00:00 Intro 00:47 Sponsor: 100$ free credit off your Linux or Gaming server 01:37 The decline of Firefox 05:20 Why that's a problem 08:13 Why is Firefox important? 11:43 How can we solve this? 13:23 Sponsor: Get your Linux laptop or desktop with Slimbook 14:23 Support the channel
There is no denying that Firefox has been progressively losing ground in the web browser race. It's highest peak was at the end of 2009, at almost 32% market share, when Internet Explorer has about 55%, and Chrome was barely edging out the 5% market share.
Fast forward to 11 years later, and Chrome now has 62.7% of the market, where Firefox only has 4.2%. How did that happen? Why did the browser that basically started the work to take IE down, that introduced tabs to the masses, and that made sure web standards were respected, why did THAT browser fall so low?
First, Mozilla completely missed the mobile market. There's also the fact that Google pushed CHROME very aggressively. Firefox also kinda rested on their laurels for a while, while Chrome worked tirelessly on their engine.
Now you might think: that's a free market. People use what's best, and if Firefox gets better, people will flock back. And while that's a possibility, as it stands, it still creates an issue.
The web relies on being open and on evolution. These evolutions, to be beneficial to everyone, need to be decided collectively, by independent organisms, supported by all browsers, and implemented freely.
What I mean is that the browser engine shouldn't control how the web runs, looks, or what it can do. The browser engine is just there to ensure that websites and webapps just run like they should.
The rise of Chrome and chromium based browsers, just like any other monopoly, turns that on its head. Developers, you see, can only implement features, if they know that their users will be able to make use of them. If everyone uses the same engine, and that engine decides to NOT implement a feature, then it's just not going to be used at all, because why make something that no user will ever be able to take advantage of?
This is a problem. Not right now, but it might become one in the future. See, Chromium is open source, as is Blink, the rendering engine used in Chromium and every browser using it. It's open source, but decisions are made by Google. In 2019, 92% of commits to the code base were made by Google employees. So let's not kid ourselves: Google has total control over what goes in and what they don't want to see in Chromium.
You might say, someone would fork chromium or Blink and start their own browser, and that would solve it. Except no one would move to that browser.
What's important isn't Firefox specifically, it's having rendering engine diversity. Having 2 or 3 engines that have almost equal market share is crucial to avoid that situation, because in that case, the one that doesn't implement a new technology doesn't hold back the whole web.
So how can we solve this? How can we make sure that Chromium doesn't start deciding how the web should run? Well, as users, apart from not using chromium based browsers, and supporting other engines financially, there isn't much we can do.
The other option would be to try and take governance of Chromium away from Google, but I don't see that happening any time soon.
Hey everyone, this is Nick, and you might have been a Firefox user, you might even currently
be a Firefox user like me, but you're in the vast minority of people.
Mostly everybody nowadays uses Chrome or a Chromium-based browser or Apple Safari.
Now any other browser on iOS is virtually Safari in disguise, so if you're using Firefox,
Chrome or whatever, Edge on iOS, you're basically using Safari but with another UI.
This decline of Firefox has been slow but steady, and it is a real problem for the open web,
a serious problem. I'm wearing a shirt, that's how serious it is, so let's see why.
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started. Now there is no denying that Firefox has been progressively losing ground in the web
browser race. Its highest peak was at the end of 2009, at almost 32% market share, when Internet
Explorer had about 55%, and Chrome was barely edging out the 5% market share. Fast forward to
11 years later, and Chrome now has 62% of the market, while Firefox only has 4.2%. How did that happen?
Why did the browser that basically started the work to take IE down, that introduced tabs to
the masses, and that made sure that web standards were respected, why did that browser fall so low?
Wokeness. That's it. Go woke, go broke. Nah, just kidding, that notion that Mozilla or Firefox
were trying to be woke or censor the web started taking root in 2020 or 2021, and basically at that
time Firefox was already at 3%, so it had literally zero impact. As a matter of fact, Firefox has been
climbing very slightly back up ever since this happened, so yeah, wokeness is not a factor.
What basically signed the death warrant of Firefox is a compound of multiple factors.
First, Mozilla completely missed the mobile market. When smartphones started becoming really
popular at the very beginning of 2009 and 2010, Firefox just didn't exist on mobile. It had Safari
on iOS and Chrome on Android, and that was it. Firefox for Android only came in early 2011,
and it only was available on iOS in November 2015. That's two to five years after people
started using these devices, and people just didn't wait around. They just used what was
provided as the default on their mobile operating system, and then they probably wanted to sync the
data from that mobile browser to their desktop, so they also moved to the desktop version of
that browser if possible. There's also the fact that Google pushed Chrome very aggressively.
Search pages displayed ads for Chrome if you visited them with another browser,
and they still do to this day. After a while, users just gave it a shot and stuck with it,
or they used a new device where Chrome was pre-installed by the manufacturer,
and they moved on from Firefox. Firefox also kind of rested on their laurels for a while,
while Chrome worked tirelessly on their engine, based on WebKit first, itself a fork of KHTML,
which was the rendering engine used by Conqueror, the KDE browser at the time,
and then on Blink, their own fork of WebKit. This engine was better in every way. It was faster,
it was more respecting of standards, it was adopting newer technology faster,
and Firefox just remained as the grandpa browser. Reliable, but just not excelling at anything
anymore. As users progressively moved to Chrome, Firefox stagnated more and more,
until they finally decided to release their Quantum update, where they caught up in terms
of performance and features. There's also the fact that Google voluntarily neutered some of
their online services on non-Chrome browsers. They implemented worse versions of features
that were supported in other browsers, just to make the experience slower or buggier,
for example on YouTube. After all that, it was hard to see Firefox as anything other than the
new IE, and people just abandoned it. And now we see the emergence of the Chromium-based browsers,
like Bray, Vivaldi, Opera or Edge, all using Google's base to make their own stuff.
And since this base is now the vast majority, developers don't test their websites on Firefox
anymore. So stuff just breaks, and people just assume it's Firefox's fault. Which it isn't,
but it also kinda is, because for the end user, the fact remains, using Firefox makes some websites
not work, and using Chrome makes stuff work. They don't care whose fault it is. You might think that
it's a free market, and that if Firefox makes things way better than in Chrome, then people
will progressively flock back to it, and it will still survive. But there are issues with that.
The web relies on being open, and it relies on evolution. These evolutions, to be beneficial to
everyone, need to be decided collectively, by independent organisms, supported by all browsers,
and implemented freely. What I mean is that the browser engine shouldn't control how the web runs,
looks, or what it can do. The browser engine is just there to ensure that websites and web apps
just run like they should. The rise of Chrome and Chromium-based browsers, just like any other
monopoly, turns that on its head. Developers, you see, can only implement features if they know
that their users will be able to make use of them. If everyone uses the same engine, and that engine
decides to not implement a feature, then it's just not going to be used at all. Because why make
something that no user will ever be able to take advantage of? Right now, all Chromium-based
browsers combined represent about 85% market share worldwide, combining mobile and desktop.
WebKit is at about 8.8%, and Firefox is at 7.7%. Yeah, I know that's not the same figure as I gave
earlier, but data sources don't seem to agree. What they agree on is that Chromium has a huge
monopoly. This is a problem. Not right now, but it might become one in the future. See, Chromium is
open source, as is Blink, the rendering engine used in Chromium, and every browser using it.
It's open source. But decisions are made by Google. In 2019, 92% of comments to the codebase were made
by Google employees. So let's not kid ourselves, Google has total control over what goes in and
what they don't want to see in Chromium. If, for example, in a few months or a few years, a great
new technology for, I don't know, NFTs or the Metaverse or any Web3-based bullshit is just
pushed on and developers want to adopt it, but it also makes tracking and ads completely irrelevant,
Google is not going to add that to Chromium. They're just going to push back against it.
And so basically, the web will not be able to use that feature because developers will just
not implement it because no users will be able to use it. You might also say someone would fork
Chromium or Blink and start their own browser, and that would solve it. Except no one would move to
that browser. Even big ones like Brave or Opera haven't much market share today. So a new entry on
the market without the firepower of a Google or a Microsoft behind it would never succeed. And then
we're back to our chicken and egg problem where no developer will implement a feature that's not
supported by the most mainstream browser, and so no user will take advantage of it, and so no other
browser has a chance to shine. So why is Firefox important then? What's important isn't Firefox
specifically, it's having rendering engine diversity. Having two or three engines that have almost equal
market share is crucial to avoid that situation because in that case, the one that doesn't
implement a new technology doesn't hold back the whole web and risks actually losing market share
to other browsers that support that feature. Developers will take the risk to create a web
app that works for 33% of worldwide users or 50%, not for under 10%. And that's where you might say
WebKit is the engine used in iPhones, iPads and Macs, so surely developers will take risks and
implement specific new features just for the iOS market, right? Sure, maybe, except WebKit is
currently the IE of rendering engines. Apple is actively refusing to implement a bunch of features
that literally everyone else has, like browser notifications or anything that could bring
progressive web apps into competition with the App Store, because money is tight. Well, no, like having
money is tight, like Apple is not short on cash at all. So right now, only Firefox has a current
rendering engine with good performance, good standard support, and the capabilities and the
brand name to regain some market share. Unless Apple decides to actually implement things developers
want to use, only Firefox can do that. Some could also argue that developers prefer having a single
rendering engine to work with, because that's much easier to test things out. And to that, I reply
Internet Explorer. IE had a complete monopoly on rendering engines for a long time, and that
rendering engine just didn't evolve. The browser UI didn't evolve and developers were raging against
it. They were stuck with old technologies because most people could just not move on, and it took
tens of years to actually make the web a more stable place where you could just use a new CSS
feature and not have to do a workaround for IE. So no, you don't want a single rendering engine.
Of course, IE also failed because the UI of the browser was bad compared to what other browsers
could offer, especially Firefox at the time with its tabs. But Google is not stupid enough to fall
into that pit. So no, a single rendering engine isn't a good option. The only way having one
dominant rendering engine being a good thing is if it's run by a really community-driven project,
not by a big company that happens to open source the code and decides what goes in or not. It needs
to be handled by a non-profit or a community that will be much more open to letting things in,
because they will have no stake in how the web enables them to make money. There is another
option though, another way out, but it's not one I would favor. See, if Google starts deciding that
things can't go in Chromium because that would hurt their revenue, another actor would have the
firepower to make things go back to a more reasonable state. That actor, unfortunately,
is Microsoft. If they decide to fork Chromium and dedicate a real team of people to this new project,
they could end up dominating the market, or at least splitting it up enough to rebalance it.
The problem with that is that Microsoft does not want to maintain their own rendering engine. They
basically abandoned two of them in the past 5 or 10 years. And second, I don't think Microsoft
would be more trustworthy than Google in terms of how they would handle a project like this.
So, how can we solve this? How can we make sure that Chromium doesn't start deciding how the web
should run? Well, as users, apart from not using Chromium-based browsers and supporting other
engines financially, there isn't much we can do. We just have to not use Chromium-based browsers
to try and rebalance things out. The problem is, most users, the general population, does not care
about this at all. They just want their websites to work, and Chromium or Chromium-based browsers
just do that. And also, they just use the default, as proven by the rapid rise of Edge. It gained like
6% market share in a few years, just because Microsoft is actively pushing it and it's
pre-installed on Windows. So yeah, just not using Chromium is not going to work.
The other option would be to try and take governance of Chromium away from Google, but I
don't see that happening anytime soon. So yeah, I'm all doom and gloom here, and I'm mostly
extrapolating, because Google hasn't done anything yet with Chromium or Blink that would endanger
the openness of the web or limit what features can actually be accessed by users. But the potential
for abuse is here. The potential for monopoly abuse is here. And Google has demonstrated again
and again that they are really willing to cross that line. They don't have a good track record
in terms of consumer friendliness, openness, and just generally not being a bad company.
So we'll just have to see what path the market takes to rebalance itself if it ever does.
But in the meantime, I'll die on that hill. I'll use Firefox or any other engine than Chromium
and Blink, and yeah, I'll still stand by it. The Chromium monopoly is terrible for the web,
for everyone on the web. But today's sponsor, on the other hand, is good for you. Slimbook
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