Is It Too Late for Firefox?

Firefox rolled out some changes to its mobile browser this week that got me curious about where they stand in the 3rd-party mobile browser race.

To do that, let's have a look at downloads of the most popular mobile browsers this year.

Chrome leads the way, as you probably expect. Opera is right behind it, which I didn't exactly expect, followed by Brave. Firefox is 4th out of 5, beating Microsoft Edge.

Here's another interesting point. Between January and October of 2021, the top 5 mobile browsers were downloaded 136,000,000 times globally, according to our estimates. That's about 5% lower than the same period in 2020. The downward slope isn't the interesting bit, though.

When you compare each app individually, you see that other than Chrome being the most downloaded browser in both years, everything else is pretty different.

A lot has changed year over year. Here's the summary:

1. Google Chrome lost about 10,000,000 downloads, but it's still the most downloaded mobile browser in the world.
2. Opera moved from #4 to the #2 most downloaded browser.
3. Brave became the #3 most downloaded browser in the world as its downloads more than doubled!
4. Demand for Firefox dropped 24% ,and its rank also dropped, from #2 to #4.
5. Microsoft Edge dropped 36% and landed in the last position.

A lot of data, I know. The gist is -- the 3rd party browser market is hot and not (yet?) set in stone. Firefox lost a good lead, but it's not too late.