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Posted in Free/Libre Software at 8:19 pm by Guest Editorial Team
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer
According to the latest Firefox Public Data Report statistics, Mozilla has lost about 16 million more Active Monthly Users between August 15th 2022 and August 14th 2023.
Image: Firefox users' activity
Image: Firefox users' activity
192,840,300 minus 176,821,100 equals 16,019,200 less users in a single 12 month period.
On January 28, 2019, Mozilla had 253,877,800 Active Monthly Firefox Users, so if you subtract 176,821,100, they’ve lost 77,056,700.
Yes, over 77 million users lost in 4 years and 7 months. If you average out the loss over this period, then they’ve lost about 1.4 million Firefox users per month, give or take a couple thousand. Per day, that means that over 46,300 people slam Firefox shut and never open it again.
Where do they go?
Well, from the screenshot it may look like I used Firefox to take that picture, but I actually snapped them using LibreWolf on openSUSE Leap 15.5 KDE.
LibreWolf is a fork of Firefox that doesn’t spy on you and is set to privacy-preserving settings from the Tor Uplift Project and to default to not persisting your history or cookies between sessions and to never keep a disk cache. It also comes with ublock-origin, and is fully compatible with WebExtensions from the Firefox Add-Ons, including NoScript and all the other ones you may use.
It blocks fingerprinting vectors like Canvas and WebGL (which is a security hazard) and I’ve disabled WASMs (because those too are a hazard that adds more security issues, and I don’t want the Web platform to have it even if I whitelist a domain in NoScript…I want my bank to work, not shove a binary blob down the hatch).
I’ve also hidden and disabled the Widevine and EME (DRM stuff).
I don’t use Firefox Sync. I enabled (in about:config) password CSV imports and occasionally I just back up my password and bookmarks file to storage I control. Then I go over to SeaMonkey and stomp those with the latest version. It’s some work, but it keeps my information off of Mozilla’s server.
Set up this way, LibreWolf doesn’t spy on you like Firefox does.
It also doesn’t throw garbage in your face.
“Too much garbage in your face? Try space!“
With Mozilla quickly running out of Firefox users and resorting to petty harassment of SeaMonkey, it’s anyone’s guess exactly how long before Google totally defunds them.
Most people aren’t very intelligent, so I’d imagine that Mozilla is hemorrhaging users to something even nastier, like Chrome or Edge.
This does not bode well for the future.
At this point I don’t even think Mozilla wants to save themselves.
They’ve abandoned Windows users who could have been a captive audience, even though there’s nothing technical in the way of compiling new builds for these versions of the OS, yet.
Years later, they still won’t fix embarrassing “fake errors” that Microsoft and Google throw Firefox users along with “get our browser instead” spam.
In addition to Mitchell Baker firing Gecko developers by the hundreds and hiring Diversity Inclusion People and folks to write adware (which LibreWolf disables, and SeaMonkey has never had), Mozilla has a long history of serving a a line item on someone’s resume before they go work at a GAFAM company officially.
There’s a good reason to switch from Firefox, even if you pick something else that’s basically Firefox.
We need to protect ourselves from all of this adware and spyware and these binary-only modules and tell Mitchell that “We’re not gonna take it anymore!”.
(My Firefox ESR from openSUSE has had the “profile hardening” applied to it to make it basically like LibreWolf with Firefox branding, but it’s more work than letting someone else maintain it for you.) █
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