An anonymous reader quotes a report from It's FOSS, written by Ankush Das: Mozilla's Firefox is the only popular alternative to Chromium-based browsers. It has been the default choice for Linux users and privacy-conscious users across every platform. However, even with all benefits as one of the best web browsers around, it is losing its grip for the past few years. I came across a Reddit thread by u/nixcraft, which highlighted more details on the decline in the userbase of Firefox since 2018. And surprisingly, the original source for this information is Firefox's Public Data Report.

As per the official stats, the reported number of active (monthly) users was about 244 million at the end of 2018. And, it seems to have declined to 198 million at the end of Q2 2021. So, that makes it a whopping ~46 million decline in the userbase. Considering 2021 is the year when privacy-focused tools saw a big boost in their userbase, Mozilla's Firefox is looking at a constant decline. Especially when Firefox manages to introduce some industry-first privacy practices. Quite the irony, eh? Just for fun, here's a timeline of our stories reporting on Firefox's download milestones from the mid-2000s:

September 19, 2004: 1 Million Firefoxes in 4 Days
December 12, 2004: Firefox Reaches 10 Million Downloads
February 17, 2005: Firefox Breaks 25 Million Downloads
April 26, 2005: Firefox nears 50 Million Downloads
July 29, 2005: Firefox Downloads Reach 75 Million
October 19, 2005: Firefox Tops 100 Million Downloads
September 11, 2007: Firefox Hits 400 Million Downloads
July 3, 2008: Firefox Breaks 8 Million, Gets Into Guinness

Ron Amadeo writing via Ars Technica: Who remembers the sudden and dramatic death of Google+? Google's Facebook competitor and "social backbone" was effectively dead inside the company around 2014, but Google let the failed service hang around for years in maintenance mode while the company spun off standalone products. In 2018, The Wall Street Journal reported that Google+ had exposed the private data of "hundreds of thousands of users" for years, that Google knew about the problem, and that the company opted not to disclose the data leak for fear of regulatory scrutiny. In the wake of the report, Google was forced to acknowledge the data leak, and the company admitted that the "private" data of 500,000 accounts actually wasn't private. Since nobody worked on Google+ anymore, Google's "fix" for the bug was to close Google+ entirely. Then the lawsuits started.

Today's class-action lawsuit, Matt Matic and Zak Harris v. Google, was filed in October 2018 and blames Google's "lax approach to data security" for the bugs. The complaint added, "Worse, after discovery of this vulnerability in the Google+ platform, Defendants kept silent for at least seven months, making a calculated decision not to inform users that their Personal Information was compromised, further compromising the privacy of consumers' information and exposing them to risk of identity theft or worse." The case website with full details is at googleplusdatalitigation.com. The case was settled in June 2020, with Google agreeing to pay out $7.5 million. After losing about half of that money to legal and administrative fees, and with 1,720,029 people filling out the right forms by the October 2020 deadline, the payout for each person is a whopping $2.15.

An anonymous reader shares a report: It has been over three months since Click Studios, the Australian software house behind the enterprise password manager Passwordstate, warned its customers to "commence resetting all passwords." The company was hit by a supply chain attack that sought to steal the passwords from customer servers around the world. But customers tell TechCrunch that they are still without answers about the attack. Several customers say they were met with silence from Click Studios, while others were asked to sign strict secrecy agreements when they asked for assurances about the security of the software. One IT executive whose company was compromised by the attack said they felt "abandoned" by the software maker in the wake of the attack.

Passwordstate is a standalone web server that enterprise companies can use to store and share passwords and secrets for their organizations, like keys for cloud systems and databases that store sensitive customer data, or "break glass" accounts that grant emergency access to the network. Click Studios says it has 29,000 customers using Passwordstate, including banks, universities, consultants, tech companies, defense contractors and U.S. and Australian government agencies, according to public records seen by TechCrunch.

Amazon has launched two programs as part of an effort to give products a second life when they get returned to businesses that sell items on its platform or fail to get sold in the first place. From a report: The so-called Fulfilment by Amazon programs, announced in a blog post on Wednesday, will help to build a circular economy, the company said. It comes less than two months after British broadcaster ITV reported that Amazon was destroying millions of items of unsold stock at one of its 24 U.K. warehouses every year, including smart TVs, laptops, drones and hairdryers.

The online giant was sharply criticized by U.K. lawmakers and environmental campaigners at the time and Prime Minister Boris Johnson pledged to look into the allegations. In a blog post on June 28, Greenpeace said ITV's investigation showed it was clear Amazon "works with within a business model built on greed and speed." The group also described the environmental and human cost of Amazon's wastefulness as "staggering."

Google has fired dozens of employees between 2018 and 2020 for abusing their access to the company's tools or data, with some workers potentially facing allegations of accessing Google user or employee data, according to an internal Google document obtained by Motherboard. From a report: The document provides concrete figures on an often delicate part of a tech giant's operations: investigations into how company's own employees leverage their position inside the company to steal, leak, or abuse data they may have access to. Insider abuse is a problem across the tech industry. Motherboard previously uncovered instances at Facebook, Snapchat, and MySpace, with employees in some cases using their access to stalk or otherwise spy on users.

The document says that Google terminated 36 employees in 2020 for security related issues. Eighty-six percent of all security-related allegations against employees included mishandling of confidential information, such as the transfer of internal-only information to outside parties. 10 percent of all allegations in 2020 concerned misuse of systems, which can include accessing user or employee data in violation of Google's own policies, helping others to access that data, or modifying or deleting user or employee data, according to the document. In 2019, that figure was 13 percent of all security allegations.

Microsoft launched its new cloud PC Windows 365 service earlier this week, and the company has already had to pause free trials due to demand. From a report: Windows 365 lets you rent a cloud PC -- with a variety of CPU, RAM, and storage options -- and then stream Windows 10 or Windows 11 via a web browser. The service reached max capacity after only a day of signups. "Following significant demand, we have reached capacity for Windows 365 trials," reads a statement from the Microsoft 365 Twitter account. "We have seen unbelievable response to Windows 365 and need to pause our free trial program while we provision additional capacity," explains Scott Manchester, director of Windows 365 program management.