On the desktop, Firefox has about 6% marketshare, and Edge, the Windows default, about 11%.
On mobile, however, Firefox is at 0.5%, and Edge at 0.3%.
A lot of people only browse the Web on a mobile platform. And the ones using those tend to use the default browser bundled with their phone; if what they have out-of-box works, they’re not going to install anything else. Apple bundles Safari, and Google bundles Chrome, so that’s what gets used.
I expect that they had something break on it and decided that it wasn’t worth the time spent fixing it, so they just blocked it so more users didn’t run into it. A simple message may be annoying to them, but at least they have a straightforward workaround then.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I use Firefox on both mobile and desktop, but it’s not too hard to see why they’d do a cost/benefit analysis like that. No one company is in the business of trying to do antitrust work, to avoid a browser monopoly, and that’d be the reason why it’d be important to have competing browsers.
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/mobile/worldwide
According to this:
On the desktop, Firefox has about 6% marketshare, and Edge, the Windows default, about 11%.
On mobile, however, Firefox is at 0.5%, and Edge at 0.3%.
A lot of people only browse the Web on a mobile platform. And the ones using those tend to use the default browser bundled with their phone; if what they have out-of-box works, they’re not going to install anything else. Apple bundles Safari, and Google bundles Chrome, so that’s what gets used.
Chromebooks are frequently used in US schools, this has to screw the statistics.
It still doesn’t explain all the extra work of detecting and intentionally blocking firefox…
I expect that they had something break on it and decided that it wasn’t worth the time spent fixing it, so they just blocked it so more users didn’t run into it. A simple message may be annoying to them, but at least they have a straightforward workaround then.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I use Firefox on both mobile and desktop, but it’s not too hard to see why they’d do a cost/benefit analysis like that. No one company is in the business of trying to do antitrust work, to avoid a browser monopoly, and that’d be the reason why it’d be important to have competing browsers.