this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2023
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Mozilla 2023 Annual Report: CEO pay skyrockets, while Firefox Marketshare nosedives (lunduke.locals.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What methods are being used to measure browser market share? Are those methods inclusive of Firefox users utilizing privacy-forward tools and ad blockers? If not, then Firefox market share may not necessarily be dwindling.

Then again, if Mozilla's revenue stream is aligned with the world of advertising, Firefox users who strive to make themselves invisible to advertisers are being written-off outright by Mozilla. The population of browser market share is only counting those who advertisers can influence - nobody else matters.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I'm not an expert, but I was curious so I did 15 minutes of digging and this is what I found. Take it in context.

Wikipedia's Usage share of web browsers page references two sources for stats: StatCounter and NetMarketShare.

StatCounter is an analytics tool for web site operators. They cover their methodology here: https://gs.statcounter.com/faq#methodology . To quote:

Our tracking code is installed on more than 1.5 million sites globally.

Their installation guide explains that they use a small JavaScript snippet embedded into the site's HTML.

Firefox blocks this if enhanced tracking protection is set to strict. Discussion on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34502986 . Some commenters there also said that uBlock origin blocks it. I have not confirmed.

NetMarketShare also refers to collecting data from user browsers and requiring JavaScript. https://netmarketshare.com/methodology

I would be interested to see server-side statistics based on HTTP user-agent from major global sites like Wikipedia, but I was not able to find that. I imagine spoofing user-agents is less common than ad blocking and tracker blocking

Edit: Found Wikimedia's browser stats:

https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#all-sites-by-browser/browser-family-and-major-hierarchical-view

Linked from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics#Analytics

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

I see suggestions to spoof that too for sites that require chrome for example