Mozilla Firefox Review 2022- Is it slowly dying?

Mozilla FireFox – Introduction

Not long ago there was a time when Microsoft ruled the world of computers and Internet Explorer was king of the Internet browsers. Microsoft didn’t invest enough money in the further development of IE because the search engine business was not as lucrative back then and most of the Microsoft income was coming from directly selling windows and office. Also, Internet Explorer was getting enough users anyway, reaching 94.6% market share at its peak in 2004 so, Microsoft thought it is wise not to invest more resources in the further development of their browser. The result? People were forced to stick with an outdated, slow, horribly designed browser.

This is where Mozilla came to the rescue with their non-profit project- Mozilla Firefox. It was clean, simple, fast, safe, and modern. Microsoft still wasn’t aware of the threat. Firefox grew fast as most people were considering alternatives reaching over 31% of the market share at its peak in 2009.

Firefox has always maintained its role as a privacy-focused browser. It always leads the way among major browsers for better privacy practices. It was an early adopter of trackers blocking feature as well as DNS over HTTPS (DOH) and other privacy-oriented features.

Is Firefox Dying?

There are two types of people—one, who have never even installed Firefox and others who will never use any other browser other than Firefox. There is still a huge number of dedicated Firefox fans who love the Firefox project and will proudly recommend it to other users. This is the reason Firefox is still the #3 most used browser after Google Chrome and Safari.

After reaching its peak in 2009 with over 31% of the market share, Firefox is declining continuously as Google Chrome entered the market. As of 2020, Firefox has less than 9% of the market share compared to over 70% of Chrome.

Firefox has an extremely weak presence in smartphones. As Android comes with the preinstalled Chrome and iOS with safari, Firefox already had a serious disadvantage. Further, Firefox didn’t focus on smartphone development early on. Among major browsers, Firefox was the only smartphone browser that had full extension support but they have removed that feature with the latest version and now it only supports a limited number of them. It caused a massive backlash from firefox users and the app was flooded with one-star reviews in the Google play store. Firefox team has mentioned that support for more extensions will come in the future.

the most troubling news for Firefox is that recently, Mozilla, the non-profit organization responsible for developing the Firefox browser, has laid off 250 of its employee citing economic crises due to coronavirus. Mozilla team was already facing an economic crisis due to the declining market share.

All these scenarios point to the fact that Mozilla is having a little bit of trouble financially. However, Firefox is most likely to stay for a while, at least for desktop, as it has a very huge number of dedicated fans and the 250 employees they laid off were mostly responsible for development on smartphones. Firefox is still a decent choice for smartphones too as it has extension support and privacy features too.

Firefox Features

1. Blocks Ads trackers
2. Password Manager
3. Less Memory usage compared to Chrome
4. Extensions