Mozilla Firefox ok?

At the end of 2008, Firefox was at its best. Twenty percent of the 1.5 billion people on the Internet used the Mozilla browser to navigate the web. In Indonesia, Macedonia and Slovenia, more than half of all Internet users used Firefox. “Our market share in the regions listed above grew like crazy,” Ken Kovash, then president of Mozilla, wrote on his blog. Nearly 15 years later, things are not so rosy.

On all devices, the browser’s market share is less than 4%, and on mobile it’s a measly half a percent. “Looking back five years and looking at our market share and our own numbers that we publish, there is no denying the decline,” says Selena Deckelmann, senior vice president of Firefox. Mozilla’s own statistics show a drop of around 30 million monthly active users from early 2019 to early 2022. “Over the past couple of years, we’ve seen some pretty significant smoothing,” adds Deckelmann.

In the two decades since Firefox was launched from Netscape’s shadow, it has become key to shaping online privacy and security, and staff have been pushing for greater online openness and better standards. But its decline in market share was accompanied by two layoffs at Mozilla during 2020. His lucrative search contract with Google, which accounts for most of his earnings, expires next year. A slew of privacy-focused browsers now compete in its territory, while new feature misfires threaten to alienate its base. All this has left industry analysts and former employees thinking about the future of Firefox.

His fate is also of great importance for the Internet as a whole. For years, it has been the top contender for control of Google Chrome, offering a privacy-enhancing alternative to the world’s most dominant browser. Since its release in 2008, Chrome has become synonymous with the web, with about 65 percent of all Internet users using it, and it has a huge impact on how people surf the web. When Google launched its AMP publishing standard, websites rushed to adopt it. Similar plans to replace third-party cookies in Chrome — a move that will impact millions of marketers and publishers — are taking shape in the image of Google.

“Chrome won the desktop browser war,”says one former Firefox employee who worked on the browser at Mozilla but doesn’t want to be named because he’s still in the industry. Their hopes for a Firefox revival are slim. “It’s not very reasonable for Firefox to expect it to win back even any share of the browser at this point in time.”Another former Mozilla employee, who also asked not to be named for fear of career repercussions, says: “They’ll just have to come to terms with the reality that Firefox won’t rise from the ashes.”

Mozilla and Google have a complicated relationship. While they may be competitors, they are also business partners. Every year, Google pays Mozilla hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties — reports say that amount is currently around $400 million a year — to make its search engine the default on Firefox. In its 2020 financial results, the most recent available, Mozilla listed its total revenue of $496 million, with royalties from search deals of $441 million. Firefox has other default partner search engines like Yandex search in Russia and those fees are also critical. (In addition, Google pays Apple huge sums every yearfor making it the default search engine in Safari.)

The Google-Mozilla deal was last renewed in 2020 and is expected to expire in 2023. Statistics show that Firefox’s market share has fallen by about 1 percent since the deal. The company’s own data shows that monthly active users remain stable at around 215 million. But there is no guarantee that Google will renew at the same level. Deckelmann says Mozilla does not disclose details of arrangements with its partners and declined to say whether negotiations are underway with Google. Mozilla’s 2020 financial statements say that despite the layoffs, the company is in a healthycondition and expects its 2021 financial results to show revenue growth.

However, Mozilla and Firefox recognize that in the long run they need to diversify how they make money. These efforts have intensified since 2019. The company owns Pocket to Read Later, which includes a paid premium subscription. It also launched two similar VPN-style products that people can sign up for. And the company is also paying more attention to advertising, placing ads on new tabs that open in the Firefox browser.

Mozilla’s combined subscription and advertising revenue has grown from $14 million in 2019 to $24 million in 2020, and the company says its 2021 financial results will show that new products will generate 14 percent of its revenue. This independence from Google is key to creating a “healthier”business model. However, some of these new bets have not worked out and may seem inconsistent with Firefox’s broader privacy goals. The encrypted file sharing service was shut down after being used to distribute malware. The company inserted ads into the Firefox address bar. And the less said about mid-2010s Firefox phones, the better.

The need to find new sources of income comes at a time when Firefox is facing more browser competition than ever. “Many browsers use privacy in their branding,” says Lourdes Turrecha, founder of Rise of Privacy Tech, a group that tracks privacy-focused companies. Many of Chrome’s competitors aim to stand out by not collecting data about your browsing history or tracking what you do online. Firefox, DuckDuckGo, Brave, Vivaldi, and Safari all join Tor as the most secure option, blocking tracking to varying degrees.

Firefox’s privacy credentials are about as secure as those of any of its commercial competitors. “The main thing about Firefox is its extensibility,”says Jonah Aragon, a systems administrator who also helps run the Privacy Guidelines on the recommendations website. The site, which focuses on open source software, ranks Firefox browsers highly. “There are a lot of privacy features that aren’t enabled by default, which is annoying, but at least it gives you the option to turn them on if you think you need them.”

In addition to the main Firefox browser for Android and iOS, Mozilla also uses the Focus browser, which enhances privacy protections by default. (Deckelmann says the two Firefox browsers have different use cases, and she doesn’t see apps merging into one product.) Aragon adds that while Firefox competes with other privacy-focused browsers, it wasn’t necessarily the first to introduce these features – for example, Safari blocks third-party tracking cookies by default for the first time.