Is Firefox as popular as it used to be? A decline in the Firefox market share has proven its loss of user share. Learn why by reading our overview here.

Browsers take long-term data statistics very seriously, as it is a measure of their success in the internet browser market. The popular and widely used browsers today are considered to be Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera.

In the past year, Mozilla Firefox’s desktop user share has dropped by a significant 34% and since April 2010, dropped down to a total of 54%.

In recent months and years, Mozilla’s Firefox has continued to lose user share due to other widely used internet browsers gaining popularity. The Firefox browser has dropped to the lowest numbers in the browser market share since its initial release back in 2004 when Internet Explorer had already captured most of browser market.

Less people are using the Firefox browser and they’re increasingly reporting issues related to its use. For instance, there are now fewer browser users discussing bugs and fixes on blogs and forums than ever before. This has led to more problems for Mozilla Firefox.

The rise and fall of user share

Browser wars as depicted by Galit Weisberg.

Let’s look at the rise and fall of user share regarding Mozilla Firefox browser and compare it to other popular browsers.

February saw Mozilla Firefox’s user share on desktop platforms to be down to 18.2%, which was down half a percentage from the previous month.

According to Computerworld, if the trend of losing market share continues at the same rate, this could mean that Firefox would go under 8% by this coming October based on both mobile and desktop users being at a low 9.8%, which is 3.4% down from when they first recorded statistics in July 2014.

Mobile Device Browsers

Since the introduction of smartphones that have been made widely available to the consumer market, users are also accessing the internet on their mobile devices. The drop in user share for Firefox appears to correlate with the increased use of mobile devices. Not even their combined numbers of desktop and mobile device users can make up for this loss in market share.

This is despite having a mobile web browser available on smartphone devices, such as for Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android devices.

According to Computerworld’s records, February’s mobile share usage was less than seven-tenths of 1%.  Google’s Chrome browser has been the biggest beneficiary of the loss of user share suffered by Firefox.

With Chrome being a popular browser choice on mobile platforms, this has helped their share flourish on the overall market. According to Net Applications’ statistics, Chrome along with the former Android browsers it has replaced, takes up a massive share of the market with 41.5%.

Mozilla committed to evolve their services

As Mozilla is focusing on their cloud service to offer an improved browsing experience for mobile and desktop browser users. They have also signed a five year contract with Yahoo to make its search engine a default one for Firefox browser in the United States.

In regards to a snapshot of the current market share for browsers, the order of popularity from highest to lowest includes Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Safari, Mozilla Firefox and Opera.

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