Technology

37746 readers

834 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

201

The fall of Firefox: Mozilla's once-popular web browser slides into irrelevance (www.zdnet.com)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

184 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Article seems pretty flawed. Relevance is a vague metric, and the author relies pretty heavily on data related to government site visitation, which seems subject to bias toward certain types of users.

Market share is likely still incredibly low, but Firefox's relevance should be spiking right now due to Google's shenanigans with Chromium. The fact that like 90% of revenue for its for-profit wing is from Google is still troubling.

Any alternative views out there?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 15 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

Cold plain metrics can easily hide social complexity.

Assume 10 investigative journalists use modded privacy-friendly Firefox for year long investigation. Then their report is read by 10 million average news reader on stock browsers like Chrome. Network logics tell us that Firefox browser has asymmetrical value in the ecosystem than plain usage metrics can ever reveal.

The obsession with numbers (the more the better) is a major blinding effect in societies driven by hierarchical cultures.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

The obsession with numbers (the more the better) is a major blinding effect in societies driven by hierarchical cultures.

So true!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Usage numbers are part of how they pay for ongoing support and development though.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Sadly, yes. One would hope the more core sectors use it, the more the general population would use such tools. But alas!