A recent article about Firefox caused a lot of discussion . The author says that Firefox is on the verge of becoming obsolete soon.
Source https://www.brycewray.com/posts/2023/11/firefox-brink/
The article mentioned that according to the U.S. Government Website Development Guidelines ( US Web Design System , USWDS), if Firefox’s market share is less than 2% (refer to the statistical usage of analytics.usa.gov ), then the U.S. Government website can no longer be used. Compatible with Firefox.
In the past 90 days, Chrome accounted for 49% of the browsers that visited analytics.usa.gov , Safari accounted for 34.8%, Edge 8.5%, and Firefox only 2.2% - very close to the critical point. If Firefox loses support for US government websites, this could have a ripple effect throughout the web development community. Because the government's decision will affect countless companies, just like dominoes falling, more and more websites will follow suit and be incompatible with Firefox, causing Firefox to be on the verge of elimination.
Someone may ask; "So what if government websites are not compatible with Firefox? This is only a measure against the US government and will not affect any other websites." But the author believes:
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Once Firefox falls below the 2% threshold in the government's visitor analytics, USWDS will tell government website developers that they no longer need to support Firefox.
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After the news comes out, not only the front-end development community, but also the enterprise IT departments where some web developers work will quickly learn about it. Many businesses have extensive business dealings with the government, so any government initiatives in IT will affect businesses.
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Businesses will see this change as an opportunity to reduce development costs and shorten delivery times , as it provides an excuse to remove some tests (and in rare cases specific code) from the development workflow.
The figure below clearly shows the changes in the market share of the three browser giants from 2009 to 2023. Firefox reached a peak of 31.82% in November 2009, and has continued to decline since then.
