An anonymous reader quotes a report from It’s FOSS, written by Ankush Das: Mozilla’s Firefox is the only popular alternative to Chromium-based browsers. It has been the default choice for Linux users and privacy-conscious users across every platform. However, even with all benefits as one of the best web browsers around, it is losing its grip for the past few years. I came across a Reddit thread by u/nixcraft, which highlighted more details on the decline in the userbase of Firefox since 2018. And surprisingly, the original source for this information is Firefox’s Public Data Report.
As per the official stats, the reported number of active (monthly) users was about 244 million at the end of 2018. And, it seems to have declined to 198 million at the end of Q2 2021. So, that makes it a whopping ~46 million decline in the userbase. Considering 2021 is the year when privacy-focused tools saw a big boost in their userbase, Mozilla’s Firefox is looking at a constant decline. Especially when Firefox manages to introduce some industry-first privacy practices. Quite the irony, eh? Just for fun, here’s a timeline of our stories reporting on Firefox’s download milestones from the mid-2000s:
September 19, 2004: 1 Million Firefoxes in 4 Days
December 12, 2004: Firefox Reaches 10 Million Downloads
February 17, 2005: Firefox Breaks 25 Million Downloads
April 26, 2005: Firefox nears 50 Million Downloads
July 29, 2005: Firefox Downloads Reach 75 Million
October 19, 2005: Firefox Tops 100 Million Downloads
September 11, 2007: Firefox Hits 400 Million Downloads
July 3, 2008: Firefox Breaks 8 Million, Gets Into Guinness
Read more of this story at Slashdot.