Mozilla Firefox is Probably Already Below 2% in the UK (United Kingdom)
LAST summer we wrote about the risk of Firefox losing support (from Web sites) in the US, seeing it was nearing the threshold above which government sites were mandated to offer support (it's still obligatory or implicitly compulsory to support Firefox users). At the end of last year we talked about Firefox in the UK, as it had fallen to almost 2% in statCounter. Right now it's 2.33%:
LibreWolf/Firefox are still used by millions worldwide, but only somewhere less than a million in the UK, according to this (assuming not all people use the Web). LibreWolf identifies as "Firefox" by default (to evade/avoid discrimination), so it'll never be possible to tell how many LibreWolf users are "out there"; they're seen as Firefox, except neither LibreWolf developers nor Mozilla will keep data on them (it would go against this project's core aims).
So that 2.33% already (or also) includes non-Firefox browsers; not only LibreWolf users but also many Pale Moon (or similar) users probably tell sites that they are in fact Firefox. See this report from earlier this month:
Users of some of the less well-known web browsers are getting blocked from accessing multiple sites by Cloudflare's flaky browser-detection routines.Aside from reporting it on Cloudflare's forum, there appears to be little users can do, and the company doesn't seem to be paying attention.
Cloudflare is one of the giants of content distribution network. As well as providing fast local caches of busy websites, it also attempts to block bot networks and DDoS attacks by detecting and blocking suspicious activity. Among other things, being "suspicious" includes machines that are part of botnets and are running scripts. One way to identify this is by looking at the browser agent and, if it's not from a known browser, blocking it. This is a problem if the list of legitimate browsers is especially short and only includes recent versions of big names such as Chrome (and its many derivatives) and Firefox.
Liam Proven's article garnered 66 comments, some of which from users of these 'forbidden' browsers or "unsupported" Firefox-by-another-name browsers. █