Firefox is (and has been) no longer a consideration in web development because of its tiny and thus inconsequential market share.
Lest we forget, Firefox was once the market leader that usurped the position from IE6.
>they tried to rip off Chrome
The constant dumbing down and changing of the UI, removal of XUL in favor of WebAssembly (dropping Firefox extensions in favor of becoming compatible with Chrome extensions), moving to the Chrome Version Number system (we're on Firefox what again? 100? 150? 200?) to not look ancient comparatively, etc.
I'm sincerely of the opinion Mozilla should just drop Gecko and move Firefox over to being another Chrome fork. It would be far more in line with Mozilla's goals of shipping a Chrome ripoff in vain attempts to steal Chrome users.
> Firefox is (and has been) no longer a consideration in web development because of its tiny and thus inconsequential market share.
Is 7.4% of desktop users [0] inconsequential? Maybe to your business, but I think most would be sad to lose 7% of desktop users. I'll also note if this indicates "death" Safari is dead too.
I know XUL pissed off a lot of people, but I really don't think copying Chrome was the main motivation. XUL had a LOT of cruft and issues they wanted to escape and going to web extensions for some level of interoperability made sense, and looking at data from around that time [1] it doesn't appear to have cost them much of their user-base. It's also a perfect example of Firefox not copying Chrome, with Firefox supporting a ton of APIs Chrome doesn't or has removed [2].
As for the UI "copying" Chrome, I'm not sure how to respond to that. I just spun up vanilla profiles of Firefox and Chrome, and sure they both have tabs at the top, but they are pretty visually distinct. Yes Firefox has reduced the size of it's UI over the years, but if that's copying Chrome... I guess a lot of apps are.
Firefox may be in decline, and that makes me sad, but I think that has a lot more to do with shitty developers using non-standard Chrome APIs and then telling users to use Chrome when it breaks, while GMail and other Google properties cripple Firefox performance, rather than Firefox blindly copying Chrome.
Personally I hope this trend reverses. Firefox is the only thing stopping Chrome from becoming the next IE 6.
>Is 7.4% of desktop users [0] inconsequential? Maybe to your business, but I think most would be sad to lose 7% of desktop users. I'll also note if this indicates "death" Safari is dead too.
Nobody with a sane mind is going to bother spending time and resources on just 7.4% of the userbase, that's just a simple and brutal fact of reality.
I do think Safari is "dead" as a browser, it's not Chrome after all. But it's not dead dead yet, and the only reason for that is because it's the only browser on iOS which itself holds a significant minority share of the mobile space. Webdevs will support Safari not because Safari is worth paying attention to, but because iOS and its ~45%(?) market share is worth paying attention to.
>Personally I hope this trend reverses. Firefox is the only thing stopping Chrome from becoming the next IE 6.
I argue Chrome is already the second coming of IE6, and we've yet to see the second coming of Firefox. And whatever the second of coming of Firefox is, it's almost certainly not going to be anything to do with Mozilla.
Firefox is (and has been) no longer a consideration in web development because of its tiny and thus inconsequential market share.
Lest we forget, Firefox was once the market leader that usurped the position from IE6.
>they tried to rip off Chrome
The constant dumbing down and changing of the UI, removal of XUL in favor of WebAssembly (dropping Firefox extensions in favor of becoming compatible with Chrome extensions), moving to the Chrome Version Number system (we're on Firefox what again? 100? 150? 200?) to not look ancient comparatively, etc.
I'm sincerely of the opinion Mozilla should just drop Gecko and move Firefox over to being another Chrome fork. It would be far more in line with Mozilla's goals of shipping a Chrome ripoff in vain attempts to steal Chrome users.