For years, it was the best contender for keeping Google Chrome in check, offering a privacy-forward alternative to the world’s most dominant browser. Its fate also has larger implications for the web as a whole. All of that has left industry analysts and former employees concerned about Firefox’s future. A spate of privacy-focused browsers now competes on its turf, while new-feature misfires have threatened to alienate its base.
Next year, its lucrative search deal with Google-responsible for the vast majority of its revenue-is set to expire. But its market share decline was accompanied by two rounds of layoffs at Mozilla during 2020. In the two decades since Firefox launched from the shadows of Netscape, it has been key to shaping the web’s privacy and security, with staff pushing for more openness online and better standards. “In the last couple years, what we've seen is actually a pretty substantial flattening,” Deckelmann adds.
Mozilla’s own statistics show a drop of around 30 million monthly active users from the start of 2019 to the start of 2022. “Looking back five years and looking at our market share and our own numbers that we publish, there's no denying the decline,” says Selena Deckelmann, senior vice president of Firefox. Almost 15 years later, things aren’t so rosy.Īcross all devices, the browser has slid to less than 4 percent of the market-on mobile it’s a measly half a percent. “Our market share in the regions above has been growing like crazy,” Ken Kovash, Mozilla’s president at the time, wrote in a blog post.
In Indonesia, Macedonia, and Slovenia, more than half of everyone going online was using Firefox. Twenty percent of the 1.5 billion people online were using Mozilla’s browser to navigate the web. At the end of 2008, Firefox was flying high.
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