An obscure guideline for developers of U.S. government websites could hasten the long-running decline of the Mozilla Firefox browser. There are already many websites of large public and private entities that lack proper support for Firefox; and this situation will only get worse in the near future, so one commentator said: "The fox's ocher paws are dangerously close to the edge of the slippery slope."
The United States Web Design System (USWDS) provides a comprehensive set of standards that guide many website builders across the U.S. government. Its documentation for developers borrows from its UK counterpart's "2% rule": "...we officially support any browser with more than 2% usage, as observed by analytics.usa.gov. (Firefox has a market share of 2.2%, based on traffic statistics from the first ninety days)."
You might ask, "So what?" This is just for U.S. government web developers. It won't affect any other web developers". In fact, it's very possible:
1. Once Firefox slips below the 2% threshold in government visitor analysis, USWDS will tell government website developers that they no longer need to support Firefox.
2. After the news comes out, not only the front-end development community, but also the enterprise IT departments served by some network developers will quickly know about it. Many companies have extensive business dealings with the government, so any government initiatives in IT will affect corporate initiatives.
3. Businesses see this change as an opportunity to reduce development costs and shorten delivery times, as it provides an excuse to remove some testing (and in rare cases specific code) from the development workflow.