On the desktop, Firefox has about 6% marketshare, and Edge, the Windows default, about 11%.
On mobile, however, Firefox is at 0.5%, and Edge at 0.3%.
A lot of people only browse the Web on a mobile platform. And the ones using those tend to use the default browser bundled with their phone; if what they have out-of-box works, they’re not going to install anything else. Apple bundles Safari, and Google bundles Chrome, so that’s what gets used.
That’s why I started setting Firefox as the default browser on my family’s phones. They were too annoyed by ads and almost got scammed once. With Firefox and uBlock Origin it’s like magic for them. Plus they don’t visit any non-mainstream websites so they’ll never encounter such a screen.
A small step to a better web-browsing experience for all of us.
Something didn’t work on Firefox and the dev didn’t get permission to work out how to fix it as it was uneconomical compared with just disabling firefox
I expect that they had something break on it and decided that it wasn’t worth the time spent fixing it, so they just blocked it so more users didn’t run into it. A simple message may be annoying to them, but at least they have a straightforward workaround then.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I use Firefox on both mobile and desktop, but it’s not too hard to see why they’d do a cost/benefit analysis like that. No one company is in the business of trying to do antitrust work, to avoid a browser monopoly, and that’d be the reason why it’d be important to have competing browsers.
Important to note as well that both Edge and Opera along with Chrome (and many other niche browsers) are based on Chromium, giving them an even bigger spread of users that are using the same browser from a compatability standpoint.
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/mobile/worldwide
According to this:
On the desktop, Firefox has about 6% marketshare, and Edge, the Windows default, about 11%.
On mobile, however, Firefox is at 0.5%, and Edge at 0.3%.
A lot of people only browse the Web on a mobile platform. And the ones using those tend to use the default browser bundled with their phone; if what they have out-of-box works, they’re not going to install anything else. Apple bundles Safari, and Google bundles Chrome, so that’s what gets used.
That’s why I started setting Firefox as the default browser on my family’s phones. They were too annoyed by ads and almost got scammed once. With Firefox and uBlock Origin it’s like magic for them. Plus they don’t visit any non-mainstream websites so they’ll never encounter such a screen.
A small step to a better web-browsing experience for all of us.
It still doesn’t explain all the extra work of detecting and intentionally blocking firefox…
Something didn’t work on Firefox and the dev didn’t get permission to work out how to fix it as it was uneconomical compared with just disabling firefox
I expect that they had something break on it and decided that it wasn’t worth the time spent fixing it, so they just blocked it so more users didn’t run into it. A simple message may be annoying to them, but at least they have a straightforward workaround then.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I use Firefox on both mobile and desktop, but it’s not too hard to see why they’d do a cost/benefit analysis like that. No one company is in the business of trying to do antitrust work, to avoid a browser monopoly, and that’d be the reason why it’d be important to have competing browsers.
The point of a commercial website is that it is accessible from everywhere at every time.
It does not make sense to exclude an entire customer base just because you don’t want to support multiple platforms.
If businesses were smart, yes. But they are, first and foremost, greedy.
Important to note as well that both Edge and Opera along with Chrome (and many other niche browsers) are based on Chromium, giving them an even bigger spread of users that are using the same browser from a compatability standpoint.
Chromebooks are frequently used in US schools, this has to screw the statistics.