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Credit to Author: Matt Burgess| Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2022 12:00:00 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n Matt Burgess<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories<\/a>.<\/p>\n To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories<\/a>.<\/p>\n At the end<\/span> of 2008, Firefox was flying high. Twenty percent of the 1.5 billion people online<\/a> were using Mozilla\u2019s browser to navigate the web. In Indonesia, Macedonia, and Slovenia, more than half of everyone going online was using Firefox. \u201cOur market share in the regions above has been growing like crazy,\u201d Ken Kovash, Mozilla\u2019s president at the time, wrote in a blog post<\/a>. Almost 15 years later, things aren\u2019t so rosy.<\/p>\n Across all devices, the browser has slid to<\/a> less than 4 percent<\/a> of the market\u2014on mobile it\u2019s a measly half a percent<\/a>. \u201cLooking back five years and looking at our market share and our own numbers that we publish, there's no denying the decline,\u201d says Selena Deckelmann, senior vice president of Firefox. Mozilla\u2019s own statistics show a drop of around 30 million monthly active users from the start of 2019 to the start of 2022<\/a>. \u201cIn the last couple years, what we've seen is actually a pretty substantial flattening,\u201d Deckelmann adds.<\/p>\n In the two decades since Firefox launched from the shadows of Netscape, it has been key to shaping the web\u2019s privacy and security, with staff pushing for more openness online and better standards. But its market share decline was accompanied by two rounds of layoffs at Mozilla during 2020<\/a>. Next year, its lucrative search deal with Google\u2014responsible for the vast majority of its revenue\u2014is set to expire. A spate of privacy-focused browsers now compete on its turf, while new-feature misfires have threatened to alienate its base. All that has left industry analysts and former employees concerned about Firefox\u2019s future.<\/p>\n Its fate also has larger implications for the web as a whole. For years, it was the best contender for keeping Google Chrome in check, offering a privacy-forward alternative to the world\u2019s most dominant browser. Since its release in 2008, Chrome has become synonymous with the web: It\u2019s used by around 65 percent of everyone online and has a huge influence on how people experience the internet. When Google launched its AMP publishing standard, websites jumped to implement it<\/a>. Similarly plans to replace third-party cookies in Chrome\u2014a move that will impact millions of marketers and publishers\u2014are shaped in Google\u2019s image<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cChrome has won the desktop browser war,\u201d says one former Firefox staff member, who worked on browser development at Mozilla but does not want to be named, as they still work in the industry. Their hopes for a Firefox revival are not high. \u201cIt's not super reasonable for Firefox to expect to win back even any browser share at this point.\u201d Another former Mozilla employee, who also asked not to be named for fear of career repercussions, says: \u201cThey're just going to have to accept the reality that Firefox is not going to come back from the ashes.\u201d<\/p>\n Mozilla and Google have a complicated relationship. While they may be competitors, they are also business partners. Each year Google pays Mozilla hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties\u2014reports say that figure is currently in the range of $400 million per year<\/a>\u2014for its search engine to be set as the default in Firefox. In its 2020 financial results<\/a>, the most recent available, Mozilla listed its total revenue as $496 million, with royalties from search deals equaling $441 million. Firefox has other default search engine partners, such as Yandex Search in Russia, and these royalties are also crucial. (Google also pays Apple huge sums<\/a> each year to ensure it is the default search engine in Safari.)<\/p>\n The Google-Mozilla deal was last renewed in 2020 and is expected to expire in 2023. Stats show Firefox\u2019s market share has dropped around 1 percent<\/a> over the course of this agreement. The company\u2019s own figures<\/a> show its monthly active users have stayed stable at around 215 million. But there\u2019s no guarantee Google will renew at the same level. Deckelmann says Mozilla doesn\u2019t reveal details about arrangements with its partners and declined to say whether negotiations with Google are ongoing. Mozilla\u2019s financial declarations from 2020 said that despite the layoffs it is in a healthy place<\/a>, and it expects its financial results for 2021 to show revenue growth.<\/p>\n However, Mozilla and Firefox acknowledge that for its long-term future it needs to diversify the ways it makes money. These efforts have ramped up since 2019. The company owns read-it-later service Pocket, which includes a paid premium subscription service. It has also launched two similar VPN-style products that people can subscribe to. And the company is pushing more into advertising as well, placing ads on new tabs that are opened in the Firefox browser.<\/p>\n Mozilla\u2019s combined subscription and ad revenue rose from $14 million in 2019 to $24 million in 2020, and the company says it expects 2021\u2019s financial results to show new products contributing 14 percent of its revenue. That independence from Google is key to creating a \u201chealthier\u201d business model. However, some of these new bets haven\u2019t worked out and can seem at odds with Firefox\u2019s wider privacy aims. An encrypted file-sharing service<\/a> was shut down after being used to spread malware<\/a>. The company has inserted ads into Firefox's URL bar<\/a>. And the less said about the mid-2010s Firefox OS phones<\/a>, the better.<\/p>\n The pressure to find new revenue streams comes at a time when Firefox faces more browser competition than ever. \u201cA lot of browsers use privacy in their branding,\u201d says Lourdes Turrecha, founder of Rise of Privacy Tech, a group that monitors privacy-focused companies. Many of Chrome\u2019s competitors look to differentiate themselves by not collecting data about your browsing history or tracking what you do online<\/a>. Firefox, DuckDuckGo, Brave, Vivaldi, and Safari all join Tor\u2014which is widely considered the most privacy-preserving option\u2014in blocking tracking to varying degrees.<\/p>\n Firefox\u2019s privacy credentials are about as strong as any of its commercial rivals. \u201cThe main thing with Firefox is how extensible it is,\u201d says Jonah Aragon, a system administrator who also helps run the recommendation website Privacy Guides. The site, which focuses on open source software, ranks the Firefox browsers highly<\/a>. \u201cThere's a lot of privacy features that aren't enabled by default, which is unfortunate, but it at least gives you the option to enable those if you think that you need them.\u201d<\/p>\n In addition to the main Firefox browser for Android and iOS, Mozilla also runs the Focus browser, which ramps up privacy protections by default. (Deckelmann says the two Firefox browsers have distinct use cases, and she doesn\u2019t see the apps merging into one product.) Aragon adds that while Firefox competes with other privacy-focused browsers, it hasn\u2019t necessarily been the first to introduce these features\u2014for instance, Safari pioneered<\/a> blocking third-party tracking cookies by default.<\/p>\n This echoes concerns about how Firefox will differentiate itself going forward. Former Firefox employees say Mozilla should stick to a distinct strategy for its marquee browser. \u201cIt's basically a more optimized privacy browser, but at the same time they're trying to get more utility out of it and squeeze revenue out of it by going in different directions,\u201d one former employee says, citing search bar ads as a prime example of conflicting priorities.<\/p>\n \u201cOnce lost, users hardly come back until there's a compelling reason, and what would that compelling reason be?\u201d says Bart Willemsen, a VP analyst focusing on privacy at Gartner. Willemsen says he has been a Firefox user since its earliest days. \u201cI think Firefox really has a challenge to find a unique position\u2014not only in marketing statements, but in their absolute product\u2014and go in one direction,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n For Deckelmann, making Firefox more personalized is key. She says this includes trying to increase the browser\u2019s functionality to fit in with people being online more. \u201cIt\u2019s almost impossible now for people to manage all this information,\u201d Deckelmann says. For instance, last year Firefox revamped its homepage to allow people to pick up previously abandoned searches and unfinished articles. It redesigned its Android app and added features from its password manager to the Firefox app<\/a>. Mozilla has also been focusing on partnerships, including recently working with Facebook parent company Meta to push for more privacy-focused advertising<\/a>.<\/p>\n Deckelmann says Firefox is likely to continue looking for ways to keep personalizing people\u2019s online browsing. \u201cI'm not sure that what's going to come out of that is going to be what people traditionally expect from a browser, but the intention will always be to put people first,\u201d she says. Just this week, Firefox announced a partnership with Disney\u2014linked to a new Pixar film\u2014that involves changing the color of the browser and ads to win subscriptions to Disney+. The deal speaks both to Firefox\u2019s personalization push and the strange roads its search for revenue streams can lead down.<\/p>\n Deckelmann adds that Firefox doesn\u2019t need to be as big as Chrome or Apple\u2019s Safari, the second largest browser, to succeed. \u201cAll we really want is to be a viable choice,\u201d Deckelmann says. \u201cBecause we think that this makes a better internet for everybody to have these different options.\u201d<\/p>\n