Is Firefox actually losing millions of users at an alarming rate?

Several news articles and posts online over the past few weeks have claimed that Firefox is losing millions of users every month. Most of them point to Statcounter, where a reduction in the market share is actually visible.

You can find several posts discussing the situation on Reddit, with people sharing various reasons why the market share could be declining.

Responding to the commentary, a Mozilla employee (u/skyschub, the Web Compatibility Engineer) said that Statcounter might be inaccurately reporting this information. Since it’s classified as a tracking script, using ad-blocker extensions might block the website. As a result, it could under-report the number of Firefox users.

However, this isn’t a completely valid explanation. Other browsers with increasing or stable market share also have ad-blocker extensions, and theoretically, Statcounter wouldn’t count those either.

You can take a look at the graph from Statcounter below, and sure enough, the market share dropped from 5.88% in June 2025 to 3.79% in May 2026.

While many users are switching to other browsers, I don’t personally think it’s “alarming,” since it’s a gradual reduction in the number of users and not a sudden, recent dip in the user count. A sudden drop in the recent few months should’ve been reflected sharply in the graph.

Firefox actually publishes monthly user data publicly, which doesn’t align with the claims of the browser “losing millions” either. The data shows largely stable monthly active users, with an actually increasing count of daily active users. Newly created profiles are steadily growing on average as well. While this doesn’t explain the drop in market share, the overall usage statistics are not negative, at least according to the official data.

One common complaint I keep running into: A lot of people use Chromium-based browsers because of the extension support. Since you can’t directly use Chrome extensions from the Chrome Web Store, many people consider that a deterrent.

Another potential reason for the loss of users is the rise of forks based on Firefox. Browsers such as Waterfox and Zen have recently risen in popularity, so I can surmise that some people are using these instead of the main Firefox browser.

Browsers such as Zen have an aesthetic appeal, which Firefox may lack at the moment. Mozilla is trying to fix that with the Nova redesign, which is currently in beta. The Firefox 153 beta brings a lot of refreshing design tweaks as well.

While it’s difficult to accurately infer much from the sidelines, a 15-year dev recently quit Mozilla (more on that here), suggesting some tussle internally.

We can’t say they’re not trying either. The company has recently published a full 2026 roadmap, explaining their plans for the browser and all the new features. We covered that here.

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