The slow death of a browser
Alas, poor Firefox! I knew it, Internet: a browser of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: it hath borne me on it's back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rims at it. Here hung those tabs that I have viewed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen?
With all apologies to the Bard and the fact that Firefox is not dead.
Yet.
It does seem to be slipping pretty quickly into the abyss of browsers of old.
January 27, 2019 Firefox had 253,877,800 active monthly users. January 31, 2021 Firefox had 219,682,300 active monthly users. July 25, 2021 Firefox had 197,874,100 active monthly users.
This is from User Activity Firefox Public Data Report so this is their own data.
In two years they lost 34,195,500 active monthly users and in two and a half years they lost 56,003,700 active monthly users.
At it's high point in 2010, Firefox had just over 31% of the browser market, today they are at 3.45%.
Top 5 Desktop Browsers on Jan 2010 StatCounter Global Stats
My big conundrum is what will be my next browser?
Unfortunately, it seems that it will most likely be a Chromium/Chrome/Brave/Etc based browser, the big decision will be who do I trust my usage data with as they all seem to track what you do at some point.
But I think I still have time to decide as we are not yet at this point.
Yet.
Then you have the email client question if you, like me, use Thunderbird, will it also go the way of the Dodo at some point if Firefox does go to the great browser beyond?
What next?
As I am running OpenSuse Tumbleweed as my daily driver with Plasma (KDE) I gave the "K" set of programs a try. Kontact/Kmail/KAddressBook/KOrganizer/Kwhatever. While I can understand and even embrace (most of the time) the "UNIX Philosophy: Doing One Thing, Well" having four separate programs for email/calendar/contacts/etc is not going to work in this day and age, at least for me, I did really try to give it a serious try for several weeks but it was more work then it should be for simple things. I have tried Evolution, Claws Mail, and a few others I can't remember at the moment and in one way or another they fall short of my needs, usually in some major way. Maybe is was the use of Outlook for many decades at work that led me down this path and while you can get an open source version of a office suite (LibreOffice) the one thing that is sorely lacking in the Linux ecosystem is an Outlook FOSS replacement with Thunderbird being the closest thing with the help of a couple of addons/extensions.