A somewhat obscure guideline for developers of U.S. government websites may be about to accelerate the long, sad decline of Mozilla’s Firefox browser. There already are plenty of large entities, both public and private, whose websites lack proper support for Firefox; and that will get only worse in the near future, because the ’fox’s auburn paws are perilously close to the lip of the proverbial slippery slope.
The U.S. Web Design System (USWDS) provides a comprehensive set of standards which guide those who build the U.S. government’s many websites. Its documentation for developers borrows a “2% rule” from its British counterpart:
. . . we officially support any browser above 2% usage as observed by analytics.usa.gov.
At this writing, that analytics page shows the following browser traffic for the previous ninety days:
| Browser | Share |
|---|---|
| Chrome | 49% |
| Safari | 34.8% |
| Edge | 8.4% |
| Firefox | 2.2% |
| Safari (in-app) | 1.9% |
| Samsung Internet | 1.6% |
| Android Webview | 1% |
| Other | 1% |
I am personally unaware of any serious reason to believe that Firefox’s numbers will improve soon. Indeed, for the web as a whole, they’ve been declining consistently for years, as this chart shows:
Chrome vs. Firefox vs. Safari for January, 2009, through November, 2023.
Image: StatCounter.
Firefox peaked at 31.82% in November, 2009 — and then began its long slide in almost direct proportion to the rise of Chrome. The latter shot from 1.37% use in January, 2009, to its own peak of 66.34% in September, 2020, since falling back to a “measly” 62.85% in the very latest data.1
While these numbers reflect worldwide trends, the U.S.-specific picture isn’t really better. In fact, because the iPhone is so popular in the U.S. — which is obvious from what you see on that aforementioned government analytics page — Safari pulls large numbers that also hurt Firefox.
[…]
Firefox is quickly losing “web space,” thanks to a perfect storm that’s been kicked up by the dominance of Chrome, the popularity of mobile devices that run Safari by default, and many corporate and government IT shops’ insistence that their users rely on only Microsoft’s Chromium-based Edge browser while toiling away each day.
With such a continuing free-fall, Firefox is inevitably nearing the point where USWDS will remove it, like Internet Explorer before it, from the list of supported browsers.
[…]
Source: Firefox on the brink? The Big Three may effectively be down to a Big Two, and right quick.
Competition is important, especially in the world of browsers, which are our window into far and away most of the internet. Allowing one browser to rule them all leads to some very strange and nasty stuff. Not only do they no longer follow (W3C) standards (which IE and Chrome didn’t and don’t), but they start taking extreme liberties with your privacy (a “privacy sandbox” that allows any site to query all your habits!), pick on certain websites and even edit what you see, send your passwords and other personal data to third party sites, share your motion data, refuse to delete private data on you, etc etc etc
Firefox is a very good browser with some awesome addons – and not beholden to the Google or Microsoft or Apple overlords. And it’s the only private one offering you a real choice outside of the Chromium reach.
Robin Edgar
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