmanager.com
googletagservices.com

They are all google (doubleclick bought google many years ago, and in
reality modern google is just the doubleclick advertising machine
operating behind the "google" name).

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On 2023-12-08, Rich <rich@example.invalid> wrote:

There are five permanent, global, block rules in UblockOrigin in my
firefox:

doubleclick.net
google-analytics.com
googleoptimize.com
googletagmanager.com
googletagservices.com

They are all google (doubleclick bought google many years ago, and in

----------------------------------------

reality modern google is just the doubleclick advertising machine
operating behind the "google" name).

Too true :)

doubleclick.net has the honour of being the first entry in my personal proxy blocklist, and the reason for creating it in the first place.


--
Ian

"Tamahome!!!" - "Miaka!!!"

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Ian wrote:

On 2023-12-08, Rich <rich@example.invalid> wrote:

There are five permanent, global, block rules in
UblockOrigin in my firefox:

doubleclick.net
google-analytics.com
googleoptimize.com
googletagmanager.com
googletagservices.com

They are all google (doubleclick bought google many years
ago, and in

----------------------------------------

reality modern google is just the doubleclick advertising
machine operating behind the "google" name).

Too true :)

doubleclick.net has the honour of being the first entry in
my personal proxy blocklist, and the reason for creating
it in the first place.

Ditto.

I think the only one of the above google-ish domains
I need to add to my list is the newer googleoptimize
one.

I use SeaMonkey with various profiles (js on/off; cookies
on/off, etc.) to do 90% of the web visiting I might
do. I'm noticing more and more sites refuse to even load
unless I change my apparent agent to Firefox, and then
some still refuse to talk to SeaMonkey. :P~~~

The browser wars are reverting to 30 years ago with
the "you can use any browser you want, it just won't
work unless you use the one *we* want you to."

So whatever happened to html standards? IE needed
special handling, now Chrome does its own thing too.

Stick to standards and everything should work for
every browser, right?

Nyssa, who remembers the pre-WWW Internet with longing
when her browser of choice is rejected by a website she's
trying to view

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John McCue <jmccue@qball.jmcunx.com> writes:

That is me, I have google-analytics.com blocked since
I do not what google spying on me.

In the logs of one of my sites, lines containing "Firefox"
are about 39 % of the lines containing "Chrome" (using about
100,000 recent log lines as a data source).

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Am 08.12.2023 um 18:28:27 Uhr schrieb Ben Collver:

Retired self-proclaimed ordinary guy Bryce Wray has written an
analysis of the situation with Mozilla's Firefox, the tipping point
it is rapidly approaching, and the factors behind it heading towards
that tipping point as it descends towards 2%. The U.S. Web Design
System (USWDS) guides those building US government web sites, but the influence extends much further in practice:

With such a continuing free-fall, Firefox is inevitably nearing the
point where USWDS will remove it, like Internet Explorer before it,
from the list of supported browsers.

Mozilla wanted to follow Google and now they are not that unique
anymore. People abandon it.

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