> 4.1 billion internet users, firefox has 4% market share
Note that the denominator for market share as measured by StatCounter is "page views", not "browser users".
So for example, say you have 4.1 billion users, who use their laptop and phone evenly for their web browsing. On their phone, none of them use Firefox. All of them load the same number of pages every day. In this scenario, 4% of page views corresponds to 8% of users using Firefox on laptop.
Note that these are not realistic assumptions, of course: people vary widely in terms of how many pages they load, vary widely in terms of how their web activity is split between mobile and non-mobile, etc. For example, in 2010, I would bet that the average Firefox user used the web more than the average IE user, so the StatCounter number for Firefox was inflated compared to the actual fraction of users using Firefox.
If you want to measure actual number of Firefox users, you need to use a data service that tries to measure users instead of page views (i.e. not StatCounter).
Yes, this has been a long-running problem, and was the impetus for Mozilla's attempt at FirefoxOS/boot-to-Gecko.
The current mobile situation is:
* iPhone: can't run Firefox there at all, really. There's Firefox for iOS based on WebKit like everything else on iOS, but I don't even know that StatCounter would count it as "Firefox".
* Android: Google for a long time had (and in many cases continues to have, as far as I know) agreements with OEMs that forbid a default browser other than Chrome. In some cases those agreements forbid preinstalling a non-Chrome browser at all, even as non-default. So you have to rely on people downloading an extra browser from the app store, and people don't do that much.
In addition to all that, "mobile" sites tended to be written to "WebKit", not "standards", for a while for various historical reasons. Unfortunately, at this point that's pretty deeply ingrained and people continue to do that, albeit with "Blink or WebKit" replacing "WebKit", which entrenches the problem.
I don't understand why they sunk so much money into Firefox OS when they could have much more easily released an Android spin that had Firefox by default, along with other privacy enhancements.
I think they missed a huge opportunity in about 2014/2015 to do what CyanogenMod was doing, as a clean/no-nonsense power user variant of Android. Ultimately the Cyanogen company leadership made poor choices and killed their relationship with the largest phone manufacturer that was shipping their OS on the phones (OnePlus), who decided to go and re-implement the same features in their own oxygenOS android build. Thereby killing Cyanogen as a company.
My understanding, and I could be totally wrong on this, is that at the time such an Android spin would not have been able to use things like Google's app store, and possibly things like Maps and whatnot, due to not having Google's browser as default.
A bit tangential to your point but firefox for android isn't bad. I am using it to type this.
Not as snappy or polished as chrome on android to be honest.
I personally switched to it because I felt I give enough data to Google as it is. Probably not a great reason, because they still get a lot of data from me.
Sure, I use Firefox for Android as well. The "no one" was for ease of illustration; the general point is that Firefox market share on mobile is different from desktop and that this affects per-view share more than per-user share. Of course, to the extent that someone only uses a mobile device to access the web, per-user share is affected too.
Worrying and indeed not good for Firefox, if correct.
However, when you simply multiply "browser share" with "amount of 'internet' users, you may very well make some grave mistakes. E.g. does "Browsing Tinder" count as 'internet user'? Someone updating their instagram app? If so, you do miss a lot and maybe the numbers go very far in either direction when corrected?
2010: 2 billion internet users, firefox has 30% market share => 600mio absolute users.
2019: 4.1 billion internet users, firefox has 4% market share => 165mio absolute users.
That's of course very rough and may be a severly off, but the absolute number of firefox users seem to have shrunk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/m...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/273018/number-of-interne...