There was a point around 10 years ago where Firefox was an exceptionally popular internet browser. Admittedly, at the time, it’s not as if consumers were exactly spoilt for choice with Internet Explorer still representing one of the most popular mainstream consumer options. And incidentally, and just for you whippersnappers, yes, there were internet browsers before Google Chrome came along to gobble all the market up.
While Firefox still remains exceptionally popular with many users, however, following a report via TechSpot, the internet browser themselves have confirmed that in just the last 3 years, they’ve lost around 46 million users taking their once 30% peak market share (back in 2009) all the way down to just over 3%.
Firefox Struggles to Battle Its Competition!
One of the biggest problems, or at least criticisms, that Firefox has faced in recent years is that while their competition has looked to provide users with more features and functionality, Firefox has largely just stagnated with fairly benign updates. It, of course, doesn’t help either that Edge and Chrome are provided on many devices by default. However, the bottom line is that while Firefox has always been something of a fringe alternative to the mainstream options, better alternatives have since come along to attract users. Browsers, for example, such as Opera and Brave (and in regards to the latter, we regularly hear good things about it from our own community).
What Does the Future Hold?
The market outside of mainstream browsers will (probably) always be small, and by proxy, highly competitive as they all fight over what is effectively a 10-15% slice of the market share pie. With this news, however, things are certainly not looking good for the long-term prospects of Firefox. Put simply, and as a former Firefox user myself, better alternatives have come along since. Hell, I’m even using the ‘new’ chromium-based Edge these days which is, incidentally, vastly superior to the original version and more than trades blows with Google Chrome.
Put simply, Firefox’s management is going to have to have a good long hard think about what their plans for the future are because unless they can start offering better features or performance than their other ‘fringe’ alternatives, we can only see that already slim market share figure dipping even more in the future!
What do you think? – Let us know in the comments!
