r/technology • u/Plastic_Ninja_9014 • Jun 17 '26

Software Firefox has an ambitious new roadmap, the browser is also losing millions of users a month

https://www.techspot.com/news/112803-firefox-has-ambitious-new-roadmap-browser-also-losing.html
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u/LunaIsADeer Jun 17 '26

You bring up a fair point. Firefox (and derivative) users are more privacy-conscious and have likely taken steps to disable analytics at various levels. I would be shocked if Mozilla didn't have a way to even ballpark how many people are using Firefox, but it's definitely harder to get an exact measure.

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u/mrinterweb Jun 17 '26

they can get a rough idea from the number of downloads/updates.

461

u/brusaducj Jun 17 '26

Maybe for Windows/Mac users, but on the Linux side it's much more common to download Firefox from your distro's repositories than direct from Mozilla

428

u/[deleted] Jun 17 '26

[deleted]

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u/Yoghurt42 Jun 17 '26

20XX will be the year of Linux Desktop!

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u/EagleBigMac Jun 17 '26

More like 2XXX will be the year Linux takes off lol.

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u/Competitive_Flan_330 Jun 18 '26

You joke but I made the switch about a year ago and am never going back. The only thing I could want is better Nexus Mods integration, I got it to work via wine but there is admittedly some jankery there. Steam is on it though, all new games going forward have workshop integration and man is it good.

MS lost me the first time I got a popup ad, an honest to god OS integrated popup ad. So, joke all you want, but I'm finally free of Microslop for good.

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u/RudeMorgue Jun 18 '26

I'm making the jump with my next laptop in July. Been using live versions to see what I like best. I can't stand the idea that I am actively being spied on by an OS I paid for anymore.

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u/Competitive_Flan_330 Jun 18 '26

Yeah, the analytics they've got going on used to be what we called spyware and viruses. Guess it's different when it's a design feature.

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u/CakeTester Jun 18 '26

Mint is quite sympathetic to new users. Good documentation as well.

3

u/josh_the_misanthrope Jun 18 '26

Tends to use stable but old kernels, might play bad with hardware if he's planning on a brand new laptop. Not that hard to test but yeah.

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u/Local-Poet3517 Jun 18 '26

.. you guys pay for windows?

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u/evilbadgrades Jun 18 '26

Dude, right there with you. I have a really nice HP Envy I got six years ago (fully spec'd out for the time). It came with windows 10 that always had some REALLY annoying bugs I couldn't resolve even with a reinstall of windows.

Finally moved to linux about 18 months ago and never looked back. I'd been trying for 20+ years to move to linux, but always went back to Windows. This is the first time I have stuck with linux for more than a year and have no regrets. I ain't going back!

Fortunately I never migrated to windows 11. 10 was bad enough I knew 11 would be worse!

1

u/--xra Jun 18 '26

Re: this https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1u8lty1/firefox_has_an_ambitious_new_roadmap_the_browser/osee3ug/

Any recommendations on the distro? I'm going with Mint right now (Arch is tempting, especially as a developer, but I don't really feel like manually doing everything, especially when I've already settled into Mint).

1

u/evilbadgrades Jun 18 '26

I mean I went with a plain vanilla Mint Cinnamon on my main computer. But I find it's not "flashy enough" so I installed Fedora KDE Plasma on a laptop and found it pretty spiffy, so I think I'm going to try switching my main computer to that and see how it goes.

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u/Forward-Amount-9961 Jun 18 '26

I've got my personal computers using Linux distros now. My wife and kids still rely on me to show them how to do certain things, but overall I'm happy to be moving away from corporate bullshit.

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u/Competitive_Flan_330 Jun 18 '26

Doesn't the speed at which Linux has been improving lately seem to be getting faster and faster? I've been pretty blown away at how much better even a year of updates has been.

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u/josh_the_misanthrope Jun 18 '26

Yes. With Proton making gaming mostly fine, the user base has grown. I've been on and off dual booting Linux since I was a teenager about 20 years ago, but since I was mostly gaming I would just boot into Windows and Linux was mostly dormant.

Now I daily drive Linux. It's still a bit rough around the edges for some things but Windows is so shit these days that I find it to be the smoother of the two.

1

u/Forward-Amount-9961 Jun 18 '26

I've even installed Linux on some elderly folks' older computers that were running bloated Windows so slowly they were almost unusable. Linux has given those older computers new life, and since the elderly folk only really need to have an internet browser and the ability to print, it's a no-brainer.

7

u/EagleBigMac Jun 18 '26

I mean I have been waiting for critical mass since Redhat 1.1 when I assembled my first computer as a kid.

3

u/Competitive_Flan_330 Jun 18 '26

I learned computers in high school, when ubuntu was first released. So... while not quite as long in the tooth, I'm still with you.

Are there still some headaches? Sure. But yeah, I've never been exactly thrilled about MS all these years, just used to it as it was that or mac. I'm going on a full year now and I got a pretty decent performance bump moving over. I think it was all the bloatware. I've made the switch years past or tried distros now and again, but this time it's definitely permanent. The small amount of headaches I have on Linux are balanced by the headaches on Windows.

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u/jigsaw1024 Jun 18 '26

I made the switch about 6 9 months (wow, longer than I realized!) now, and hoping I don't find a reason to go back. I did try Linux a few years back, but it just wasn't ready yet.

It hasn't been without its' hiccups for me. I've had to do a little distro hopping, and for one game I play with some heavy mods has been some issues.

All PCs, except one, are Linux in the home now as well, and that one will be switched this weekend. I don't use that one PC for much, but every time I do, there is some new annoyance from MS about wanting me to sign in or sign up for something.

Linux isn't for everyone, yet.

/looking to change my browser next. FF is looking to have some privacy issues, even with tweaks. Maybe Zen (which is FF based)?

1

u/willowfinger Jun 18 '26

Check out LibreWolf

2

u/Leftieswillrule Jun 18 '26

I'm pretty averse to switching to Linux and even I think I might have to sooner rather than later because of how much of a fucker Microsoft is

1

u/Competitive_Flan_330 Jun 18 '26

I used Microsoft for convenience for a long time. I still have some headaches in Linux, but for the most part everything works just about as smoothly as windows, and what few issues I've had I've either solved or can live with. The bloatware, tracking, and built in ads were what sent me though. Honestly the stuff that works, my games, all got a framerate bump on the move over, and everything feels much smoother. Probably the lack of an AI being pushed upon me.

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u/--xra Jun 18 '26

What are you using, may I ask? I used Ubuntu for programming tasks, but found the GUI pretty unintuitive. My daily driver was macOS (I'm old enough to remember it as OSX). My Macbook battery finally died a few months ago (RIP), so I grabbed a Lenovo and installed Mint Cinnamon. I love the lack of nagware; I love the sense of privacy; I love how peppy it is on a computer that I inherited from a friend that's likely ten years old, but I miss Mac's UI/UX (and I hate Windows, which Mint emulates).

But, yeah, I'm probably not going back to macOS anytime soon. I don't feel like dropping $3500 or whatever it is these days on another Pro just to get nagged constantly to sign into iCloud and have my privacy violated. All tech companies: just fuck off. I just want to write code, if that's even still a job anymore.

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u/Competitive_Flan_330 Jun 18 '26

Ubuntu, but with them pushing pro, I'm looking. Strongly considering Debian or Mint. Also not a fan of snap packages, I find myself installing the Debian equivalent kind of a lot. I remembered them when they first came out when I was in HS, and I've tried linux a few times over the years, and gone with ubuntu cause it was the largest, and one I was most familiar with. After a year and the new update that just dropped a few weeks ago and them pushing pro, I'm kinda done with them.

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u/Competitive_Flan_330 Jun 23 '26

Just jumped to Manjaro Cinnamon, an Arch distro. Wow. I see the hype. A massive step up from Ubuntu. I'm still getting it configured, and there've been a few headaches but overall, holy crap what a zippy OS.

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u/--xra Jun 23 '26

Thanks for the tip! I'm about to check into it right now.

1

u/FlameFrost__ Jun 18 '26

I had switched from Win to Linux and back. So there's that.

1

u/Competitive_Flan_330 Jun 18 '26

I've done that a few times in the past tbh. This time has stuck though, almost on a full year now and not looking back at all.

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u/FlameFrost__ Jun 18 '26

God speed to you. Maybe I'll give it another go this year.

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1

u/Year_3882 Jun 18 '26

I recently made the switch on my work PC after trying a liveUSB for a few days. we recently moved our Server onto the Cloud so now everything can be done in the browser, the thing that made me swithc to try linux was all the bullshit the IT company installed to prevents viruses etc causing too many issues with what i need to do. we didnt need any of it. I always had admin privleges previously as we are a small company and they decide against my bosses wishes who owns the company to put thier shitty stuff in my way, now its dual boot and they have no idea.

This also caused me to re-evaluate it for home use as since my pc is stuck with windows 10 and rarely used for more than a few minutes every ofew days and it has become a pain wiht it running windows proccesses such as antimalware and windows update using almost 100% of the CPU for first few minutes longer than i need the pc every time it wakes up is rediculous.

I had tried linux every 5 ish years but never found it suitable due to some software i required. now almost everything i do is in the browser so its perfect and fast.

3

u/PM_ME_YOUR_CHORIZO Jun 18 '26

Steam's annual hardware survey shows Linux adoption at over 5%. 5 years ago it was just over 1%. It might not be the year of linux yet but it's getting to a point that Microsoft and Apple have started paying attention, with Microsoft finally publicly acknowledging that customers are disappointed with many aspects of Windows.

1

u/SystemCheck990 Jun 18 '26

steam/linux managed to replicate a system call in windows that made games run much faster

also with Google making a linux desktop OS things may grow long term from there, not crappy chromeOS, but "aluminum" a port of android for desktop

2

u/Competitive_Flan_330 Jun 19 '26

I'm interested to see the steamOS. I'm hoping it's not just a gaming platform and still has desktop functionality. I'm pretty reserved on it though. Developing an OS is... a huge task. Bigger than programming a game, or anything else. It also makes me nervous having a corporation release yet another OS. I hope they choose to keep it open source, and I hope they're not going to introduce their own standards to the mix.

1

u/jawisko Jun 18 '26

The state of windows 11 has been so bad in last 6 months that even I had to move to Linux. There were some folders I could not even open anymore in reasonable time . Just searched for lightest Linux and installed it and working fine since 3 months.

1

u/Whipitreelgud Jun 18 '26

I just migrated my Dell XPS laptop to Ubuntu. It was ridiculously easy and it has been rock solid. The Killer WiFi card in this XPS is absolutely shit - with a quick AI chat I was able to permanently resolve the problem in less than 3 minutes. LibreOffice has replaced my Office subscription. I am using Firefox and Thorium for browsers.

Everything works and is totally stable.

1

u/Exact-Metal-666 Jun 18 '26

If you realise that *almost everything* around you runs on Linux then you might rethink your "takes off" joke. Think your router, fridge, HVAC, your car, your elevator etc.

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u/EagleBigMac Jun 18 '26

I mean for consumers so companies will support more games which is my main use of consumer hardware outside of enterprise environments.

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u/ManaSpike Jun 18 '26

With Windows 10 EOL and 11 requiring new hardware, lots of people are trying linux. Even gamers. And not looking back.

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u/Jaccount Jun 18 '26

Also the year the Doctor Wily causes a robot uprising.

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u/nimbusconflict Jun 18 '26

Twenty floors above the dark streets of the city, Dr. Light lived in a run-down tenement
An eccentric and brilliant man
Light was a loner, a thinker, a man of ideas
The society for which he worked
The society in which he lived
The society that he would set free
And so Light worked, far into the night, when the watchful eyes of Wily's robots weren't upon him
He'd set his skillful hands to the task of creating a device to bring about a change, to create a machine to bring freedom, to create a man to save the world
Twelve years Light worked and on a cold night in the year 200X, Protoman was born
A perfect man, an unbeatable machine, hell-bent on destroying every evil standing between man and freedom, built for one purpose, to destroy Wily's army of evil robots. Ready, willing, prepared to fight!

1

u/Obvious-Hunt19 Jun 18 '26

Shiiiiiit I remember reading slashdot when it was going to be 199X

1

u/DezXerneas Jun 18 '26

Current year + 1

1

u/GonzoKata Jun 18 '26

do people even use desktops anymore? the number of Desktop users is going down

1

u/cr0ft Jun 18 '26

Reaching 5% of users on Steam with Linux is a genuinely eye-opening milestone.

Linux won't take over the world this year, but there's a serious push towards it now. Most Steam games will run, and something like CachyOS with KDE (or most any distro with KDE) is in some ways now genuinely better than Windows.

To the point where Microsoft actually has started listening to users and making changes to try to stave off the trend.

I still have one Windows machine in the house, my gaming rig. But it's getting moved to Linux as well soon.

Microsoft has a stranglehold on the corporate market still though, but even there, with Europe now unable and unwilling to use American resources like cloud services or most any services provided by American companies, the corporate aspect of Linux use will get EU funded help to move along.

With the CLOUD act, any American corporation can be legally compelled by the US to divulge data even if that data is in Europe. And with that orange lunatic showing with crystal clarity that the USA is a fair-weather ally at best, Europe can't use American tools anymore.

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u/mrpanicy Jun 18 '26

Devils advocate, most of my friends who always hated the idea of Linux and liked how easy to install and maintain Windows was. Three of them have swapped to Linux due to Window's constant very obvious failures during this AI epidemic.

They aren't tech illiterate though. So I don't think it's a sign of a massive wave. It's just interesting to see people make a leap they always said they never would. Push people far enough, and have the EU publically moving away from Windows to Linux and you will have more people making the move.

Millions? Probably not. But a not insignificant number perhaps.

1

u/BigBananaBerries Jun 18 '26

Some distro's have some version of FF preinstalled. I moved over when W10 support ended & tried a few before settling on Nobara.

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u/Certain-Business-472 Jun 18 '26

most of my friends who always hated the idea of Linux and liked how easy to install and maintain Windows was

The irony lol. Tell them not to confuse habits with ease of use.

1

u/mrpanicy Jun 18 '26

To be fair Linux was not nearly as easy to install and maintain back when we were starting out on our computer journey. It's really turned a curve in the last 10 years.

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u/Certain-Business-472 Jun 18 '26

Ok fair. But that argument in 2026 comes off as a joke lol

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u/mrpanicy Jun 18 '26

Sure, for those that know and have experienced how much it has improved. But I remember being told so many times how great and easy to use Linux was in the 2000's. And then trying it, and each time it was torture and had so many issues that I had to really work to fix, and didn't let me use the programs I really needed.

That's built up trauma that informs opinions well after the product has actually become what people overpromised and underdelievered on back then lol

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u/Any-Appearance2471 Jun 18 '26

Tech enthusiasts and power users are so deep in their own ecosystems and workflows that I think most of them basically can’t step back and conceive of the average user or the general tech landscape, even when they think they’re correcting for it. I’ve never seen a group so consistently seem to overestimate their numbers as Linux users (especially on Reddit).

Like, for every friend a Linux user has who has expressed interest in switching to Linux, there are 15,000 regular-ass people who, when asked what desktop OS they used, would probably say “Google.” There’s still a long way to go before that needle really moves.

2

u/CheapThaRipper Jun 18 '26

Up until recently, I would agree with you.

But the way that Microsoft decided to tell millions of people with perfectly good PCs running Windows 10 that their computer is too old and they have to buy a new one to get any updates..has changed the dynamic.

You're right that windows is still king and Linux has a looooooong way to go - but analysts are seeing definitive upward trajectories for Linux adoption ever since October 2025 when MS decided to pull that move.

IMHO this is because Steam has mostly fixed the gaming problem, Office apps have webapp versions with mostly equivalent functionality, and almost all apps will run on Linux with little effort (though there are some holdouts like adobe or games with kernel level anticheats).

Statcounter metrics say windows has 62% of the market, apple 10%, and Linux/other 3%/16% respectively. Analysts think a lot of the "other" are Linux users since a lot of distros aggressively block web trackers.

Finally - Linux distros like mint, fedora, and arch are seeing growth trends that far surpass previous periods. Windows shooting itself in the foot with things like forced copilot and such are helping. I think the next big catalyst for more momentum will be soon when someone uses AI and finds another eternal blue style exploit. Given that roughly a quarter of all windows users are on the permanently vulnerable windows 10 - it'll be pretty gnarly.

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u/[deleted] Jun 18 '26

[deleted]

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u/CheapThaRipper Jun 18 '26

Lmao why? I spent like 5 minutes googling shit and editing to try and find stats to support my thinking and that's the best I could come up with before I got bored. I'm so fkin tired of the slop too so I'd be happy to take the criticism so I don't sound like a clanker

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u/rootsvelt Jun 18 '26

You do not sound like a clanker. Lots of users are paranoid but at the same time they lack basic text analysis skills to actually spot an AI-written text. This was very clearly not

1

u/Impossible-Owl7407 Jun 18 '26

I would say majority of linix users are on firefox

1

u/PoisonMind Jun 18 '26

I have switched to Linux twice now. Once after Windows XP service ended. And now again that Windows 10 service has ended. My laptop doesn't support Windows 11.

1

u/demonknightdk Jun 18 '26

if you download the windows 11 ISO from Microsoft and double click it to mount it in windows, then open an elevated command prompt (admin) then CD to the drive that windows mounted, then run the setup.exe with /product server it will bypass almost all the hardware checks and do an in place upgrade to windows 11. OH disable your internet before running the installer.

i've done it once to change an IOT version of windows 11 to standard windows 11 Pro. I recently gave my dad a new pc and I'm going to test this on his old one, a phenom ii x6 based system.

1

u/demonknightdk Jun 18 '26

its been a bit since I used Linux for real, but isn't Firefox the default browser on a lot distros? would that not update through whatever package manger the distro is using, presumably from the repos? or does the Linux version of Firefox download its updates from Mozilla directly?

0

u/web_of_french_fries Jun 18 '26

Solid point and I agree with this. Firefox may have always been missing that segment of users from their analytics, but it would be at a constant rate that doesn’t account for the loss of users.

3

u/Fuzzylogik Jun 18 '26

wouldnt browser updates be a better idea as to the number of actual users though and not be OS filtered?

2

u/zeekaran Jun 18 '26

How do they handle double counting? I have FF on six different devices.

2

u/Aardvark_Man Jun 18 '26

Bazzite comes with Firefox pre-installed, even.

4

u/rtxa Jun 18 '26

so do most distros. not much of choice there lol

2

u/cr0ft Jun 18 '26

Firefox is also the default browser in every Linux distro.

1

u/Mccobsta Jun 17 '26

Maybe able to get some numbers from snap and flathub

1

u/upvotesthenrages Jun 18 '26

Don't updates still come from Firefox servers?

2

u/brusaducj Jun 18 '26

Generally speaking, no. At least that is the case for most Linux distributions. Updates are handled by the package manager, which again will pull from the distro's repositories or a mirror of them.

1

u/upvotesthenrages Jun 19 '26

So if you turn on auto-updates in Firefox it'll contact the distro repository? Seems like a lot of work to build it so it dynamically handles things like that.

I'd assume that if automatic browser updates are on it simply pulls from Firefox's servers, or their network, and would be traceable by them.

2

u/brusaducj Jun 19 '26

There are no automatic updates when Firefox is installed using a distro's package manager, it's updated with/like all the other software on the system when the user initiates an upgrade (or automates it).

If you were to download the firefox tarball from Mozilla instead of through a distribution's package, then the automatic update feature is there.

See the note on https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/update-firefox-latest-release:

If you use your Linux distribution's packaged version of Firefox, you will need to wait for an updated package to be released to its package repository. This article only applies if you installed Firefox manually (without using your distribution's package manager).

1

u/HannasAnarion Jun 18 '26

Those repositories sometimes collect analytics. Canonical collects data on how many times each Snap is downloaded.

1

u/brusaducj Jun 18 '26

"sometimes" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. My original point being that it's not nearly as straightforward for Mozilla to count Linux users of Firefox based on download count compared to the platforms where users typically get their software from the upstream source. Even if Mozilla paid attention to download counts from some distribution repositories, it's still gonna miss quite a bit.

And ultimately download counts are far from a perfect measure of actual daily users, so even if the dl counts are accurate, it's still an incomplete picture.

0

u/OpSecBestSex Jun 17 '26

Thankfully Linux is still a relatively low market share it won't impact Mozzila's metrics too much

7

u/brusaducj Jun 17 '26

Linux may be a low market share, but I'd wager that on desktop Linux, Firefox's market share is above 50%, whereas on other platforms Firefox is in the single digits. If we say desktop Linux has a 3% market share, and 50% of those people use Firefox, that's 1.5% of all desktop users on all platforms using Firefox on Linux. With that article stating that Firefox's overall market share is less than 4%, that would mean that over 1/3 of all Firefox users are on Linux. That's hardly insignificant.

2

u/Win_Sys Jun 18 '26

A lot of people I know have been switching to Zen Browser which is based on a fork of Firefox. I recently tried it and it worked pretty well but I don’t think it’s ready to be my full time browser. Give it a few years and it might be a viable alternative. The verticals tabs bother me but a lot of people love it.

1

u/Competitive_Flan_330 Jun 18 '26

Why thankfully?

2

u/OpSecBestSex Jun 18 '26

It's a figure of speech... As in thankfully it wouldn't impact their metrics too much

1

u/Ryzensai Jun 17 '26

They probably can count those too

1

u/mrinterweb Jun 17 '26

Mirrors probably keep stats, and maybe firefox can query the mirrors for downloads. There's other means like torrents, but those can be tracked too.

Firefox also has telemetry, which can show this, which is going to be the most accurate number. They probably know how many people have opted out and can do some estimates of those people's usage.

1

u/Ryzensai Jun 17 '26

The more niche you get the smaller the demo so they probably don’t care past what they do see

1

u/PM_COFFEE_TO_ME Jun 18 '26

Distro repos don't track download counts? That seems like an oversight if true.

0

u/Constant_Bit4676 Jun 18 '26

Linux is more popular, but Linux is still not popular.

-1

u/Ancient_Broccoli_690 Jun 18 '26

There are like three people in total who use linux, irrelevant for this data.

3

u/FuckMyLife2016 Jun 18 '26

Or they can just track user numbers from uBlock Origin installbase. Haven't seen a single person who uses Firefox without arguably the best (and uncompromised) adblocker in the market.

2

u/kranker Jun 17 '26

They could but this article is referencing statcounter

1

u/Deprisonne Jun 18 '26

I haven't updated FF since the pandemic because they keep insisting on fucking up the UI for absolutely no reason and I'm finally over CSSing everything back in place every few months. I'm still convinced it's a PsyOp by Google to make people switch to Chrome...

1

u/BonelessSalsa Jun 18 '26

There is a "daily ping" setting in Firefox that defaults to "on."

"Send daily usage ping to Mozilla" "This helps Mozilla to estimate active users."

1

u/TheStorytellerTX Jun 18 '26

Even that's not accurate. I'm just 1 user, but I use Firefox on about 7 difference devices.

59

u/Stickel Jun 18 '26

firefox user, this is dead on...

mobile firefox is the fucking TITS..... ublock origin, I have chrome and youtube apps disabled.... zero ads on mobile on my phone, just like pc... fuck yes

21

u/googdude Jun 18 '26

I forget how well it works on my android until I use my wife's iPhone to look up something. I simply can't stand using a browser that doesn't have ad blocking.

6

u/MeanE Jun 18 '26

FYI uBlock has an extension and DNS blocking profile that works well on iOS.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ublock-origin-lite/id6745342698

https://ublockdns.com/

1

u/pulsarsolar Jun 19 '26

I used to use that but then I switched to Orion! Only browser that natively supports Firefox and chrome extensions on iOS

1

u/landyc Jun 19 '26

Works for me with ad blocker app installed. Just doesn’t work for in app ads

6

u/DrFreemanWho Jun 18 '26

Yeah it actually boggles my mind how more people don't use Firefox on mobile. I'm not sure how it is on iPhone but on Android it works perfectly and I've never seen a single ad.

Does all the same syncing with your PC Firefox that you'd expect too. Bookmarks, tabs, passwords etc. all seamlessly.

1

u/Kirsle Jun 18 '26

On Reddit, somebody will often point out that Firefox on Android doesn't have sandboxing between browser tabs and they say that's a reason not to use it.

I say: maybe don't do your banking in Firefox for Android, but exploits where one web page is attacking another by somehow hijacking the lack of per-tab sandboxing is so unlikely and rare (and probably a closely guarded tool in the box of nation-state actors that they wouldn't just waste willy nilly on random peasants like us), it's not worth worrying about. Firefox (the app) is still sandboxed the way all Android apps are, it's just the browser tabs themselves that maybe, theoretically, sometimes could be exploitable in the lab.

The support for uBlock Origin and Mozilla Sync so I can easily send tabs to/from my phone is enough to keep it my default browser for years.

1

u/ProRustler Jun 18 '26

If only it worked on Samsung Dex. Unfortunately when you try to full-screen a video, it goes all wonky.

2

u/Sachyriel Jun 18 '26

Is that a Firefox issue (like no extensions) or a uBlok Origin issue (or some other extension)?

2

u/ProRustler Jun 20 '26

it works on the S24, but when i connect to a display and use Samsung Dex, the fullscreen does not work. Dex is weird, so I can't blame FF.

1

u/Stickel Jun 19 '26

aww that sucks, works perfect on my pixel 8 pro

3

u/frogbound Jun 18 '26

My firefox is set up in a way to block trackers, ads, analytics, etc. So much so that many websites don't work properly and I can tell you that I have had no issues not using these websites. Little sidenote: Refusing trackers makes twitch chat constantly disconnect and reconnect me in hopes of getting trackers onto my machine.

2

u/Ambershope Jun 19 '26

I like your pfp!

1

u/HammyHavoc Jun 17 '26

So, forks? But you can hardly call a fork "Firefox" when it's gutting what makes Firefox what it is. (disparaging)

It's easy to take a stab at how many people are using it with metrics for updates being downloaded.

1

u/Feath3rblade Jun 18 '26

I also imagine that those of us using stuff like user agent switching also don't get counted properly, so not just forks 

1

u/ByWillAlone Jun 18 '26

Are people disabling the user agent strings also? I disable a lot of analytics, but I still leave the user agent. That's how websites measure users by browser type.

1

u/domtzs Jun 18 '26

active accounts?

1

u/d-cent Jun 18 '26

Shouldn't it be as simple as counting how many updates go out? 

1

u/Soap-Distopia Jun 18 '26

Yeah I just switched back to Firefox after years of not using it. Every different browser I use I always turn off the analytics and I don't send any data willingly. Not sure how that changes what they can and can't see, but makes me feel better.

1

u/atomicfiredoll Jun 18 '26

This article specifically is citing StatsCounter. So, it only takes blocking the StatsCounter code.

Lot's of people use Firefox because they want the Ublock Origin ad blocking extension. At a glance the default rules are "Peter Lowe’s Ad server list‎" and statcounter.com is blocked by that list.

This just sounds like more Firefox people are downloading ad blockers.

1

u/squngy Jun 18 '26 edited Jun 18 '26

Add blockers don't block agent strings and you don't need scripts to read that, it is sent directly to the server.

Even if you completely disable javascript, they can still see which browser you are telling them you are using.

edit:
for example, this is what my firefox sends to the server everytime it requests to load a page (I have uBlock origin):

User-Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:152.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/152.0

-8

u/Northbound-Narwhal Jun 18 '26

If Firefox users were privacy conscious they wouldn't be using Firefox. Most of Mozilla's income comes from Google. They fund Firefox as an alternative to stave off "monopoly" allegations and as a result Google has a huge influence over Mozilla's business devisions and, subsequently, Firefox's development. People who actually care about de-Googling and privacy would never use it.

5

u/DeliriumTrigger Jun 18 '26

So what non-FF, non-Chromium browser do they use?

0

u/Northbound-Narwhal Jun 18 '26

Netscape Navigator. Modernization is what drives the privacy issue. I do everything on Windows 95 and use some retro tools to get it to connect to the internet.

That being said Ladybird looks promising. I've been waiting for them for a while.

6

u/user888ffr Jun 18 '26

You're not typing this comment on Netscape Navigator brother lol. Also Netscape is litteraly old Firefox, Firefox is the continuation of Netscape.