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Firefox Users on iOS Have Doubled in France and Germany, From a Very Small Number to a Slightly Less Small Number
Nick Heer: They are impressive, but my interpretation of statistics like these is that one often finds percentages used like this when neither actual number is very large. Nevertheless, another indication that browser choice screens can have a positive effect for smaller browsers and, conversely, also a reminder of the power of defaults. Saying the daily users have doubled isn’t very meaningful when they don’t state the baseline. It’s a bit of a Bezos chart. And what’s the proof that this growth is from happy users — users who, upon seeing the DMA browser choice screen on their iPhones, realized only then that they wanted to switch to Firefox? Surely some number of users who switched to Firefox via the choice screen did so by mistake, because they were confused. The best case scenario is that this growth for Firefox (and presumably for other alternate browsers that qualified for the EU choice screens) means that alternative browsers have gone from a tiny usage share to a twice-as-large-but-still-tiny share, and that most of the growth comes from happy users. I see no proof, though, that the growth hasn’t at least significantly come from confused users who now wonder what happened to Safari. And either way, the DMA’s mandatory choice screen has, thus far, been relatively ineffective overall. ★
Nick Heer:
They are impressive, but my interpretation of statistics like these is that one often finds percentages used like this when neither actual number is very large. Nevertheless, another indication that browser choice screens can have a positive effect for smaller browsers and, conversely, also a reminder of the power of defaults.
Saying the daily users have doubled isn’t very meaningful when they don’t state the baseline. It’s a bit of a Bezos chart. And what’s the proof that this growth is from happy users — users who, upon seeing the DMA browser choice screen on their iPhones, realized only then that they wanted to switch to Firefox? Surely some number of users who switched to Firefox via the choice screen did so by mistake, because they were confused.
The best case scenario is that this growth for Firefox (and presumably for other alternate browsers that qualified for the EU choice screens) means that alternative browsers have gone from a tiny usage share to a twice-as-large-but-still-tiny share, and that most of the growth comes from happy users. I see no proof, though, that the growth hasn’t at least significantly come from confused users who now wonder what happened to Safari. And either way, the DMA’s mandatory choice screen has, thus far, been relatively ineffective overall.
