Firefox is on the brink of being dropped by the US Government

The U.S. Web Design System (USWDS) provides a comprehensive set of standards which guide those who build the U.S. government’s many websites. Its documentation for developers borrows a “2% rule” from its British counterpart:
. . . we officially support any browser above 2% usage as observed by analytics.usa.gov.

Reminder to self to always use FF when visiting .gov sites.

I took the liberty of reading the article but I'm gonna say the title is quite... tendentious. Makes it sound like it's yet another one of those FUD / nutjob clickbait that have been coming at the privacy community for a few days with sensationalist titles such as "The CIA will stop funding Signal" (never has been) or "FBI wants to sell Wikipedia" (never has been).

What is going on?

EDIT: Cosmic Cleric has provided the definition of "tendentious", which I have linked.

The U.S. Web Design System (USWDS) provides a comprehensive set of standards which guide those who build the U.S. government’s many websites.

Now I know what to blame for every single US government website being so poorly put together they they barely function, if they function at all.

Really sad. In Germany, Firefox sits comfortably at 10% market share, and actually is having a slight uptick in the last month.

I'm pretty convinced that a country with an annual military spend of almost three quarters of a trillion dollars can afford to QA their web services in at least the latest versions of the five major browsers(1). Anything less might be seen as corporate favouritism.

(1) Chrome, Firefox, Edge (so Chrome), Safari, and Opera (so also fucking Chrome, apparently) were the five I'm thinking of but I'm open to persuasion if anyone's got a better list

Some of you need to stop spoofing browsing agents. We need to show people that Firefox is used. This telemetry can help Firefox support and become a big competitor to Chrome and other Chromium based browsers.

Governments agencies usually obtain software through contracts with vendors. Microsoft is one of those vendors so I'm not surprised to hear about this.

Also, Firefox is the pretty much the browser of freedom and independence so I'm surprised it's not illegal or "against family values" at this point. 😔

So changing the user agent to chrome to fool websites that work shittier on non chromium stuff will ruin this metric?

All you people too young to remember the late 1990s, enjoy the internet as we used to know it before adblockers, because it sounds like you're going to be out of options a lot of times soon.

I plan to use Firefox as long as I can, but I hate that I already have to have a backup browser for some sites, including the back end of the website where I used to work. And that will only get worse.

holy shit I didn't realize the market share for firefox was so low. i remember when chrome was launched and figured they both had about the same

The government IT shops part feels like a real issue. If the government gets it's self in a tech debt to two of the largest IT orgs because they didn't want to invest the time to get Firefox enterprise installed and configured on at least their own machines I'll be pissed. Like why are we spending so much but getting so little from our IT?

I tried doing my annual vehicle registration online on FF yesterday and the dmv site kept throwing an error and bringing me back to step 1 when I submit my payment information. Tried turning off all my extensions and still wouldn’t budge. Finally tried it in Chrome and it worked instantly. You’d think government websites of all places would have compatibility with most popular browsers.

Who cares? I use Firefox but why do I care if the US government does? I thought they were still using Netscape on Windows ME

I am personally unaware of any serious reason to believe that Firefox’s numbers will improve soon.

Yeah about that. Manifest V3 will infuse Firefox userbase nicely come next summer.

2% is huge. Many companies still have their website support ie6, and the US gov wants to abandon 2% of their users???

Pretty sure those Edge numbers are from using it under duress…

TIL Samsung makes a browser.

Are they talking about government devices? I've never seen firefox installed on a government device.

That's terrible. How can Firefox usage rates be declining? It seems like every day there's some new scammy feature being rolled out in all the other browsers.

Mozilla hasn't been putting any effort into making firefox a proper competitor despite their 400M+/year from Google.

They haven't pushed the envelope in any way, haven't invested in a Rust browser engine, haven't moved away from XUL, haven't fixed their oldest bugs, haven't made Gecko more easily embeddable, haven't added added better documentation to Gecko, haven't improved speed or memory use, haven't invested heavily in their android version (it's slow af on older devices), only just now are starting to enable extensions in firefox on android, ...

Their biggest changes are buying up a few useless startups (Pocket, some analytics company?), multiprocess firefox, manifest, containers, looking more chrome-like, firing 400 developers or something during COVID and paying their CEO 5M (?).

All they do is exist. The only reason people switch is because other browsers fuck up. IMO, that's not a strategy to get more users, but a strategy to collect the Google cheque.

https://gs.statcounter.com/ until G tries to force ads on all the Chrome

In Soviet Russia, browser drops government!

Edit: FireFox fire + outfox you!

So everyone using FF just had to start visiting more .gov websites (using the correct user agent) ?

Firefox already doesn't work well with government sites, so this doesn't really change anything.

Horrific but strategically inevitable, switch to chromium engine, and do your own privacy related fork . Like all the other browsers.

Oh no! Now that shitty government websites with 12-character passwords don't work, Firefox is dead!!

Get real. Too many of their websites only supported IE when it was around.

but when you point out the problems with mozilla in any of their subs/echochambers their usebase is by far worse than any other.