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.

Thank you for the excerpt. I initially interpreted the title as US government agencies will stop using Firefox, not US government agencies will stop requiring their web masters to test in Firefox.
- I’d imagine that effectively means agencies would stop using Firefox, if they can’t use it on their own sites.
- tbh I already editorialized the title a bit to make it less exaggerated, wasn't sure how far to take it.
Reminder to self to always use FF when visiting all websites.
^except the ones that only work in chrome
- *especially! Spoof user agent if you have to.
Or just in general
I visit weather.gov around once a day on both mobile and desktop Firefox.
I'll be over here making sure they still got a sliver of Mosaic in their logs.
I actually did that today before reading the article.

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.

tendentious
ten·den·tious /tenˈdenSHəs/ adjective expressing or intending to promote a particular cause or point of view, especially a controversial one. "a tendentious reading of history"
- Thank you. I'm not too proud to say I didn't know this word. And, you saved me looking it up. When I was a kid, my dad got tired of defining words for me when I was reading a book, so he taught me to use a dictionary. From then on, I've read with a dictionary next to me.
- New word for me, too. Odd, considering how incredibly relevant it is nowadays!
- Thanks for taking the time to explain it to others, which I should have done beforehand. Admittedly when I wrote that post I was thinking of the term "tenacious" which means something completely different, and that distracted me from noticing I was using a perhaps obscure word.
Your adroit incorporation of the term “tendentious” exemplifies lexical virtuosity. Impressive articulation. Truly seamless weaving of a sesquipedalian polysyllabic term.
- Someone call 911, I think I'm having some kind of medical issue with how this post looks.
- The fuck does tendentious mean and how do I even pronounce it?
- We speak murican here friend
- Your adroit incorporation of "adroit " reminds me of mine own erewhile efforts to incorporate "adroit" into my poetical experimentations, which I hope resulted in an execution considered adroit back in the time.
  Grateful I am for your bringing of this memory of creation to me.
Much of it has to do with Firefox's decisions in the past 5-7 years that have made it very unfriendly to enterprise environments. The provisioning tools have gotten progressively more hostile to IT departments.
The US government is also finally moving to more modern systems for authentication and Mozilla has incorporated some particularly poor changes to how the stack is handled that are very unfriendly to IT environments that need to manage credentials for multiple authoritative sources. We had to switch to Chrome a couple years ago because our support cases with Mozilla would on many occasions come back with a response of 'we've made our decision and will not be considering changes'.
Unfortunately, as Firefox kicks itself out of the enterprise market; that's going to cascade to the personal market even further as well.
- Serious question re the auth part:
  Have you tried submitting PRs? Much of the complaints that I see about the development side of Firefox are grounded on the fac that "they won't have this cool thing that Chrome has", ignoring that those things are usually dangerous or are rejected for justified, studied reasons (see: WebUSB). Sounds just about the area where auth would have issues, and it'd be interesting to see what Firefox's actual response was.
  Who knows, maybe they're cluing you that you shouldn't depending on Google...
Original title is worse, I editorialized it as much as I thought appropriate
- You made it express an opinion as if in an editorial report?
  Or do you mean edited/revised?
"When did you stop beating your wife?"
- Completely off-topic but I recall a lawyers TV show back in the day where the response to this joke was something like:
  "About at the same time you stopped beating yours"
  Which would have been interesting to see how that would have worked at the court. Can't remember the show alas, but it was probably The Practice (a late 90s show I think, predecessor to Boston Legal).

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.

Here are a few names you can blame in addition to the USWDS:
Deloitte
Accenture
Ernst & Young
KPMG
PwC
The four corporations other Accenture constitute the US' "Big 4 accounting firms", and they get a shitload of money from local, state, and the Federal government to develop software for them at taxpayer expense -- and none of this publicly-funded code is FOSS.
- The Free Software Foundation Europe has an awesome initiative called Public Money Public Code where they try to convince lawmakers to use as much open source software as possible when using public funds. I really hope they succeed.
- And 100% of it is dog shit. I have seen custom products from Accenture, Deloitte, and E&Y, and they were passable prototypes at best.
That's the opposite of most UK government websites. I've always found them very well designed and easy to use. I think they're well regarded by web designers
- That's because the US government outsources a lot of software development to consulting firms who bill hourly for developer time while paying the developers a fixed salary. Even though these developers have to do at least 40 billable hours a week, they don't get time and a half for overtime.
- UK gov site is pretty good, NHS can be an absolute mess, especially going into the different trusts.
USWDS is new and is a response to exactly that problem. You'd be blaming people who have nothing to do with the status quo who were hired to fix the problems you've experienced.
Not to derail a good point but there are at least a few government entities with brain cells. Check out digital.gov and cloud.gov, the latter of which has created a responsive, accessible platform for government websites.
Bold of you to assume that people writing contracts or working them know about these standards at all.
Well, that plus CGI
every single US government website being so poorly put together
So, just like the rest of the internet? A technology, that popularly speaking, has only been around for 30-years?
And you expect an entity, as huge and diverse as the US government, on federal/state/local levels, to be on the same page?
I can safely make 2 predictions about you:
You're young, and that's A-OK. My kids are GenZ, maybe Alpha? They're my last, best hope for this world. But you haven't had the benefit of watching all this evolve. I was writing BASIC on a VIC-20 as a child. 3K RAM!
You're not in tech. So again, you haven't had the benefit of trying to make all this shit work. GenXers physically and programmatically built the world you live in, on top of the work of the Boomers. I've hung cable drops and coded, all messy.
This clusterfuck is both expected and natural. Or did your science teacher tell you evolution was orderly? Or perhaps intelligently designed?
And anyone else wanting to complain, I'll remind you, this is how the government vs. the free market works.
Government works by rules that are not broken or bent. And this pisses some people off. Private enterprise works by what works and what doesn't. It's fast and fluid, and not designed to take "the people" in mind. And this pisses some people off.
Some tasks are appropriate for the government, some for the public sector. We're still working this shit out. (website_under_construction.gif)
- I can safely make 2 predictions about you:
  You might wanna check the reception on your crystal ball, Nostradamus, cuz you're wrong on all counts. I'm 38 and have worked in general IT as well as network engineering.
- What a weirdly arrogant, condescending response. I also started on basic on a vic20, had a dad who worked in IT for the government, and have done all of that except the physical wiring on any noteworthy scale. This is utterly unhelpful.
- This thread is filled with people who don't make a connection between shitty government websites and the roads that are filled with pot holes, several train derailments every day, a tax collection agency that doesn't have enough staff to do audits on wealthy people, and schools that ban books that have rainbows in them but teach books by Prager U.
  We could have better government websites - but not if we elect "starve the beast" politicians.

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

Wait until Google implements manifest V3 and "kills" adblockers. Firefox will become cool again for the normies.
- I will wait and see. We could see Google pulling it's weight to convince publishers to start blocking Firefox. Google is not just going to sit and watch its market share shrink.
- Unlikely. If they are prompted to remove it, normies will do it.
  The tech iliterate folk will ask relatives but not the normies.
- yea my dad would not survive not having adblock on his evenly youtube sessions XD
- People are so used to seeing ads they probably wont bother, i have friends who work in IT who just acceppt that half of the sites they visit are full of annoying flashy and intrusive ads.

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

Even Opera is now Chrome....
- Opera, chrome, but with CCP data theft and monitoring
- And the last reason to even consider using it goes out the window 🙄 Thanks for the heads-up.
Bold of you to assume there’s QA happening on govt UIs.
I don't think the issue is if it can afford it. The question is what constitutes a major browser.
- Obviously, but that is a self-reinforcing loop. I'm not suggesting that government websites drive the most traffic or anything, but the government is kind of special as an entity. In several other areas the US government is bound to show no preferential treatment to vendors or other entities, such as in public broadcast TV or awarding government contracts. I don't think "internet browsing software" is one such covered area, but forcing people to use one browser to access their websites is pretty equivalent in this day and age, so if they drop support for Firefox a lawsuit might change that.
  My point with the money is that a whole team of highly skilled QA professionals isn't even a rounding error on that kind of balance sheet, but thinking about it further there's a solid argument to be made that supporting a variety of web browsers for government web services is in the interest of national security. In that case they could pull the money from the military budget for the project.

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.

Do you think the number of people spoofing user agents are going to even dent those numbers?
I say we just set our UAs to "Firefox", plain and simple. None of that "Chrome KHTML like Gecko" shit.
- Typical Firefox UA: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/120.0
  Chrome: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
  See browsers started calling themselves "Mozilla" to say "Hey I can do what Firefox can!" (or back then still navigator, doesn't matter. So then sites started checking for "Gecko" (which is Mozilla's browser engine), and browsers (in this case Konqueror, I think) started adding "Hey, I'm like Gecko" to it. Then... it just goes on and on.
  The only things not Mozilla in that Firefox UA are X11, Linux, and x86_64. It never stepped so low as to call itself "Mozilla (like Mosaic)".
Iirc there’s a “per site” spoofer that people could use instead, for those sites that require specific browsers. I don’t actually know what it’s called, and my cursory Google search didn’t bring up much of anything, but I do believe I’ve seen them before.
- The FF extension is just called "User-Agent Switcher" I believe?
  And yes, you can set it blacklist mode or whitelist mode (in other words, "use the extension on every domain but:" vs. "Only use the extension with these domains:").
  I'll only switch away from FF if a site is completely broken. I'll try it before resorting to chromium
I only use fake user agent for snapchat, because they block firefox lol
- Solution: fuck snapshit.
Why are people spoofing their browser agent?
- Some sites that don't work on FF will work if the site thinks you're using a Chromium-based browser.

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?

No, what this means is sites might start adopting features like PassKeys - a major browser feature that works in every browser except FireFox and one where you just might not be able to access the service, at all, unless your browser has support.
(Passkeys are a replacement for passwords - essentially the idea is to take the technology commonly used for second factor authentication and use it as your "first factor" instead)
- PassKeys - a major browser feature that works in every browser except FireFox
  So... Chrome and Safari? Because the rest of browsers are just rebranded Chrome.
  I'm not particularly a fan of passkeys, because I'm fairly happy with my password manager, but personal opinions apart, just because Google and Apple decided to implement a feature, that doesn't make it an standard.
  This is why Chrome having the web engine monopoly is such a big problem. They can implement whatever they want and because it will also be adopted by Edge, Opera and others, it seems to automatically be considered a web standard and websites will start using it even when the other major independent browser (Firefox) hasn't implemented it.
- a major browser feature that works in every browser except FireFox
  Funny cause it works fine in my browser with a bitwarden plugin. I don't need and actually REALLY don't want my browser handling my passwords... or passkeys... or whatever the fuck authenticates me.
- Isn’t that what password managers are for? People don’t store credentials in browsers, not sure why they’d start for passkeys when password managers are rolling out support.
- I use 1password for passkeys on FF, works great.
  I know your point is native, just want to point it out.
- God this reminds me that it took Firefox forever to support security keys natively. I hope PassKeys are implemented quickly in Firefox if they take off.
- I'm using passkeys in Firefox everyday just fine.
- Maybe its because I'm on Nightly but PassKeys work natively for me on Windows 11 with Firefox already
- No, what I mean is "metric" as in data about users per browser.
it wouldn't do anything if chrome was the next fallback that it was coded for anyway. worst case parts of the site don't render correctly.

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.

Yup, just like the days where sites would just display a "this site is designed for internet explorer 6" and nothing else unless you were using IE.
I will tell you something that most people won't: you don't have to use those websites.
It doesn't matter how important you think they are, you can take a stand by not using them if they don't respect you.
Do you know the reasoning behind the common saying "the united states doesn't engage with terrorists"? Politics aside, it's because engaging with your enemy legitimizes or empowers them. By refusing to negotiate or engage with terrorists, the policy aims to avoid granting them recognition or validation for their methods.
You can take the same stance; when a website stops working with non-chromium browsers you stop using it. You IMMEDIATELY stop using it, even better if you pay them money, you should IMMEDIATELY cancel citing that they're stealing your intellectual freedom. If the US government does the same and you're required to use a chromium browser to fill out your taxes for example, do it on paper, give them a message that you'd rather not use technology than have guns pointed at you
- I think, at least in my state, Unemployment needs to be filed online. I don't believe there is an alternate process that doesn't require the internet.
- Sure, until there are almost no websites left you can go to.
My first desk job was in 96 and even then I needed 3 browsers to get the different government websites to work properly. I don't know if there was a time before needing a backup browser.
Oh it will be far worse this time.
- Remember when websites could open infinite windows, and prevent you from backout out or closing windows?
  Even if things get really bad, they wont get that bad. Also dont forget flash meant the ads were media rich, security hole ridden, cpu spinning, awful monsters as well.

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

Firefox usage has plummeted. To be fair, 2% isn’t a huge slice of the pie, but it’s still a pretty large number of users in absolute terms.
- I use Firefox exclusively. It is fast, responsive, and works on all the sites that I visit. So I don't really understand why the share of users are so low. What sites are ya'll visiting that doesn't work on FF?
and figured they both had about the same
Sounds like you're living in a 10000 meter hole under a rock.

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?

why are we spending so much but getting so little from our IT?
That's easy, it's called lobby!

Government websites don't care at all about support, most of them were made 15-20 years ago and haven't been updated at all
- Well, those will work in Firefox just fine...
You’d think government websites of all places would have compatibility with most popular browsers.
lol, I would never ever think that. government sites are just the worst fucking feverish web nightmare that exists, at least here where I live.
it's like they deliberately choose people for this kind of work whom never seen computers in their life before and think Internet is just an energy drink you buy at the gas station.
dude i work with one that just recently added support for non-internet explorer... major. government. entity. places that are the reason for the required legacy i.e. code in edge.
this government shit is based on 'lowest bidder' mentality.
I have had some luck using a user agent switcher in these cases. Might be worth a shot.

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

Did you read the article? This is about how the government's web developers could stop writing websites that support Firefox. You might have to switch to Chromium to use government websites.
- Web dev here. Unless they explicitly block other browsers or somehow adopt bleeding-edge tech that other browsers have and Firefox doesn’t (has Firefox ever not been the first to support new standards?) I don’t know how this would even be a problem.
- How convenient for them and the Corp lining their pockets.
When I worked for the USDA in 2010 we had several web applications that depended on Internet Explorer 6.
- I worked in an office in 2009 with a Windows 95 PC (a Packard Bell that barely ran the OS).
  I got them to upgrade it in 2012.
- I worked at a software company in 2010 and was still actively coding web applications that work in ie6. They wanted web 2.0 flashy things... And also must work in ie6. It was not fun
Knock on affects could hurt firefox quite a bit

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.

Get out of the lemmy Foss bubble and ask again. I don't know anybody that actually gives a fuck about manifest v3 tbh.
- They will care about their adblocker no longer working
- Because they haven't been affected by Manifest v3 yet. As soon as they realise just what Manifest v3's all about...They'll give a fuck.
- I've never even heard of it...
- People don't care about anything until that thing hits them.

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

Nobody supports IE6. The OS won't even load the sites these days thanks to TLS1.2 support being required for a lot of sites.

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

Edge really isn't an awful browser. At least not in the same league as IE
- Yeah because its just Chromium which isn't an awful open source browser developed and maintained by Google.

TIL Samsung makes a browser.

How else are you going to browse the web on your fridge?
Samsung loves bloat. Their attempt at creating an ecosystem and therefore lock in to keep using their devices. I like Samsung hardware but their software is shit.
Yeah, comes on Samsung phones and tablets.
Eventually, the list of things Samsung doesn't make is going to be shorter.
@Reverendender
And it apparently has just .6% less market share than the mighty Firefox
- Yeah, people will use anything, if it comes as default...
- It's just another Chromium reskin on Android. I'm glad my Z Fold 5 didn't come with it any longer, so maybe they are finally letting go of it on brand new models.
- It’s just my intuition, but I get the feeling the data on Firefox market share is skewed

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

They are talking about .gov websites. Any website operated by the US government should, at least according to their own standards, develop for and test for users using Firefox. If this is followed in practice the article doesn't really cover.
- It's USWDS, firefox should still work as long as it is standards compliant.
It is installed on our computers, depends on the agency it policy
- Yeah, I'm surprised your agency let's you do that with firefox. First time I have heard of that.
Do school or library computers count as government devices?
- Technically, yes, but in this context government devices means systems used by federal employees which have access to PII or classified information.
- Generally I was talking about Federal devices. Those move a lot of needles because one federal change can switch a lot of stuff over.

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.

Most people have no idea that there are differences between browsers, or how the internet even works for that matter, and as such, generally use either Chrome or whatever the default installed browser is.
- More people than should still think 'smartphones' are all called 'iphones'
Try asking a random person about any of those features. They'll have no idea

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.

Their ceo pay keeps going up. Even as their market share declines. And they're still entirely dependent on Google for revenue, who at this pint is basically donating to them to avoid more anti trust issues. It's a precarious system.

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.

It would be more accurate to state that any given site chooses not to work well with any given browser.
Your phrasing makes it seem as-if this choice is in the browser developer's hands. It is not.

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

fork
what if google chrome decided to close the fork by changing the license to something restructive, i mean the fork can goes on for a little while but we are still depending on the resources of a Big $$ corporation....
firefox is the only way for a free web....
- Then they'd be alienating the open source community that makes a lot of contributions (though much of chromium is still essentially built internally). They also wouldn't be able to lock down the code that's already been released under the more permissive BSD license.
  Now, a fork of Chromium is its own beast. Some searching shows that just to build it takes 30 minutes on a decent workstation. It's huge, which makes me think it's the kind of project that could only really be maintained by a large company. Not necessarily a Google sized company, but a large one nonetheless if you seriously want to remove the dependency on Google.
  EDIT: turns out it's Chrome that takes that long to build, which includes things not in Chromium like Widevine, licensed codecs, telemetry, sync, that kind of thing.

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.

Don't forget, on the off chance they accept symbols at all many of them also dictate which symbols you can use.

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