Mozilla Firefox hemorrhaged practically 46 million customers within the final three years, the corporate’s personal Public Data Report reveals a gradual and troubling decline in recognition for a browser that serves as one of many final critical opponents to Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome.

Colloquially referred to as Firefox, Mozilla’s browser exploded onto the scene in 2002 with the express intention of disrupting the monopoly Safari and Chrome had lengthy loved and offering internet customers with a higher range of choices.

But as a Reddit thread by u/nixcraft lately identified, Firefox’s endurance seems to be in jeopardy: While Firefox’s desktop consumer had about 244 million reported lively month-to-month customers in 2018, that quantity has sagged to simply beneath 50 million within the intervening years. The drop-off means that customers are migrating in droves to Chromium-based browsers like Google Chrome, which occurs to return conveniently pre-downloaded on Android, and Microsoft Edge, which serves because the default internet browser for Windows.

In basic, web sites do are likely to optimize for Chrome nowadays in order that their pages will load sooner, and Google’s search engine at present promotes the browser to its billions-strong each day person base, offering a considerable increase.

Firefox has made changes to remain aggressive lately, together with tweaks to its default monitoring safety settings meant to safeguard customers’ privateness. But some have argued that the fixes don’t go far sufficient and {that a} lack of considerable efficiency updates—coupled with a complicated collection of UI modifications for Firefox 89—have brought about the model to lose its aggressive edge lately.

Even with the worrisome loss, Firefox’s lively month-to-month customers sat at a median of 198 million on the finish of Q2 in 2021, which is nothing to sneeze at. As the browser slips in recognition, it’s possible not going away anytime quickly—which suggests there’s nonetheless time so that you can change to a much less mainstream different if you wish to hold your vary of browser choices various within the years forward.