Ouch, Firefox has lost 46 million users in the past three years

Mozilla Firefox has hemorrhaged nearly 46 million users in the past three years, the company’s own Public data report shows a constant and worrying decline in the popularity of a browser that is one of the last serious competitors of Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome.

Colloquially known as Firefox, Mozilla’s browser exploded onto the scene in 2002 with the explicit intention of disrupting the monopoly that Safari and Chrome had long enjoyed and offering Internet users a greater variety of options.

But as a Reddit thread by you / nixcraft recently highlighted, Firefox’s lifespan appears to be at risk: While Firefox’s desktop client had around 244 million reported monthly active users in 2018, that number has dropped to just under 50 million in the years since. The drop suggests that users are migrating en masse to Chromium-based browsers like Google Chrome, which happens to be conveniently pre-downloaded on Android, and Microsoft Edge, which serves as the default web browser for Windows.

In general, websites tend to be optimized for Chrome these days so that their pages load faster, and Google’s search engine is currently promoting the browser to its multi-billion daily user base. , which gives it a substantial boost.

Firefox has made adjustments to stay competitive in recent years, including adjustments to its default tracking protection settings intended to protect user privacy. But some have argued that the fixes don’t go far enough and that a lack of substantial performance updates, coupled with a confusing series of user interface changes for Firefox 89, has caused the brand to lose its competitive edge in recent years.

Even with this disturbing loss, monthly active Firefox users averaged about 198 million at the end of the second quarter in 2021, which is not to be sneezed at. AIf the browser is losing popularity, it probably isn’t going away anytime soon, which means there is still time for you to switch to a less common alternative if you want to keep the diversity of your range of browser options in. coming years.