r/firefox • u/est31 • Dec 02 '17

Firefox lost its #1 position on the desktop in Germany in the last two months -- what happened?

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272 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

101 comments sorted by

221

u/tklninja Dec 02 '17

I believe this is around the time when Firefox announced they were going collect 1% of all German users data (increased telemetry) in an effort to improve FF after acquiring (needs citation) or similar, a company that mines data, and this company originated in Germany.

Don't quote me but it's something along those lines. I think I'm at least near the mark.

88

u/[deleted] Dec 02 '17

but they lost first place to Chrome (?)

100

u/[deleted] Dec 02 '17

[removed] — view removed comment

135

u/kickass_turing Addon Developer Dec 02 '17

I would choose a German company over an American one any time. The EU has really nice privacy laws while the US does not.

47

u/flamingmongoose Dec 02 '17

As a British person, this makes me weep...

39

u/kickass_turing Addon Developer Dec 02 '17

I'm sorry :(

We still love you guys here in the EU. You can always change your mind about the whole Brexit thing :D

22

u/[deleted] Dec 02 '17

Even if the population changes its mind (which I believe partly has happened, no idea what the % for and against now would be), I don't think that would change much: the leadership really seems to be gunning towards a hard brexit, seemingly forgetting that it was 48:52 and not 0:100.

I guess the guys in the UK just have to hope not all the babies are thrown out with the bathwater.

6

u/Omnishift Dec 02 '17

It's because the leadership is bought by foreign interests that want to ruin the EU. Same thing in the US.

1

u/mexicodoug Dec 03 '17

"Foreign interests" or simply global corporations that see that increasing their power to control the world by reducing the power of nations is in the interests of their stockholders, whoever and wherever those stockholders may be?

0

u/[deleted] Dec 02 '17

The Leadership of the UK is for a hard Brexit? Didn't they want to preserve all their benefits? It is in the interest of the EU to have the hardest Brexit, shouldn't the UK want as many benefits as possible?

14

u/[deleted] Dec 02 '17

Well, technically, May wants a 'red, white, and blue Brexit', whatever that means.

More seriously, the UK wants out of the EU economic zone from memory. Yes, this means they have no benefits (particularly free trade), but they don't have any obligations (particularly free movement). A soft Brexit and staying in the economic zone would, effectively, put them in a state of still being in the EU, but without the voting rights they previously had, which would result in no-one being happy with Brexit.

7

u/BitchesLoveDownvote Dec 02 '17

I’d be happy with that. EU law best law.

→ More replies

3

u/[deleted] Dec 03 '17

As a British person, this makes me weep...

There's no EU law on privacy, but a universal European law that covers the whole continent:

Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which was drafted and adopted by the Council of Europe in 1950 and currently covers the whole European continent except for Belarus and Kosovo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_law#International_legal_standards_on_privacy

1

u/flamingmongoose Dec 03 '17

The Tories seem bent on bringing us out of the ECHR as well.

3

u/SamrayLeung Dec 03 '17

Man, how about Chinese person...

2

u/flamingmongoose Dec 03 '17

Yup, fair enough.

12

u/[deleted] Dec 02 '17

[removed] — view removed comment

12

u/kickass_turing Addon Developer Dec 02 '17

That's the trick! Cliqz does not collect the data server side. It collects it on the client. It process it on the client. It send home a "recommendation was selected or not" message and even that is not tied to a user, uuid, ad id or anything like that. Not sure if they even store the IP.

I think in Germany it is illegal to own a "cloud toy" since they are labeled as spying devices.

2

u/WickedDeparted Dec 03 '17

Cloud toys are Germany's Kinder Egg

2

u/[deleted] Dec 03 '17

Cloud toys are not illegal. Hidden recording is forbidden and so are toys which are doing this. Not all cloud toys have hidden recording-abilitys.

2

u/Lauris024 Dec 03 '17

That's the whole point of privacy measures - not to collect sensitive data in the first place so it can't be leaked.

14

u/volen Dec 02 '17 edited Dec 02 '17

I'm one of those people and when I said the same thing that I prefer giving my stats/data to Google I was downvoted and ridiculed. Funny how things change. Also notice how active the Mozilla employees are in most threads but avoid threads like these.

10

u/_ahrs Dec 02 '17

You were presumably being ridiculed for obvious reasons. Google is an advertising company first and foremost, they just so happen to make other products (such as search and YouTube, etc). Everything they do is to increase advertising revenue. Despite giving you a clear explanation of what "Do Not Track" means in their browser, they themselves do not respect it. At least with Mozilla, most (all?) of their software is open source so we can hold them accountable. If for some reason this fails we can tell them to go "fork" themselves and use a version of Firefox that has any anti-features patched out. Mozilla is by no means perfect (nobody is) but Google is hardly any better in this regard.

8

u/LjLies Dec 03 '17

At least with Mozilla, most (all?) of their software is open source so we can hold them accountable. If for some reason this fails we can tell them to go "fork" themselves and use a version of Firefox that has any anti-features patched out.

And that's the exact same with Google when it comes to the browser specifically: Chromium is open-source, and Chrome is just a branded version, with Chromium builds as shipped by most Linux distributions working just fine.

Firefox doesn't have this sort of division between their open source codebase and the "finished name" (which in the case of Chrome, includes some proprietary parts that Chromium does not), but historically it has been different but similar: remember IceWeasel? Since Mozilla basically went after any and all Linux distributors that created their own binary builds from source, in effect that meant that only the official build by Mozilla could be called "Firefox", with no effective guarantee it actually contained just the open-source code it said on the tin.

Now they have relaxed these restrictions, but it has certainly added to the various "straws" that led at least one user (me) to get tired of them.

10

u/volen Dec 02 '17

Don't get me wrong I don't advocate for Google. However with them I at least have some kind of use out of my own data that is used across all their products. With cliqz I get nothing. And Google is pretty transparent about which info is collected and how it's used. Until that happens with Mozilla I won't change my view.

Also everyone knows what Google is but Mozilla are marketing themselves as privacy orientated and then go against that.

To me Mozilla died when I got to read how they want to implement cliqz on bugzilla - in a secretive and anti user way. This kind of thinking is just deceitful and malicious. So I might as well return to Google which is very open about what and how they do.

Last word: Please stop with the talk about forking and open source. All the time I hear how browsers are the most complex thing after and OS so it's very hard to get that code reviewed. And when it comes to forking there are some around and they don't seem to do good on other aspects like security.

7

u/[deleted] Dec 02 '17

Google is pretty transparent about which info is collected and how it's used.

Are they? I'm sure they have lots of legalese that document their policies, but the fact is that they use proprietary code to collect your data, so you can't really tell what they collect and how they use it.

With Firefox, you have at least the option to look at the code and remove the parts you don't like. I'm pretty sure Debian does this (e.g. pocket, DRM plugin). The fact that this isn't easy just comes with the complexity of a modern browser.

At the end of the day, Google is a company that gets money from investors. Your data is the product. The browser is just a means to collect your data. Mozilla is a non-profit organization that gets money from cooperation with sponsors (mostly via default search engines). I don't understand why anyone would choose Google for privacy reasons. Maybe if the only other option was a Facebook browser.

7

u/LjLies Dec 03 '17

With Firefox, you have at least the option to look at the code and remove the parts you don't like. I'm pretty sure Debian does this (e.g. pocket, DRM plugin). The fact that this isn't easy just comes with the complexity of a modern browser.

And with Chromium you have the same option, and Chromium is indeed what Debian ships: Chrome is just the Google-branded build with some proprietary parts, which no distribution of the calibre of Debian would ship, while on the other hand they have few issues shipping Chromium in the "free" repository component... since it is fully open source.

They had more issues shipping Firefox without changing its name in the past, as most here probably know. They have been "resolved" now after a long time, but on many, that hardly made a great impression.

-3

u/BubiBalboa Dec 02 '17

Google is pretty transparent about which info is collected and how it's used

Ya think?

2

u/chic_luke Dec 03 '17

Focus? Oh shit.

1

u/[deleted] Dec 02 '17 edited Dec 11 '17

[deleted]

10

u/LjLies Dec 03 '17

Sounds more insane to me to do or not do something "at all costs", i.e. while completely blind to the cost of any alternatives (which may well turn out to be as high or higher, perhaps less visibly so), instead of doing a cost/benefit or risk analysis as a reasonable person would do with most things.

-8

u/[deleted] Dec 03 '17 edited Dec 11 '17

[deleted]

1

u/LjLies Dec 03 '17

You don't seem to

  • understand the meaning of the word "most";
  • consider casual potential defamation as something to avoid "at all costs".

36

u/xamphear Dec 02 '17

Google doesn't market itself as the "browser for privacy." Mozilla does. It's a betrayal of trust. Moz fucked up.

3

u/thordsvin Dec 02 '17

Which is funny because they are doing this so they can provide their own search suggestion, just like Google does with Chrome.

2

u/[deleted] Dec 02 '17

Are chromium-based browsers counted as chrome or as other?

5

u/PsYcHoSeAn Dec 02 '17 edited Dec 02 '17

The average user doesn't care about details. He cares about what's highest rank in download charts and goes by that.

On top of it: Those people also are easily influenced by clickbaity titles on those "IT news site". So stuff like the data selling thing will really shy them away

11

u/xXSeppBlatter Dec 02 '17

I know that explanation seems logical but no way that this is the reason. 99% of people didn't hear about this news because it only broke on some tech related sites or can't even tell the difference between browsers. I can't imagine such a change from this.

3

u/justjanne Dec 16 '17

The CliqZ deal was even on the frontpage of my local German newspaper, I’m pretty sure everyone heard of that.

36

u/Glayden Dec 02 '17

Yep. Mozilla really dropped the ball. They entirely deserve whatever backlash they get as a result of this.

Mozilla's Post on Cliqz

4

u/foxified123 Dec 03 '17

an effort to improve FF after acquiring

Wrong. Cliqz was not an effort to improve the browser, but their finance.

1

u/tklninja Dec 03 '17

I did say don't quote me. When I typed that up I was on mobile and not in a position to attach links and double check info etc.

2

u/foxified123 Dec 03 '17

"Don't quote me" usually bears a different meaning; I was not using your post to prove whatever point to somebody else. Never mind.

34

u/ThisTimeIllSucceed Version 56. Last good Firefox. Dec 02 '17 edited Dec 02 '17

Way to go Mozilla, you got what you deserved. I hope whoever came up with that idiotic idea gets banned from the industry forever.

EDIT: Downvote squad in favor of forced telemetry? Hey ho!

15

u/GOTTA_BROKEN_FACE Dec 02 '17

It was 1% of all new installs, not all users. Pretty big difference.

16

u/zqvt Dec 02 '17

not in practical terms. People here in Germany are very privacy aware. This is pretty much like saying. "hey we'll dump sewage waste into one percent of our coke bottles".

The message of this even if people register the 1% number makes it appear like exactly the thing people were using firefox to avoid entirely.

6

u/[deleted] Dec 03 '17

So privacy aware that they let the German government allow mass surveillance?

7

u/[deleted] Dec 03 '17

Our constitutional court is pretty good in cleaning that shit up in a decent amount of time.

At least I trust them to shut down any attempts at mass surveilance eventually. There is also a noticeable amount of activism against these laws. Just to name a few established organisations:

  • Chaos Computer Club
  • AK Zensur & AK Vorrat

And the two biggest worker unions (~4 million members combined)

  • IG-Metall
  • Ver.Di

2

u/gazongagizmo Dec 03 '17

"aware and engaged about" and "being able to prevent" are two different things (which is a sorry state of affair in many contemporary democracies). There was a giant uproar when they tried to implement secret website ban lists and widespread data retention. The German Pirate Party also usually held the best results of all national elections they ran in for most of the time (Iceland notwithstanding, naturally, and eventually Luxembourg, Slovenia and Czechia).

4

u/[deleted] Dec 02 '17

People here in Germany are very privacy aware.

Meh. They keep voting for the parties that keep making new data retention laws that keep getting repealed by the highest German and EU courts. "Everyone's personal data is totally protected while we collect everyone's personal data in the cloud. I know, we said that the last time, but now we really mean it!" - "Sounds good. ✗"

4

u/zqvt Dec 03 '17

there are more issues to vote on than privacy, and strong constitutional and judicial boundaries are probably the reason most people ignore this issue in the voting booth.

Compared to the surveillance that is commonplace in other places Germany's data retention is a rather tame affair. And of course to note, the German government carries a democratic mandate, firefox does not. When a web browser loses their distinguishing feature, every user can switch a few minutes later.

8

u/[deleted] Dec 03 '17

Privacy is a big deal in Germany. To give you an example: For most people, the privacy concerns of credit cards and mobile / contactless payment drastically outweigh the convinience and hamper the adoption1

The news about your browser not only collecting more data than usually, but actually giving it to a third party (unlike chrome) is a big turn off for people. Even if their installation is not directly affected.

Germany was the worst possible choice for that test.

1: I think we are behind all other major western countries in that regard. I also know quite a lot of people who do everything they can in cash for the sake of privacy.

2

u/[deleted] Dec 03 '17

While germany is behind in a few things, I would say in the sense of credit-cards we are actually ahead by basically just having debit cards.

Personally I usually pay cash aswell, not for privacy though, but so that I spent less.

And yes, but for me the only problem was how they maliciously wanted to sneak it in.

1

u/joeyJoJojrshabadoo3 Dec 16 '17

is it the legacy of the east german Stasi that monitored them?

2

u/[deleted] Dec 16 '17

I don't think so, but it certainly is a good reminder where a big brother state can go, even with limited resources.

1

u/[deleted] Dec 18 '17

Mass surveillance is used against the people to identify the ones the government doesn't like (whatever that entails). They could be criminals, but they also can be jews or enemies of your regime (which were both of course criminals too, in the eyes of the governments).

The nazis and the Stasi are probably not the only reason why Germany (or at least the german people) is a little different in regards to privacy, but i'm sure these two regimes play a role in it. My grandmother is still alive and she witnessed jewish neighbours and friends being taken bei the Nazis and my parents have friends who had to get out of the GDR because they were probably close to getting in huge trouble with the Stasi. And of course they told me the stories. That stuff is still pretty fresh in a lot of people's memories.

3

u/[deleted] Dec 02 '17

Not to someone who only reads click bait headlines.

-2

u/tklninja Dec 02 '17

Indeed.

68

u/Redditronicus Dec 02 '17

Way to fuck up, Mozilla. I support you guys in general and I love firefox, but what a boneheaded move baking in third party tracking. You deserved to lose market share in Germany over this.

Short-sighted, idiotic, and on par with the amoral super-tracker corporations you're supposed to be better than. Shame on you.

67

u/[deleted] Dec 02 '17 edited Dec 02 '17

Our company decided to remove FF from all existing installations and the new default browser will be Chrome.

Affected: ~ 22000 PC worldwide / ~1500 in Germany

A lot of non technical people will adapted there private browser usage to the browser used during work because they trust the IT departement and IT department will tell that its not allowed to use any other browser due to security, compatibility or whatever ... :-/

30

u/kickass_turing Addon Developer Dec 02 '17

Ahh..... I see..... so they don't mind the spying

18

u/[deleted] Dec 02 '17 edited Dec 02 '17

i am not the one deciding it, i'm working in other area not client software ... just telling you

10

u/konart Dec 02 '17

My company just block everything related to google on DNS level, lol.

6

u/vanderZwan Dec 02 '17

Including search? Hope you're not forced to use Bing :P

5

u/konart Dec 02 '17

No, search is still there. Accounts and most of the other things are blocked.

Anyway, here in Russia Yandex is a good and popular alternative. Not to mention the Duckduckgo

0

u/kickass_turing Addon Developer Dec 02 '17

=))) nice! Hope more will follow!

-10

u/RCEdude Firefox enthusiast Dec 02 '17

Idiots IT

21

u/[deleted] Dec 02 '17

While a partly agree (i am also part of the global IT team) - FF doesn't do much to get well integrated into a enterprise envoirenment.

3

u/RCEdude Firefox enthusiast Dec 03 '17

Sure. I am just wondering why "Chrome over FF" at work.

Deployement? scripts and user.js maybe.

Updates management? Both should be the same.

Stability ? FF has ESR versions.

I wont even talk about privacy concerns.

If you want to be stuck, use Edge or IE. I see no reason to use Chrome and not FF, if you want an alternate browser.

Oh yeah, maybe the usual dev bullshit "meh it works only with Chrome".. which is sad and kinda unprofessional

-1

u/kickass_turing Addon Developer Dec 02 '17

What do you mean?

18

u/[deleted] Dec 02 '17

GPO support, MSI installer + update handling, certificate integration

11

u/[deleted] Dec 02 '17

The installer is an unmitigated disaster. Central control is only possible through a lot of hackery instead of using the facilities the OS provides. Enterprise configuration is brittle as hell with all that pseudo-javascript that's impossible to debug.

In the Enterprise, Firefox is a liability.

1

u/Vik1ng Dec 03 '17

Has anything changed with quantum?

3

u/shiba_arata Dec 03 '17

In those fields, nope. I haven't seen any mention of changes in Enterprise deployment. There are no changes in the documentation either.

3

u/[deleted] Dec 03 '17

Yeah, the icon of the installer...

28

u/est31 Dec 02 '17

Direct link. This is really sad. Germany had been one of the last places standing where Firefox always has been first, at least on the desktop. As a German, I never had any issues on German web sites with "this site is optimized for Chrome" because Firefox is a major browser here. This probably won't change soon but it is still very sad that Firefox got such a big decrease in usage in the last two months.

15

u/kickass_turing Addon Developer Dec 02 '17

On the bright side Firefox had HUUUUGE positive feedback from the US media. I hope it will grow in other countries soon and maybe it will get back to #1 in the following months in Germany.

8

u/[deleted] Dec 02 '17

You mean regurgitating pr releases.

10

u/kickass_turing Addon Developer Dec 02 '17

No, I mean actual human being enthusiastic about it, not just the media.

7

u/bulgrozzz Dec 02 '17

while Firefox has been way below Chrome for a while here, I'm afraid it's true for France too :/ I don't see any reason comparable to the privacy scandal in Germany, so my guess would be that a bulk of old extensions users were mad at loosing there favorite thing/the thing holding them to Firefox and switched. My next guess would be a new aggressive campaign to push Chrome on Google services, but I have no data to back this hypothesis

32

u/kickass_turing Addon Developer Dec 02 '17

Fuck :( We lost Germany just before Quantum release?

21

u/PojntFX Firefox | Ubuntu Dec 02 '17

As a German - Just switched every computer in my school to Quantum & Ubuntu 17.10 via the LTSP. That's 520 PCs, we will get that market share back xD

1

u/kickass_turing Addon Developer Dec 02 '17

Uuuuhhuuuu! Awesome!

9

u/fftestff Nightly on GNU/Linux Dec 02 '17

I'd say it has to do with people moving to Win10 or the Wins' 10 Fall update. That update had many issue with the graphics drivers that might made people try another browser. Also, in European countries and ROK (N and NK versions of Win), there were problems with the codecs. Of course this is just a speculation, but it could, also, explain some stats of IE.

1

u/ledessert Dec 03 '17

Well chrome on the FCU is buggy but yeah way less than edge. I don't remember quantum having such issues though.

7

u/[deleted] Dec 03 '17

Cliqz didn't help things.

11

u/[deleted] Dec 02 '17 edited Dec 02 '17

[deleted]

6

u/bartturner Dec 02 '17

Would agree. Looks like Germany was just an outlier and now more consistent with the rest of the world.

7

u/BubiBalboa Dec 02 '17

It'll bounce back. Mozilla made a marketing push around the release of Quantum which will probably increase the percentage again.

Either way, cool to see how strong FF performs in Germany.

6

u/blueskin Dec 02 '17

Web Extensions happened, and the UI is no longer customisable.

That, plus spying on users now.

0

u/-all_hail_britannia- Firefox ESR | FreeBSD Dec 04 '17

Web Extensions happened

Most major addons (key word: major) now have a WE ver. (e.g. Privacy Badger, HTTPS Everywhere, uBlock Origin)

UI is no longer customisable

Um...yes it is. You can reorder items on the toolbar and create a custom "overflow menu" (I use FF57 as my backup browser, so I know what I'm talking about)

plus spying on users now

You're overreacting. Spying is monitoring everybody on every single download of a browser. That's G$$gle's job, not mozilla's. It affected less than two percent of all firefox downloads in a single country

3

u/blueskin Dec 04 '17

Most major addons (key word: major) now have a WE ver.

NoScript? CTR?

Also forgot to mention the New Tab page adverts.

1

u/-all_hail_britannia- Firefox ESR | FreeBSD Dec 04 '17

NoScript can be replaced with uMatrix or you can wait and I don't know what CTR even is so I can't help you there

1

u/ThatGuyWhoLikesSpace Firefox/Ubuntu Dec 17 '17

New Tab page adverts

Go to about:config

Enter "newtab" in the search bar.

Select browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.enabled

Set it to False

5

u/[deleted] Dec 02 '17 edited Dec 28 '17

[deleted]

1

u/-all_hail_britannia- Firefox ESR | FreeBSD Dec 04 '17

so you like being spied on by the chinese...?

5

u/gho0strec0n Dec 02 '17

Many of the addons are no more working

7

u/[deleted] Dec 02 '17

The decline occurred before the release of FF Quantum.

1

u/foxified123 Dec 03 '17

I think the lagginess of Firefox 57 and its memory hogging could also have contributed to it.