It doesn't particularly matter whether or not the figure is accurate in that context. Maybe that can be fixed easily by having Firefox contextually relax tracking a bit or by having the government change how they perform the tracking, but the status quo is not really sustainable. And that's really all the article is saying at the end of the day.

On top of that, said lack of knowledge is a stated goal of all privacy-focused browsers. GA-blindness is an implementation detail of these policies. Any method the government could use to accurately track that information is effectively a bug in need of fixing from the POV of the browser's developers.

The most practical answer is, as was posted by someone else here, the government spec'ing to a standard instead of a set of browsers, which it really should be doing in the first place. The mere fact that the current setup means that the government accidentally makes and/or breaks winners in that space is justification enough.

The government doesn't design roads to conform to the top brands of cars and trucks. It specs them to a standard and any manufacturer can have their product certified as compliant. This both protects the public and gives anyone an opportunity to provide products no matter how small their market share is. Doing it the other way around would be madness, and I don't see why the same principle shouldn't apply here.

This is exactly why sites should be tested for their conformance with the standard rather than with specific browsers. Testing against specific browsers just encourages browser-makers to continue to avoid fixing their shit.

When people complain that they can't submit their DMV forms (or whatever) and you say, "well we followed all the standards, go find another browser" and they say "which one" and you say "I don't know, we didn't test with any browsers, we just test against the standard" who do you think they'll blame?

Is it really a standard if the dominant vendor just ignores the standard and does what it wants because then it becomes the "actual standard" ?

As a (terrible) example, look at FIPS. The government has the power to mandate a standard that everyone needs to implement. If instead of "supporting specific browser vendors" they "support a specific standard" then all vendors have a target that works with an agreed upon common ground.

Plenty of standards are guidelines. The point is the website’s purpose trumps dogmatic adherence to a standard. If the site works against standards but not in the browser, it’s a failure.

Basically, no proprietary features whatsoever. No draft features. No optionally-supported standard features without a fallback that fully covers the same underlying use case.

This would be beneficial guidance for browser developers, but also for anyone developing government sites. Saying "whatever chrome is doing is our standard" is a cop out.

If you want test that you are adhering to a standard (if there is no testsuite available) you need to test against more than 2 independent implementations.

USDS serves basic pages and applets which work fine on Firefox. It is only a handful of very complex web apps like Photopea where the developer will say "run this on Chrome for best results".

The most recent example I've run into is Snapchat's web client: It reject's Firefox purely by user agent string, but then works perfectly in Firefox if you just have your browser lie.

Speaking of Google, won't this interfere with their "look we're not a monopoly" payments to Mozilla Corp?

They really should be hiring a pollster to ask people which browser they use. It might be a bit difficult for those who use the default, but it wouldn't be that difficult to ask a couple of followup questions (e.g. which device) to determine which default browser that is.

And they're involved with the Department of Education, although I couldn't find out exactly what they built.

They did help change over the old va.gov to the new va.gov (which was built as vets.gov), which imo has been a huge improvement.

(There are still many, many problems with the VA and its website. Just saying that 1. the new va.gov is a big improvement and 2. the USDS is far from being a single point of responsibility for it, or even _the_ major point of responsibility)

We also helped with design and infrastructure support for ssa.gov (launched earlier this year) with a contractor team to try to boil down 60,000 pages to ~30 pages that people tend to use.

// opinions of a former USDS, no longer with the team

Can you elaborate on what in particular on the VA site that causes serious harm to the people it's meant to serve? I'm happy to bring it to the team or if you don't feel comfortable with stating it here, please bring it up to the open source website for va.gov. https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/vets-websi...

I think it's been the case for a good 10 years.

It works fine, of course

The browser support is currently listed at https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/technology/designing-for-d... . The mention of 2% is specific to IE11, so I guess this was special-cased at some point.

So, the default position of the government is, "If we can't surveil you, we can't help you?" (Or taken the other way, you want us to help you? Let us surveil you!) This seems to be how it works out in practice, just because of favorable economics in mass surveillance. Example: RFID and license plate readers for toll collection. Various registrations with government agencies are another example.

If Mozilla can't even play this card, then they should really just shut down.

Or, maybe, like Wikpedia, they should stop begging for more-more-more, and spend what they get wisely.

Not to mention, they could simply start bug bounties and/or crowdfunding for actual deliverables and/or services (ie. a security team).

And if all this fails, then it fails. Maybe we'll simply get a Firemium or Chromefox/fix whatever the name. A fork where adblock works.

No browser deserves special treatment here. And this is as true for Firefox as it is for Lynx.

Completely disagree. Privacy is a 4th ammendment right, so the government has a duty to support privacy first browsers. How am I "secure in my ... papers and effects" if I must use a privacy destroying browser to interact with the Government? If anything, chrome support is what should be questionable.

To say "we are going to support a browser with 2% market share because we like it more" would therefor be a really big deal. I think a far better avenue would be for the government to provide funding for privacy technologies directly, in an effort to increase their marketshare, and thereby making support of those technologies trivial to justify without any potential issues of bias.

The thing is, the government already does this. The majority of TOR's funding comes from the USG, for example. I'd suggest that maybe the government could fund Mozilla's non profit, to a degree.

This is all based on a premise that Mozilla is worthy of that funding. Is Mozilla really the privacy champion that it touts itself as? Would funding be contingent on anything else? If the government is so determined to prioritize privacy, why not Brave? Or some other entity? Or a new entity?

My understanding is that the consequence is denial of the right to privacy is limited to women while they are pregnant. Not a categorical denial of the right to privacy.

> The final decision was little changed from the leaked draft. Writing for the five-justice majority (with Chief Justice Roberts concurring only in the judgment), Justice Samuel Alito argued that the right to privacy is not specifically guaranteed anywhere in the Constitution. When unenumerated liberty rights exist — the right to raise your child as you see fit, for example — those rights must be “deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition.” Reviewing the history of abortion restrictions in the early United States, Alito concluded that the right to abortion is not.

> The opinion ignited a firestorm of controversy. Predictably so: Dobbs is arguably the first case to formally rescind a fundamental constitutional right. The opinion also failed to explain how its logic would not also result in the overturning of Griswold’s right to contraception or a series of other cases that rely on the same logic as Roe. These include Lawrence v. Texas (2003), which invalidated laws criminalizing same-sex intimate sexual conduct, and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), which recognized the right to marriage for same-sex couples.

Naturally this enforced competition wasn't in Google's interests as its browser became dominant and it adopted the infamous Microsoft strategy to deal with the threat. Apparently we're fast approaching the extinguish phase.

The correct solution to this is for influential public bodies not to insist upon supporting any specific browser or browsers but instead to once again support open web standards and therefore free access to their information and services for all.

This is almost certainly in their own interests anyway. Google has a nasty habit of suddenly killing off its non-standardised extensions. Relying on functionality that other browsers don't necessarily support as well seems unwise.

How do you think WiFi devices work together? Is it because WiFi is a standard? Not really - it's because WiFi vendors all test their chips against other WiFi chips on the market.

Typically the cost of fixing the problem and going through the whole certification process again from the start is significant. There are some direct financial costs but mostly the damage is increased time to market. That's a great incentive for the maker to get their act together and comply with the standards like everyone else as quickly as possible. If you screw up too many times your product might be obsolete before you're ever allowed to sell it.

Not the kind of standards we are talking about.

Three is not a plethora.

Blink engine, Webkit engine, Gecko engine. Three.

That 2% kind be breached, but the data doesn't accurately represent usage if Firefix is blocking GA in any meaningful numbers.

Looking at browser usage data from GA when Firefox specifically blocks it quite often is useless.

Nepotism and bias aren't the alternative here. If you require that decisions are driven by data and you don't have access to accurate data, you should default to doing nothing. If anything, nepotism and bias sneak in when decisions are made despite the fact that no accurate data is avaliable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement

It seems like a pretty bit conflict of interest when the #1 money source for Firefox comes from Firefox's only real competitor.

Neglect would be a step up. It feels like they are actively trying to antagonize existing users.

This seems to be all that most software developers can do these days.

It would be best for the future of Firefox if they don't.

The default is Standard. It doesn’t block GA. The cynic in me suggests they decided making Firefox disappear altogether from popular stats by default would have harmed them more than not doing it harms their users, or that the backlash would be too great for their liking.

Sources like Google Analytics and Statcounter are still chronically undercounting minority browsers and platforms, which are much more likely to block these sorts of things, and Firefox and Linux will be particularly heavily hit, but I’m sure the difference it makes isn’t as large as I’d like it to be.

https://www.npr.org/2023/09/12/1198558372/doj-google-monopol...

And how could Firefox possibly complete against default browsers? Is it even worth the investment?

It was so slow, it was unusable; even the first Android devices running on underpowered hardware were speed champions in comparison. Looking for an Whatsapp launcher was beyond the patience of even dedicated fans.

Sent from my Librem 5.

Safari is _really_ good and a very high bar to catchup to, even if you don't have to implement the rendering engine and Mozilla is not exactly known for their friendly and refined UIs. Vivaldi on iOS is much younger by comparison and looks a lot better than Firefox.

I disagree. For the purposes of this conversation, I feel like it's the only thing that matters. The web doesn't benefit at all from a WebKit-based browser by Mozilla capturing some of the iOS marketshare. Websites will still have to cater to WebKit. Not Gecko or something new

> Mozilla is not exactly known for their friendly and refined UIs

I actually strongly prefer the Firefox app's UI to safari

I believe it matters because it shows Mozilla's ability to market their product (Firefox). If they continuously fail to capture user base on any platform, then what powers Firefox is of little consequence.

As an experiment, I just installed Firefox on iOS just to see what's up and honestly 4 screens of things to confirm before I even get to the browsing part? As a tech person I understood each of them of course, but no sane person would put 4 screens in a row blocking users from using an app they normally already know how top use. So no, I don't believe Mozilla has the required UI/UX skills.

Apple sets the rules, gets special access (new releases, features, platform changes, countless other things), and relentlessly captures their users into the Apple ecosystem/moat. You seem to think swapping the rendering engine is a trivial task but you're asking them to practically create a new browser. And for all that effort, you're still competing with an opponent that's basically cheating. I'm not sure why Firefox/iOS even exists, frankly.

The decline has already been happening since around 2010 without any drastic ups or downs.

GoAccess puts Firefox at 7.8% and Google Analytics at 3.3%.

GoAccess puts Chrome at 57% and Google Analytics at 73%.

For non-nerd populations, these numbers seem high.

There is an Android app that uses a webview so that even favours Chrome. Also GoAccess doesn't unfortunately filter all scrappers/bots and most of them declare themselves as Chrome.

A sizeable part of the traffic is (non-app) Android and I don't think Firefox is huge there so maybe on desktop Firefox market-share is actually not as bad as we think?

Ours:

Chrome 37.4% Firefox 24.7% Safari 21.1% Edge 7.5% Opera 2.6%

GA:

Chrome 39.3% Safari 31.5% Firefox 11.9% Edge 9.9% Samsung Internet 2.9%

For us, GA is undercounting FF by almost 13 percentage points, over 50%.

> this is Germany, generally far higher FF usage

But the interesting part is not how much FF has here, but how much GA undercounts it.

because google is using a near monopoly on analytics to bury a competitor in another segment

Might also be useful to have a plug-in to make a daily 'ping'/check-in from FFox to any govt sites used by their users. E.g., I use USPS and SBA/SBIR sites, but only occasionally or monthly, but if most FFox users who did so got logged more like daily instead of ~fortnightly or ~monthly, it'd improve the numbers. (Obviously, also must be done carefully so as to not get wholesale discounted).

The cascade effect of the US Govt abandoning support would be catastrophic, likely terminal, which would be bad for everyone.

That would be backwards

The main reason to use FF is the privacy protections

I find it very frustrating they do not get more recognition for the work they do on that front

Truth of the situation is probably worse. We are losing users faster than anticipated.

The desktop is virtually dead for any "normal" user, and their Android or Apple tablet/phone don't prompt them with a choice (other vendor constraints notwithstanding). It's not remotely a fair fight. You are guaranteed to lose users for reasons totally outside your control.