Week took the unusual step of issuing a brief video update on its Firefox browser mozilla last, declaring it really wants to “help users obtain the best from the Web” with “suggestions that help people find items from their history, places they visit and content most highly relevant to them frequently.”

When posted to YouTube, the under-two-minute message was panned by commenters as vague largely, a marketing spiel, and a head-in-the-sand refusal to acknowledge feedback from users.

Meanwhile – as well as perhaps not coincidentally – a thread on Reddit begun two days prior to the video hit remarked that the browser had lost 50 million monthly active users (MAUs) within the last two-and-a-half years.

What’s happening? Is Firefox within an existential crisis?

Let’s go on it chronologically.

Lousy numbers

On Reddit’s Linux sub-Reddit, Mozilla’s habit of losing users kicked off a thread greater than 2,000 messages. “Firefox lost 50M users since 2019. Why are users switching to clones and Chrome? on July 31 ” asked u/nixcraft , citing Mozilla’s own MAU (Monthly Active Users) data , which tracks the amount of desktop clients launched at the very least before 28 days once.

Firefox’s MAUs come in worse shape than that.

From Jan. 27, 2019, to Aug. 1, 2021, Firefox shed 57.5 million MAUs, representing a reduced amount of about 23%, or a quarter nearly. That is clearly a precipitous decline for a browser without fat on its user base bones.

To anyone attending to, Firefox’s decline was no real surprise. For a long time, Computerworld had regularly reported on the battles for browser dominance, so when a story-within-that-story, noted a gradual shrinking of Mozilla’s share.

      Computerworld           relied on data from NetApplications, a California metrics vendor that tracked browser usage by tallying agent strings reported to web sites of its customers. However in late 2020, NetApplications said it had been           pulling the plug           on the info source.

(By the end of October 2020, when NetApplications announced the ultimate end of its browser usage data collection, Firefox’s share stood at 7.2%.)

In actuality, NetApplications didn’t halt publication of browser usage numbers. November 2020 through July 2021 from, the latter the newest, the ongoing company continued to create monthly results. ( Computerworld asked the business last year to describe the disparity, but received an answer never.)

That recent data showed Firefox continuing its advance toward zero. Of July by the end, for instance, Firefox’s share had dwindled to 5.6%, marking the next straight month at a sub-6% mark. (Back November, Computerworld forecast that Firefox would slip beneath the 6% bar by August 2021.) If Firefox stays on its past-12-month trend, the browser could slip under 5% by the finish of the year and below 4% by August 2022.

As though Mozilla’s MAUs weren’t bad enough, NetApplications’ numbers trumped them spectacularly. January 2019 to July 2021 from, Firefox’s usage share plummeted by a lot more than 43%, double the MAU downturn nearly.

Other browsers come in a negative way – following a face-saving climb in the next 1 / 2 of 2020, Apple’s Safari is currently full circle 12 months ago – but Firefox is really a special case, as it is the only one of the very best Four not tied in a single way or another to the technologies that power Chrome. Some fear that, absent Firefox and its own Gecko rendering engine, Chrome wins the war automagically.

(It’s hard never to see Chrome because the winner, despite having Firefox on hanging; Google’s browser accounted for 73.2% of most browser activity in July by NetApplications’ measurements.)

You guys have lost the plot

Mozilla’s video-format update on Firefox was short on concrete details – one among the criticisms from commenters – but appeared to portend some AI-like additions and enhancements to the browser.

“You want to build experience[s] which are smart enough to learn what users want to accomplish and powerful enough to accomplish it,” said Selena Deckelmann, senior vice president of Firefox. In her message earlier, Deckelmann had – as already noted – ticked off a number of the specific ways Firefox may  accomplish that goal. “We have been asking ourselves, ‘What can the browser do to greatly help people navigate today’s Internet?’ We’re needs to test out suggestions that help people find items from their history, places they often times visit and content most highly relevant to them.”

Deckelmann also delved in to the past to tout the recent UI (interface) and UX (user experience) overhaul of Firefox that debuted in v. 89 and the longer term, declaring that, “This is actually the start of journey for us at Firefox.”

Commenters, those that identified themselves as long-time Firefox users even, were unimpressed.

“This sounds similar to a vague online marketing strategy instead of an update video,” complained someone defined as UberRam.

“So…that which was it you about wished to update us, then? As the video over is, I’ve no clue still, but somehow I’m more uneasy than before watching it,” reported adior8ot0s .

Others were more specific within their critiques. “So rather than keeping it solid or more up to now, like implementing web app standards, you are going to implement black box AI that goes against values of privacy to create shopping easier?” queried hanger1800. “You guys have completely lost the plot, RIP firefox.”

“20 year long Firefox user. I’m near quitting since each one of these changes with regard to changing perfectly working things are receiving beyond control,” said omma911.

However, some commenters stuck up for the browser.

“I have already been a Mozilla Firefox user all my entire life even though I haven’t always agreed with all the current decisions made at the building blocks I’m glad you’re still around and attempting to make the net better,” commented DraconianKindness. “I’d like to see Mozilla begin to decrease its reliance on Google’s profit the proper execution of selling a suite of services by subscription model.”

However the comment that took the prize because so many provocative was easily this: “This video will undoubtedly be remembered when people ask, “Whatever happened to Firefox?” wrote Jrakup.