My Thoughts on the Future of Firefox

I’ve been a Firefox user since around 2010 and tried various “flavors” of Firefox including Aurora (a build of Firefox version that is more stable than their nightly builds but less polished than the Beta version) and Firefox Developer Edition. I was also hyped for the short-lived FirefoxOS where I developed my first “mobile” application. Back around 2011, the marketshare between Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome were relatively shared among each other having a 36.6%, 28.5%, and 20.2% of the market respectively by July 2011. Google Chrome was the new kid in town that reportedly was faster than Internet Explorer and was quickly eating up Internet Explorer’s marketshare. Microsoft’s domaince after killing netscape came to an end after it kept failing to compete with with Chrome and Firefox. Internet Explorer became such a pathetic state that its only use was to install Chrome or Firefox, there’s even a funny webtoon created in 2018 that makes fun of this titled Internet Explorer by Merryweather Comics

While I love Firefox, I am no longer optimistic of its survival considering it’s lifeline is now at risk ever since the DOJ’s ruling against Google’s monopoly on online searches. For context, Firefox has been receiving funds from Google since 2005 and it eventually became its primary source of revenue. Surprisingly, Firefox made the default search engine to Yahoo in 2014 but went back to Google, something I was not aware of or something I forgotten after switching it to Google. The fact that over 80% of Firefox’s revenue comes from Google means it has become an entity that cannot survive without the lifeline that its competitor graced to Firefox.

While not major, Firefox was yet slapped again after the winter holidays with the news that the Linux Foundation with its industrial partners like Google, Microsoft and Meta will be funding Chromium developers. Chromium is the open source web browser maintained by Google and is the basis for Google Chrome, Edge, Opera, Brave, and many other Chromium based browsers and applications including the disgusting Electron applications. Firefox is left in the dark, behind its peers and likely to fade in obscurity due to the lack of funding and support from other projects and organizations.

I’ll be using Firefox as long as I can but even I have to admit, Firefox’s performance is inferior to Google. For an entire year, I had to resort to using Brave to watch anime and still do to open my online textbooks for school as they either render weirdly or just not load at all. At the beginning of 2024, I thought there was a chance of Firefox’s revival with Manifest v3 removing a lot of the capabilities that adblockers had previous access to effectively prevent those annoying and malicious ads.

In my opinion, privacy browsers such as Brave will take over the flock who will or had migrated from Chrome due to concerns of their privacy and the retirement of Manifest v3. While Firefox may benefit from the small migration of ad-hating users from Chrome, I do not forsee Firefox being able to compete at the trajectory it is going at.

On other news, I wonder how far LadyBug will go.