TL;DR: iOS Safari is more than an inconvenience for developers, it’s the fundamental reason interoperability has been stymied in…
Firefox being irrelevant and Safari coming to the rescue against Chrome is a pipedream. Apart from their upper management issues and community unfriendly UI department, Firefox is doing just fine imo.
Firefox’s stats look bad because they block trackers by default (enhanced protection) and most news sites and tech “journalist” take a user stats off of a tracking company (statcounter), which depends on script placed on websites to “track” users which is blocked.
Firefox users are also more likely to use superior adblocks and privacy extensions which doesn’t do its usage metrics any justice. There are also popular forks which come with these things inbuilt which are still Firefox.
Apple should start allowing alternative browser engine on iOS and also start blocking trackers by default too, since it so overwhelmingly likes to market itself as “privacy friendly” and see how soon its usage stats drop.
This is coming from a Firefox user who remebers the founding of Mozilla and the company name being a combination of Mosaic and Godzilla.
If tracking being off by default was the issue, the share of Firefox users should be consistently under 1% because who even turns on tracking?
The reality is, nobody outside of tech circles uses it anymore. Hell, a lot of devs even prefer to not support Firefox if they want to do something non-standard that Chromium allows and Firefox doesn’t.
Safari sucks but it has actual usage numbers and is currently the only reason not to put a big ass “this site only runs on Chromium” error on a lot of websites.
The Safari-Chromium illusion of choice might be a better deal for iOS users but that would still be only 2 browsers to choose from. Mozilla ain’t gonna invest in anything that isn’t AI or advertising. Firefox on iOS is a pipe dream.