 Hey everybody, welcome back to the channel. Today's going to be another one of those rambly type videos where I have an opinion nobody agrees with, or maybe in this case everybody will agree with me, and mostly this topic today that I'm going to be talking about is a little pointless, because I don't see it as controversial at all, but we will talk about it anyways. So mainly my goal today is to talk about the reason why Firefox still exists. I'm a Firefox user. So let's switch over to, so you can see some Firefox. This is Firefox. And I have it customized the way I like it to look and all that stuff. And I like it because it's open source and because they can mess around with the user interface and all sorts of different reasons. But let's look at this here. This is the, since 2009, these are the market share of browsers worldwide. And this is Chrome. This right here is Firefox. And that pretty much tells you everything you need to know. I mean, the nearest gap here is shockingly Safari. Appears to be number two, probably because of mobile. I'm guessing because of the iPhone. I'm betting these count mobile statistics as well. The point is that Firefox is, and also ran at this point, is not competitive in terms of people actually using it at all. And that's okay, I guess, because I mean, Linux itself isn't also ran. I mean, nobody uses Linux on the desktop. I mean, they use Linux in the server areas. It's one there and it's pretty much one on phones, but nobody really knows that Android is Linux. They just know that it's Android. So the question is, so we have several questions we should talk about today. First, is there anything Firefox can do to increase the market share? Second, should they even try to increase the market share? Just because you're not number one at something doesn't mean you're not good at it or successful. Number three, is there a point in the future where we can foresee that Chrome fails? Because right now, everything uses the Chromium-based engine. And basically everything uses the WebKit engine, which actually was open source by Apple ages ago. But here are the things that use the Chromium-based engine. There's Chromium, that's the open source project. There's Google Chrome from Google, which is the number one browser. There's Microsoft Edge. There's Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, Blisk. I've never been heard of that browser before. Calibri, never heard of that one before either. Epic browser, and notice the UIs of these. Most of these UIs look exactly the same. Iron browser on Google Chromium. That looks like Chrome from like five years ago. I bet you that's secure. And then they're calling this vendor specific implementations. I don't know what that means. A vast secure browser, Amazon Silk, Samsung internet browser, Yandex browser, Kihu 360 secure browsers, Torch browser, and the Komodo Dragon browser, okay? And then they have another list of ones here. They're called, also runs KotKok, which is an interesting name for a browser. Falcon, Exvast, Polarity, the World Chrome. Never will. I mean, nobody's ever heard of any of these things. But these all run on the same Web engine that is controlled almost 100% by Google. Yes, Chromium is open source. Yes, Chromium is open source. But Google has like half the seats on the board of the Chromium Foundation or whatever it's called. I don't know the exact numbers, but it's a lot. They control Chromium. What Google wants in Chromium, Google gets. The only company that had a chance of dethroning Google in terms of market sharing in browsers was Microsoft, and they chose not to do so, mainly because they had been failing at it for a while. They came out with Edge as a replacement based on their own engine, and nobody used it. And I mean, it wasn't very good. I mean, that's part of the reason why nobody used it, but also because by that time, everybody already had Chrome. There was no reason to have a browser that was basically locked into Microsoft services, which is weird because I mean, everybody uses Microsoft services. Everybody has an office account or a hotmail account or something. So it wasn't the necessity of having an account that was holding people back. So Microsoft obviously didn't feel that they could go through and supplant or overtake Chrome as the number one browser because that would be their goal because they'd want to be successful. So going back to Firefox, Firefox is the only real true open source browser that people use. If you notice this graph, there's no other open source browsers on here. So I mean, yes, I know Chromium is open source, but people don't use Chromium. They use Chrome, which is not open source. There's nothing like cute browser or any of those really niche browsers that Linux users might use. Firefox is it. If we want a open web, Firefox is our only hope. And this kind of transitions into the question of can Firefox ever overtake? And I don't think the way Firefox is currently ran, they can overtake it. Cause most of the vast majority of the money that they get comes from Google. I don't think that they're incentivized at Firefox right now to ever even consider Google a competitor. They don't want to really up until the time that I think it was Firefox 70. It might have been Firefox 60. It was one of the round numbers. When that came out, it was called Quantum or something like that. And prior to that, Firefox was terrible. I mean, it was slow. It was clunky. It took up entirely too many resources on your computer. And that was during the time where it went from like 28, 20, 30% and then just continued to plummet because Firefox was terrible. I mean, people use Firefox a lot, you know, in 2010, 2011, it started going down. And that's because Chrome, it turns out, is really good, right? And Firefox at that point was really bad. And even in 2018, I think it was 2018 when the Firefox, when Mozilla went through and redid Firefox and made it faster and made the interface more modern and all that stuff, they weren't able to gain back anything. They were able to stop the bleeding a little bit. They're now stuck around what looks to be, I'm reading a chart, which is always hard, but looks to be around 10, maybe nine or 10% of market share. And that's where they're probably going to stay as long as nothing unforeseen happens and it doesn't tank further. So, like I said, I don't think that they're incentivized to go through and compete with Google, but I also don't think that they're capable of doing so. Cause what could they change to get people to use Firefox? They would have to, really where they would have to succeed is in mobile, because most people use their browser on their mobile phone. And in order to do that, they'd have to make deals with Android carriers that don't use Google services to be the default browser, or at least to be installed. Google has this whole tie-in thing. So if you want Google Play services, which includes the Play Store, all your apps, you have to use Google Chrome and Google search on your devices. That's how the manufacturing process and the Samsung's and Motorola's of the world have to deal with Google. Those things are all tied together. If you want one, you have to have them all. And that's one of the ways that Google has got this huge market share is they've tied Google Chrome to everything else that they do. So Google Chrome comes installed on every Android's device and that's what they, what people use because that's what's installed. So if Mozilla wanted Firefox to make a headway into that, they'd have to make a deal with some mobile phone manufacturer to have Firefox pre-installed. They have shown no interest in doing that. And whether that's because they just don't want to or because they know that they get all their money from Google, and if they decide to try to actually start competing with Google on mobile phones, they might, Google might decide to take that $400 million away. Who knows? So that kind of, I mean, that's really the answer to whether or not they can. And if, so the question is whether or not they should. So if, let's just say they decided to throw away their connection to Google and try to become less reliant on that Google money, which they've tried. It doesn't seem like they've tried very hard. All their efforts to make money are like a VPN that nobody was ever going to use. I mean, just, I mean, nobody was ever gonna, that was never going to be big enough to replace $400 million. I mean, that's just realistic. They've tried to put ads and they bought pocket and they put, they put ads like on the start, the new tab page and people freaked the fuck out. I mean, so I mean, every little effort they've made to make money outside of Google has completely failed. So we can see that they really don't want to, but if they were to go through and throw the Google money away, should they, I mean, should they do that? Should they try to overtake, to increase their market share? This is where I'm kind of, I kind of split, because I can see it both ways. The Google money is really good money. And their see, Firefire, Mozilla does not spend that money very well. They pay their executives way too much money. Somebody did the math or something like that with that $400 million, each developer there would get like $300,000 for a salary each year. And they don't have to get that because most of the money actually goes to the executives, which is not all that great or not all that morally great, I guess. So I can see that they don't want to throw away that money because why would they? I mean, that's basically free money. I mean, they literally have to do nothing for that. They just pay their developers to continue chugging along, nothing to rock the boat in the browser war, browser wars or whatever. So I can see that point of view. On the other hand, as an open source enthusiast, I want to see more people use open source software. And I would like to see more people might Mozilla be a little bit more forceful in their marketing efforts, maybe taking some of that $400 million while it's still there and getting a carrier deal to put Firefox on a phone. Instead of working on these niche projects like the VPN or Firefox OS or wherever it was back in the day, things that were just never really gonna have a chance to be monetarily successful. Take some of the Google money while it's still there and try at least a little to go through and reclaim some market share in mobile or whatever. So those are my thoughts. I've rambled on a little bit too long on this. I like Firefox, I'm gonna continue to use Firefox. But there's gonna become a day I feel that it's just not gonna be prudent to continue to use Firefox because the question is why is this all matter? I mean, Firefox is juggling along and exists. It's fine, but really with the way this is here, this market share as it is, developers focus on Chromium-based browsers. So it's probably like three or four times a week I go to a website in Firefox that just doesn't work. The other day it was, I was buying Christmas presents on Swiss Colony. Their website doesn't work in Firefox because they've not tested it in Firefox, it only works in Chrome. And that's gonna be the problem with everything on the internet being optimized for Chrome because everybody uses Chrome, that's what developers are going to be targeting. And that means Firefox is gonna be slowly left behind in web standards because some websites, important websites and what happens when Firefox decides or Facebook decides they're going to stop optimizing for Firefox? I mean, everybody goes to Facebook, it could happen. And that's the reason why this matters is because if Firefox can't increase their browser share just a little bit to the point where developers will care more because right now I'm pretty sure they don't care pretty much at all, then you're gonna continue to see websites that you can't visit in Firefox because they don't meet the same standards. Okay, so that's it. If you enjoyed this video or you have thoughts, make sure you leave comments and subscribe and leave thumbs up and thumbs down and all those interactions that are just the typical YouTube fare. I'm not gonna tell you to smash anything because monitors are expensive. Anyways, we'll see you next time. Thanks for watching.