For most of us, the pandemic has involved a lot of forced Me Time, which has almost certainly entailed many hours Staring At a Browser Window Full of Open Tabs Time.
Today—two days before the two-year anniversary of the World Health Organization’s announcement that COVID-19 had reached pandemic status—Mozilla shared statistics about what the first three months of the ensuing societal shutdown did to one category of browser use: extensions, which its Firefox browser calls “add-ons.”
Mozilla counted average extension installs from March 2020 to May 2020, and compared them to the average monthly installs for the three months prior. The extension to see the biggest growth was, of course, a helper application from Zoom Meetings. Installs of the Zoom Scheduler extension, which allows quicker scheduling and starting of Zoom video calls, jumped by 1,522%.
Given how many times I’ve had to do a frantic search in my email for the Zoom link for an imminent video meeting, I should have been among the users to install this add-on, especially since Firefox has been the default browser on my Windows laptop since 2018.
The extension with the second-biggest increase in installs was Mikhail Khvoinitsky’s Dark Background and Light Text, which essentially puts the entire web into dark mode, although you can also opt for your own combinations of text and background colors. Enough people wanted this option (perhaps because of post-10 p.m. doomscrolling?) for installs of it to climb by 351%.
The Mozilla post also highlighted some privacy-centric extensions that saw surges in interest, led by CAD Team’s Cookie AutoDelete and its 386% increase in monthly installs. That add-on deletes tracking cookies set by a tab when you close it unless you’ve designated that site as trusted—a blunt approach that, as we note, can seriously inconvenience your web experience.
Mozilla’s own Facebook Container, which blocks the social network from tracking your activity on other sites by isolating it in its own virtualized browser, got a major boost of its own, with installs spiking by 211%. Note that by March 2020, Firefox was already blocking third-party tracking across the web (and has since grown even more strict about blocking that), while Facebook itself had finally shipped the “Off-Facebook Activity” tool that lets you opt out of this tracking.
In those early months of the pandemic, Firefox’s share of the desktop browser market (as measured by StatCounter’s automated surveys) was hovering at around 8%. It’s since gradually declined to 6% and change, far below Google’s dominant Chrome and behind Apple’s Safari and Microsoft’s Edge.
