Why is firefox losing market share? Why don't more people use Firefox?
edited the heading of the question. I think most of us here are reasoning why more people are not using firefox (because it was the initial question), but none of that explains why it's actively losing marketshare.
I don't agree ideologically with Firefox management and am somewhat of a semi-conservative (and my previous posts might testify to that), I think Firefox browser is absolutely amazing! It's beautiful and it just feels good. It has awesome features like containers. It's better for privacy than any mainstream browser out there (even counting Brave here) and it has great integration between PC and Phone. It's open-source (unlike Chrome) and it supports a good chunk of extensions you would need.
This was about PC, but I believe even for Mobiles it looks great and it allows features like extensions (and I hear desktop extensions are coming to firefox android?), it's just a great ecosystem and it's available everywhere unlike most FOSS softwares.
So why is Firefox's market share dying?
I mean, I have a few ideas why it might be, maybe correct me I guess?
Most people don't know how to use extensions well and how to use Firefox well. (Most of my friends in their 30's still live without ad blockers, so I don't think many are educated here)
It's just not as fast as Chrome or Brave. I can't deny this, but despite of this, I find it's worthy.
It's not the default.
Many features which are Google specific aren't supported.
Many websites are just not supporting firefox anymore (looking at you snapchat), but you would be right in saying this is the effect of Firefox losing it's market share not the cause (at least for now) and you would be right.
But what else?
I might take time (a lot of it) to get back at you, thanks for understanding.
occasionally I’ll find websites that don’t work 100% because they were coded primarily for chromium based browsers. FU Google
I've never experienced any slowness with Firefox, so I don't know what people are talking about. But Chrome is still the default browser on Android and I guess it's the major reason why people are installing Chrome on their computer.
It's improved a lot recently and even surpasses Chrome in some benchmarks, but it took them a really really long time to catch up with Chrome's speed.
Chrome split up web pages into their own processes very early on, while Firefox still had to mostly run things single threaded. That made a huge difference especially on laptops with 4-8 slow threads.
Chrome also turned to the GPU for acceleration really early on too. That's also something Firefox took a really long time to catch up with.
Like many, I've been on Chromium since the single digit days, and only switched back to Firefox in anticipation of the manifest v3 fiasco.
Chrome was just way too good to not use it. Chrome beat the shit out of Firefox the way Firefox beat the shit out of IE6 back then. It was so good I sucked up the lack of extensions or Flash Player support. It was faster to load ads than use Firefox to block them.
You've hit the major notes that made the biggest difference to switching in the early days. Worth mentioning too that in order to sow that field, chromium, then billed as an open source project, lifted much of those never IE power users out of Firefox specifically as well.
Similarly, if you want patrons to tell others what's great about your new restaurant, give them at least three good things to evangelize for you.
Fast. Freebies. Friendly.
Back then, Chrome crushed it. Today, it's equivalent to a joint being oversaturated with lazy managers taking advantage of gullible, unskilled teenagers and wondering why the whole place's gone to shit.
Firefox outperforms in all the key areas IMO. It's honestly a pretty cool space.
I agree majority of the regular people don't even install a second browser on their device. My brother use chrome on android and edge on windows. Sad, but he likes it enough. I use firefox on all my devices. Because of the implication.
can anything be done legally about Chrome being the default browser on most android phones? I mean, there has to be some default browser but maybe Android manufacturers should be forced to pre-install a FOSS browser instead of chrome ig, idk (or maybe the user can be asked to install it when they are logging into their phones for the first time, this sounds better)
Iirc the some people in the EU wanted to take a look at googles almost-monopoly on the android market but I don’t think anything came out of it. It’s virtually no different from MS using Edge as default browser on Windows; as long as you can get an alternative, there isn’t anything wrong with it legally.
Because not only do you (the end user) have to go out of your way to get it, but you get spammed by Microsoft/Edge and Google/Chrome to install a "faster" and "more secure" browser. Additionally, on the mobile side, Apple is preventing all iPhone/iPad users from picking a real alternative browser that isn't just webkit re-skinned, putting half the population at a disadvantage and to their own corporate interests.
The Apple part might change quite soon, with the EU’s Digital Market Act. Apple will have to allow users to download apps from other markets than the Appstore.
Don’t get your hopeS. JIT compilation is an integral part of all modern JavaScript engines, and JIT compilation requires violating the static W^X principle that is currently mandated by iOS for security. Not to mention that allowing third party browser engines would probably increase Blink’s (Chrome, Edge) market share more than Gecko’s.
I think you think too much, most people just want a browser that works and they have one preinstalled on their phone / computer. So when you arrive and recommend Firefox they just hear "Hey ! You have a browser that works, why won't you spend time installing this one that works just as fine, I swear".
Extensions and privacy might look like killer features but they are a bit too abstract to be adoption arguments (why would you even need extensions if your browser is so good).
I used to use Firefox before Chrome came out, because it was better than IE. When Chrome came out it was a breath of fresh air. A real third option! (konqueror didn't really count). And it was faster, cleaner, lighter than Firefox. Just better at everything. So I installed it on all of my family's computers, which they allowed me to do because IE by then was so bad it was an obvious improvement even for the layman.
Then in the intervening years Firefox dwindled to basically no market share and IE died, so now Chrome isn't a third option, it's the only option. And so I switched back to Firefox basically as a political sacrifice, but there's no way I'm going to be able to convince any of my family to switch because Firefox isn't better for them in any perceivable way. It's just different and they don't care. If Firefox had 30% market share I'd almost definitely be using Chromium still myself.
So probably that, but a million times. There was a period where every nerd moved all their associated people to Chrome because it was new, great, and non-dominant. It was hip and indie. And now they're still there and there's no reason for them to move that they care about.
I'll admit I used to use Konqueror for a while. Plus I much preferred it as a file browser to Dolphin (even now I begrudgingly accept Dolphin). Problem for me was always plugins.
I've used most browsers under the sun, but I can't ethically support Chrome or Edge. I remember early versions of NS and AMosaic, Phoenix, Firebird (the latter two were what Firefox used to be called).
I will openly admit Mozilla has made some huge "WTF?" calls though. They alienated a lot of people with some of their design/technical decisions that I think fucked them more than they realised.
I've basically made my parents use firefox for 15 years now. With adblocking and cookie warning disabled and stuff like that. Since a few years they're more and more on the iPhone, not on laptop with firefox... "why are there so many advertisements on the phone? Can't you fix it like on the laptop?" Nope. I can't, you chose iPhone. Had no idea all these years how much they were shielded from bs by firefox. For an average user it just boils down to 'it's too complicated', use whatever shit software they force on them and don't ask fundamental questions... Firefox became the browser for privacy nerds, lost its mainstream appeal in the period that chrome definitely was a lot faster and smoother and was still a bit less evil corp about addons
Firefox being slow has almost nothing to do with Mozilla's incompetence or the browser's inability to handle websites.
When devs build websites, they usually build them for the most popular browser, aka Chrome. They couldn't be bothered to help the minority of people who use Firefox. Also, cost. Building a website to work with 2 different engines is more expensive than building it for just one engine that'll work for 99% of users. That's why a lot of banking websites never support FF.
Another primary reason is Google's Monopoly. Almost everyone uses some Google service or another. Google's websites are tailored to perfectly fit Chromium, not FF. This is why you'll sometimes see websites break or even crash. YouTube's recent ambient mode made the site choke quite a lot on FF. An average Joe ain't got the knowledge to know or even troubleshoot the issue and they'll just shift to Chromium, where everything just works.
Declining market share and dying are not at all the same thing. Remember that FOSS can survive without resources tha M$ and ABC have.
Anyway, what do you mean you're conservative? I don't understand at all. What values pushed you to what browsers? Laziness and defaults, maybe, but that's a different position.
Eh, even as someone who on a global political scale is left leaning, I've been hesitant to donate to Mozilla. I'd love to support the browser development, but the fact that they siphon off money from that to support political activities and organizations (especially when some of them are downright corrupt, like BLM) turns me off from that.
When I want to donate to a political organization, I'll do that directly. What I want Mozilla to do, most of all, is keep firefox (and by extension gecko) alive, and thereby maintain internet freedom.
Firefox is not a worse browser, it's just the lack of visibility. You have to want to install Firefox to try it, the only exception I know it's in Linux where most of the time it's the default browser. Google Chrome, on the other hand, is promoted each time you search anything in Google without Google Chrome.
I use Firefox everywhere, but there are a few main issues that stop me from converting people...
The lack of tab groups. This seems silly, but most people I know, especially on mobile, keep a lot of tabs open. If they're researching something,
or shopping for something they'll leave 20 tabs open. Having that in one tab group in Chrome is a better way to organize than just tons of tabs.
Sites that don't work well on Firefox. Again, specifically on mobile I run into sites that work on Chrome but not on Firefox.
General stability issues. I need to force close Firefox once or twice a day because it will just fail to load pages.
Once or twice a day!? That's crazy, I wonder if others have this problem as well. I use Firefox on PC, Linux, Android, and IpadOS and I've never even approached stability issues that bad. My assumption is there's something wrong with your device...
I love using Firefox. Have been loyal user for over 15 years. But quite a few sites just don't work as intended... including online banking, city government etc. The issue has grown a lot in recent years. It's a pickle to adjust addons for every site with issues, so j just use chrome or Edge or whatever and keep the firefox settings optimised for ad free cookie warning free trackerless experience in newspaper, YouTube etc. To me it's inconvenience is just a regular reminder that Internet has gone to shit and more and more sites contain a shitload of unnecessary bullshit no one asked for
These in my experience are always because of your privacy settings, resist fingerprinting is a good one.
I run Firefox with a hardened config and with a few privacy and security extensions so I run into this all the time. It’s frustrating sure but I usually just pop open edge, do what I need to and then close it out.
I try not to make a habit of sacrificing security and privacy for convenience unfortunately for Chrome and chromium.
In the old days Microsoft essentially conquered the web by creating specialized features only available for their web browser.
This is the reason why we still suffer with IE compatibility mode in Edge. A lot of corporations still have systems that rely on clients being IE compatible.
Google essentially does the same with their services and Chrome.
I work in IT and had to abandon Firefox because of compatibility issues that came up on a regular basis. it appears companies are simply not using it as part of their QA anymore. Also, in general the GUI theming has issues for me with the font and distinguishing highlights with my crappy vision. I tried every theme out there and for some reason apparently people writing themes just don't care to make it so you can see what is highlighted and what is not. Even The default theme sucks in my opinion. There were a number of other nits that I just kept having issues with - getting prompted on eBay to verify my identity for no reason, repeatedly, which doesn't happen on chromium and stuff like that.
I wish Apple would adopt the Firefox rendering engine and take Safari cross platform. It would give Firefox a fighting chance at the overall market.
Or they just expend their effort on the browsers that 96% of people use and not the one that 4% use. I love Firefox, but I don't think this is the conspiracy you're claiming it is.
Yep. I try to use Firefox and Safari as much as possible to get away from Chrome, but they just aren't as good. They're slow and clunky and don't get me the information I need. I really wish Apple would do something about Safari. They're the only ones with other ways to make money than our information.
Firefox was long the No 2 browser, then Chrome came along at the time that Google was cool and they actually marketed it with TV ads. It looked cooler and more modern, it had some innovative features... Firefox never recovered
This is pretty much what happened, yes. I'd offer an important expansion on "innovative features" though. Chrome was objectively faster at everything. Loading pages, starting up, all that stuff. If all you care(d) about was a super fast, modern-feeling browsing experience then Chrome was all there was.
I was one of those "fuck Bill Gates!" dudes circa 2008 or 09 or whenever Chrome came along. I had been using Firefox for years because, I dunno, nerd shit. All my nerdy buddies used it and said I should use it, so I did.
And then Chrome came along and like you say Google was the cool kid on the block. They were building out Google Fiber (remember that? Feels bad), "taking it to the man ™️!" in the form of ISPs. Oh God, how I wish they had won that fight... Even the might of Google proved incapable of breaking the collusion of government and corporations that empower the ISPs in the US...
Anyway, Google was, if I'm being fair here, doing an amazing job with PR.
They were building up and out Android OS, providing an actual competitor to Apple's (basically) first to market iOS.
Mozilla simply couldn't keep up. It was already pretty niche pre-Chrome, but post-Chrome it was just IE/Edge and Chrome basically. Firefox was left far behind by the general public, forgotten and, if remembered, remembered only as "the browser for nerds."
I'm back on Firefox now after Google's billionth threat to end adblockers in Chrome. That plus Google's clearly unethical practices. I don't agree with everything Mozilla does/has done and some of the stuff that comes prepackaged in Firefox is unnecessary in my view, BUT there's little point in denying their superiority over the competition in many ways.
I remember definitely that Firefox was the browser of choice in our house pre-Google. IE was always nasty to use and my Dad was always a tinkerer and worked with IT guys a lot so we had Firefox on PC for ages
(As a side note those same well meaning IT guys persuaded my Dad Linux was really easy to set up and use as a home PC for the whole family. Didn't end well)
Anyway, Firefox was trumping IE hands down as a family PC browser, I suppose I'm talking late 90s early naughts? Don't know exactly. But we would have been using Ask Jeeves still as our search engine before Google search launched and that made my Dad's eyes light up, because it was fast. And it was the same with Chrome when it came out. By then I'd moved out but like you say, they had the PR as the guys who were now changing things most.
And it wasn't all bs, because it was and in many ways is a very good browser. On the one hand there's definitely an element of people using what everyone else does but also, if it was a total crock of shit no one would use it. For me it's not even so much privacy but my tolerance for ads and need for a dark mode on mobile have got me back to Firefox on Android for now
People forget that chrome brought v8 with it. Without v8 chrome would have just been another hat in the ring for browsers.
V8 took JavaScript from being this little thing that did some light ajax stuff in the background, and made it the star of the show. It allowed entire applications to run in the front end with no installation. Firefox and IE couldn't match the speeds chrome could do.
Chrome running each tab in a separate process was a big deal for sites being able to have more application-like functionality without bugs slowing or crashing the whole browser.
Firefox took seven years to catch up with its own multiprocess implementation.
Less bloat and the direction of the browser. They've been around forever and they have a consistent track record. Vivaldi is a good example of why it's bad to cram every single feature into a browser creates clutter. Not to mention you're supporting the only non-Chromium browser, which we're seeing the disastrous effects of their monopoly pushing user harmful changes.
Firefox is honestly just kinda always lagging behind on supporting features. If you want to use the latest tech, Chrome is always first to have it.
One that irks me a lot of the lack of any proper PWA support. On both mobile and desktop, you can install websites as apps, and they behave like apps. Slack, Discord, Spotify, YouTube Music, and a whole bunch of others you can install as a PWA and they look just like their desktop counterparts but much lighter, they're sandboxed and safer to use, and generally perform well. You click an external link on Slack as a PWA? It opens in a new regular browser window. Push notifications get routed to the correct window when you click/tap on it.
Firefox can do that with extremely hacky extensions on desktop, and just can't on mobile. Best it can do is make a shortcut. But if you receive a notification it opens it in a new tab in the browser, it's just not nearly as good of an experience.
I rely a lot on PWAs like The Lounge to use IRC as my primary messaging app. I could wrap it in a dummy Cordova app or something but then it's still running Chrome under the hood anyway, because Firefox also doesn't support being Android's WebView plugin.
That's changing but Firefox on mobile currently only supports like a dozen extensions and that's it, you can't even force install them unless you run nightly builds.
Firefox's engine was also extremely laggy on mobile but that fortunately has also improved a fair bit recently.
Then there's all the useless features literally nobody asked for like Pocket, sponsored links in the new tab page, Mozilla VPN, and other addons they bought over time with questionable privacy policies. Just make the browser good before you venture into other bloatware.
Firefox just hasn't had any reason to be used in recent years other than not being related to Google/Chromium. And even then, we've had ungoogled Chromium forks since the beginning. It's the political party you picked for the sake of being against the other worse one.
Firefox PWAs seem to work for me on mobile. To be fair I'm on nightly, but I can see a menu item that says "install" if the webpage has a PWA manifest. I was using voyager with it for a while before they released the play store version.
Internet Explorer / Edge is not complete garbage anymore, that's not helping for sure. Also, there was a period where Firefox was actually kinda lacking. That's in the past since the "Quantum" update I'd say.
Firefox is kinda like Linux in my opinion. Yes, some games might not run on linux and some games don't run as good as on windows, but most run just fine. But since I don't use windows I don't know the difference and so I don't care about it either. Same thing with firefox, chrome might do x better, but then I have not used it in years so I just don't care about it. Blissful ignorance I suppose? Either way I am happy with linux and firefox since both have not only downsides, but plenty advantages too in my opinion.
Personally I love the ability to still pimp it out with style sheets.
And yeah, Mozilla has so many, many problems. In many ways they have become Google's pet, IMO. But most importantly they are not Google.
I think when Chrome came out Google was still a cool, hip company and Chrome fixed a lot of issues Firefox had. I used it for years. So they managed to become the normie cultural default. These people are hard to change habit-wise.
I could be wrong though. Just sort of thinking out loud.
My path was the same - there was a time when FF was messing up badly trying to keep up with Chrome, and that's when I switched to Chrome. FF then cleaned up their act, but the damage was done. Or it might simply have been that Chrome was so much slicker (and not evil) at the time. I went back to FF around the time Google merged all accounts with Chrome accounts, and I much prefer it to Chrome now. I'm sad to see it not being able to regain its past glory and serious traction. I blame it mostly on convenience, inertia and "normies" generally not carrying about the same things as some "techies".
yeah have to disagree with you there. I bought a laptop very recently (a few months ago) and it was a new release equipped with everything one might think as "modern" firefox still can't beat brave or chrome.
I use Firefox, but the above #2 is why I almost switch back.
Since using Firefox, my password manager is becoming a mess on mobile because my phone uses Google manager and my browser uses Firefox.
That by itself is almost worth paying for YouTube premium for me.
Why wouldn't I browse html files on the device that is the most portable and conveniently always by my side? When I may not have internet access?
One file that I use constantly is a simple html file which sends tasmota URLs to control my smart devices. Who needs apps? lol. I also frequently refer to personal wiki html files on my devices. And there's a few html manuals I need to refer to...
Websites glitch out more often on Firefox. I had my favorite Mastodon instance not letting me scroll back up because of some weird jittering bug that only applies to Firefox for some reason.
Back when IE was on top and Firefox was the best browser, firefox started to put a lot of bad updates, then chrome came, it was faster and firefox started to lose its marketshare, for while firefox only peformed well on linux, by the time quantum came out and it's performance was good on windows again, Chrome was already the new IE, but Google is way better at managing this leadership it than Microsoft ever was, the only technical problem it has is devouring RAM.
In my opinion, gecko being so tied to the browser is also a problem. There's a ton of browsers using Blink, that gives google a lot of control over how the web will evolve. Having other browsers using gecko that aren't Firefox forks would be great.
I've used Firefox for years and I love it on Android, but on my work laptop (MacBook) I really enjoy using Arc. The vertical tabs let me organise things better, the spaces let me isolate tabs properly in a visually pleasing way, and I don't really care for extensions on desktop as I don't really browse much outside of work. I also prefer chromium dev tools, though it isn't that bad to switch to Firefox's dev tools.
If Firefox adopts few features from Arc, both in form and function, I wouldn't mind coming back. I know sidebar exists which lets you have vertical tabs via extensions, but damn Arc does it the best so far, natively!
Edit: oh, another reason was lack of background blur effects for Google meet. It's coming soon I think (I filed it on bugzilla), but damn it was needed like 3 years ago.
I did check it and it is pretty cool. Though you've to use user css to hide actual tabs and even then it isn't as polished experience as Arc. I guess it is one of the features that needs to be part of browser chrome to be really good.
Same here, I used Firefox for a long time but Arc just captured me with its beauty and polish. Sideberry for Firefox kinda replicates the vertical tab experience, but man it's so much better when the solution is native to the app.
I used Firefox at work because my company had the enterprise version of Chrome and had a lot of options I couldn't change. Like the behavior on startup. It would only open the homepage, not reopen tabs.
I didn't find the performance gap really high when I switched from Chromium to Firefox. Even on my shitty old laptop, Firefox works fine. I have to admit though that it uses way too much memory.
I do agree with your 3rd point though. History has taught us that defaults matter a lot. Firefox isn't a default anywhere apart from linux distros and FirefoxOS was a failure.
Firefox works fine. I have to admit though that it uses way too much memory
is that why it works fine? I mean, I know it uses too much memory, but is why it's comparable to chrome, because more memory usage means it's faster or something (I am a noob)
In theory you can use memory to precompute almost everything as an acceleration technique. For example, imagine you're asked to do integer division (in some range, let's say 0 to 100) without hardware acceleration. Now you could precompute all 0 to 100 by 0 to 100 division options (10000 total), and store the result of all of them in memory. The next time you're asked to divide these numbers, you can look up the answer in memory instead of having to do the computation.
This is always a tradeoff using many heuristics and guesses for what's worth precomputing and what's a waste. Then there are also systems used (by for example Chrome) where the app looks at available RAM and stores more precomputations if the PC has more RAM.
But no, this is not why Firefox works fine. There was a rewrite of Firefox's rendering engine a few years ago, search for "Firefox Quantum" if you want to know more. They shifted to heavy GPU acceleration, which brought it on par with if not above Chrome's rendering performance.
The big issue with Firefox is that the Android app still feels unpolished, and people like to use one browser across devices for password/bookmark sync etc. They simply don't have the manpower to compete with Android Chrome, which has the entirety of Google behind it. It's basically their flagship product combining Search Engine, Android OS, Chromium and Material Design all at once.
If you've been on youtube for the past 6 months or so, there were a lot of OperaGX sponsorships given to large creators and a decent majority of people have used it, liked it, and started recommending it to others via youtube comments.
There's also the fact that chrome is the browser that, at least here, is the most well known at this point and is usually preinstalled on school computers, so this builds up familiarity.
And probably a smaller reason why is because mozilla itself - it hasn't been that great of a company and the firefox over the years has gotten somewhat worse and worse.
For me, until all below are supported Firefox can't be my primary browser.
PWA not supported and only possible with FirefoxPWA. I can't rely to anything but native, Mozilla could break FirefoxPWA any time they want.
I use my browser for my multimedia needs and I use my own Emby Server. Firefox doesn't support mkv container and the most important it desn't support HEVC. Please do not tell me about HEVC royalties and how much Mozilla would have to pay MPEG-LA. Chromium based browsers have enabled hardware HEVC decoding and they pay nothing to MPEG-LA because the royalties have been already payed by my graphics card. Mozilla simply doesn't care.
Actually in my country DuckDuckGo is the only reliable search engine left. Google started giving me a bunch of bogus results for very specific queries a couple of years ago. Sad that FF depends so much on Ma'Google.
Oh hmm I don't have that experience. If I Google an obituary for example, it automatically goes to the person correctly but I find DDG doesn't have that precision.
Because the U.S. government used the 2001 Microsoft Internet Explorer Antitrust hearings to blackmail Microsoft into government servitude: implanting NSA backdoors, not patching vulnerabilities, disabling system administration tools, constantly hiding or moving useful features. Remember from the Snowden leaks that the NSA's favorite prey is the System and/or Network Administrator who holds all the keys? But what about the guy that makes the keys, wouldn't he be the biggest prey?
I ran the speedometer 2.0 benchmark on firefox and cromite (fork of bromite), and Firefox beat chrome by like 20 points which surprised me because chrome still feels a bit faster. Maybe this is why
If it's only quality would be being foss, I would understand. But that's not case case. The main quality of firefox (I think) is that you have no chance for privacy whatsoever with other browsers. It's not just the current state of chrome, but from time to time google always does something to make chrome worse than before, and it's even expected because that is in their interest
I can relate to it, but practically privacy is the least my concern. Why should I be upset about a company abroad knowing my advertising data or history, it doesn't have any impact on my work
I can't say that I praise what they do. But when there is any practical advantage I cast aside privacy and go for it.
Entirely to my system, but for me startup of Firefox takes 40 seconds and up to a minute and the UI feels very slow and unresponsive. No other application behaves like that and I have no idea how to bugfix because Firefox seems not to create any usable logs or prints anything useful to the terminal it's started from.
Firefox is ancient and used to be a major browser before chrome. They had plenty of opportunity to sell out and didnt.
That said, firefox is shittier to use
I think a lot comes down to preinstalled SW on phones (Chrome/Safari) and the enterprise world. My rather large employer just switched from FF preinstalled to Edge for all work devices since it alreadz comes with Windows.
Maybe Firefox is missing a really compelling enterprise offering for Desktops? Everybody less savvy is on mobile anyways, which is dominated by the Duopoly Apple/Google.
Sadly, on pc many ppl that are not tech savvy assimilate internet to google chrome, I had some cases where they asked me "I want to install internet" when they means I want to install chrome to browse internet.
I remember when chrome became more known by 2009/2010 Firefox had some issues, it crashes frequently and it was a bit slower, so people who found chrome faster adopted it fastly and it was more and more recommended.
In my case I'm using FF since 2006 and I never stopped.
I have no doubt that the second that FF gains a sizeable market share they will just turn in to literally every other corporation that has ever existed. They're not special, they're not your friend. They are selling a product to make money. And while they're struggling, they are working their asses off to make a good product that beats the alternatives.
So until FF announced their intention to DC, I'm not telling a fucking soul.
I truly appreciate all of the efforts Mozilla has brought, but there are things I cannot tolerate, and @[email protected] is accurate and concise, which I'd like to expound upon.
[Mozilla] spent twenty years burning out every committed advocate with broken extensions, UI whack-a-mole, random half-baked corporate decisions, [before finally mimicking Chrome.]
Firefox's user-base was mostly nerds, and nerds' grass-roots referrals; well and truly, Firefox was a developers first browser. What happens when you have many enthusiastic nerds contributing to a project? Free-ish improvements. You still need someone to review pushes, correct merge conflicts, implement requests, prioritize feedback, and maintain the playground after all.
However, Mozilla made some questionable and unilateral decisions that alienated their user-base. For the sake of brevity, I'll list some of the issues that caused me to switch to LibreWolf. Descending importance:
Deciding developers would no longer be the target audience. (History follows. 2020 a new CEO is appointed: Mitchell Baker. Mozilla announces funding cuts to various departments, such as MDN, developer tools, and security researchers. MDN slowly loses its status as the, 1, go-to web reference and, 2, place to find the latest advancements of the web. Dev tools in Chrome gain features FF can't keep up with. Earlier in May, of this year, 2023: Mozilla begins new developer blogs in an effort to regain the gold mine they discarded, along with various other measures.)
Installing the Mr. Robot extension without warning, let alone consent. (This was 6 years ago. I should let it go.)
Whitelisting only 6 mobile add-ons. (Add-on manager now announced to be "(re-)opened" later this year.)
Making it very difficult to opt-out of said mobile add-on decision, and impossible without opting-in to telemetry.
about:config unavailability in mobile Firefox.
Massive issues in major versions, which should've been caught by beta testing if not alpha.
My biggest gripes boil down to throwing us away, and the decisions made in pursuing generic and more profitable consumers. Mostly in removing the freedom, tinkering ability, control, etc that Firefox previously provided.
Ultimately, they have contributed greatly. I don't expect they quite understand how controlling and authoritarian decisions are driving away their hardest dying supporters, but I can hope they remember their roots. I hope they can learn and change. I'd like to get some faith back in the company I was such a large fan of. I wish them all the wisdom and success they can manage. If they go the way of Netscape, I hope some other idealist nerds pick up the torch.
I wish them well, but Firefox is no longer my browser.
Specifically on Android, randomly it'll just not load a page or change tabs.
It'll also randomly just lose the entire DOM and only render a black screen.
I still put up with it but I'm hoping they can focus on UX quirks a little more.
Hashtag late but Firefox’s main downsides is that it’s tab flushing sucks compared to Edge, and there’s no native vertical tabs.
In Edge, if a tab is put to sleep, clicking it again does not require a full refresh. Why does it need to completely reload in Firefox?
I’m aware there’s extensions for tab groups and vertical tabs (I’m using Simple Tab Groups), but it should be a natively supported feature.
Add that to the fact that Firefox is now the web developer equivalent of IE6 circa 2010 - minuscule user base and requires weird hacks to get websites to look good on it - and you got a recipe for people not wanting to use it.
Also lying about being the privacy focused browser when it has a bunch of telemetry and a bundled sponsored extension I had to look up how to get rid of, that part sucks too.
Because Mozilla sucks as a company. They should be coming up with new ways to promote Firefox. Instead they are just getting paid by google and selling vpns
A lot of extensions now seem to be Chrome only (probably because Chrome has so much market share), and from what I looked into there isn't an easy way to use Chrome extensions in FF.
"select extensions" I hate this patronizing shit so much. They kill off startpages, they make it impossible to install unsigned extensions. There has to be a better way to protect users from malware than acting like this is not my computer and the software on it isn't mine to do what I want with.
I install chrome on a computer and log in, I'm immediately connected to my calendar, email, cloud storage, remote desktop, documents, and my login info is synced floor all the other things I do and will auto login for me on a large number of those sites. In short it saves me a crazy amount of time.
You can do pretty much the same thing with Firefox: you sign in to Firefox to sync your passwords and browser settings, then (assuming you're talking about Google calendar, Gmail, etc.) You can sign into your Google account with one click. That's not really any less convenient.
Besides, I've hardly ever heard of anyone moving away from Firefox to Chrome, so I doubt the reason is any sort of convenience or design superiority. I'd attribute it to the fact that most people who already use the Internet (pretty much everyone) has already settled on a browser, with chrome-based browsers being the most common. So anyone new to the Internet will just choose the favorite as the default. This is especially true considering they most new Internet users are probably kids, so they're not aware of concerns about privacy, monocultures, DRM, etc. that would drive someone to pick Firefox.
Basically, it's not that Chrome is actually better than Firefox. I think it's that the market is growing, and the most common browsers will grow more quickly than Firefox simply for the sake of familiarity.
Many would argue this is not a good thing. Plus, Google login permeates all Google services as a session and has nothing to do with the browser at that level.
For me it's a silly issue, they don't let me customize my homepage and let set extensions like tabliss on homepage on android such a basic feature yet not available also external download manager implementation on android is horrible
Ever since the first release, I've tried Firefox a few times. Each time I was left with a feeling of needing dozens of extensions to get it up to par with the browser I was using at the time (mainly Opera and now Vivaldi). The extensions I found were never customisable enough, and would often break and/or be abandoned after a while.
Don't get me wrong: Chrome, IE, Edge, and Safari are worse - each time I used them I got the urge to throw my computer out the window after just a few minutes. But Firefox is just not customisable enough to my liking, and extension are IMO not the answer.
How could that possibly be? It's a web browser. You know that right? It sounds like you're trying to turn it into some other type of application.
I use like 5 extensions for privacy reasons and 5 for preference reasons. This all makes my browsing experience VASTLY BETTER, not just tolerable or something. These are all adding features, some of which chrome specifically is idealistically against (the Internet without ads or as much tracking). If you took all these extensions away, Firefox would still be functionally just as good as chrome if not better.
So yeah it always blows my mind when people claim how lacking in features Firefox is. What are you even talking about?
Note that I explicitly said Chrome is worse. And "dozens" was likely an exaggeration. But yes, compared to Vivaldi, Firefox has very little customisation.
I actually switched away from Firefox to Vivaldi a few months ago mainly for 2 reasons.
Firefox's profiles are dogshit. They are almost a hidden feature and are very cumbersome to use.
The Android browser support for certain types of extensions is dodgy. Using uBlock Origin delays the loading of all webpages by a few seconds for some reason. There is a Github issue about this that has been open for a few years now.
I want the browser I use to be on both Android and desktop. Vivaldi has been OK so far.
I do miss a lot of the good stuff from Firefox, especially their address bar. For some reason I find it much better than anything on Chromium based browsers. Firefox's is much snappier and is correct with it's suggestions the majority of the time.
I also like Firefox's sync between devices to be much better.
When those 2 issues are resolved I will come back, but as it stands now it's a hassle for my needs.
The thing with Firefox is that it's not the best at performance, especially on phones where the browser can be laggy. I use Ungoogled Chromium instead which is Chrome without Google and some nice tweaks !
Firefox on android is terrible. The UI is awful (how hard is to create a usable bookmark system?) and forced opening a new tab are my two pet peeves. Also, it is much, much slower than a chromium based browser in my experience and seems to take a lot more memory. Also, occasionally I'll find websites that don't work 100% because they were coded primarily for chromium based browsers. FU Google.
I don’t use anything else. I don’t like the long list of folders that doesn’t clearly show the tree hierarchy, ie. I can’t easily identify the child/parent relationship. The visual difference between parent and child is too minimal for my eyes. I realize it’s subjective but I really don’t like it.
I personally use Fennec and Bromium whenever using Android (I'm a sick fuck who hot swaps between an iPhone and a Google Pixel phone). Fennec for a lot of stuff is fine, but much like the default Firefox, it's still slow- although better. Bromium and other Chromium based browsers on Android, especially on older shittier hardware, are really hard to beat. I find myself using Bromium a lot just because it's simply faster. Firefox/Fennec with native support for actual ublock origin though... nothing beats that browsing experience as far as replicating real desktop browsing. Bromium can't keep up and Google doesn't want Chrome to. Brave can offer a similar blocking experience but at what cost? I fucking H A T E crypto and even their features that you can turn off, just seeing references to them and such pisses me off. Honestly wish someone would spitefully fork Brave anonymously and remove any crypto references. Last time a team did it openly Brave got pissy and tried to get the project taken down... Even though it's open source. So, fuck them.
Most people don’t know how to use extensions well and how to use Firefox well. (Most of my friends in their 30’s still live without ad blockers, so I don’t think many are educated here)
All browsers have extensions, even Safari. This has nothing to do with FF particularly
It’s just not as fast as Chrome or Brave. I can’t deny this, but despite of this, I find it’s worthy.
Firefox is now a memory hog as bad as Chrome, but doesn't offer speed and responsiveness, which is kind of a shitty trade-off
It’s not the default.
Neither is Chrome, yet people actively download and install it.
Many features which are Google specific aren’t supported.
True
Many websites are just not supporting firefox anymore (looking at you snapchat), but you would be right in saying this is the effect of Firefox losing it’s market share not the cause (at least for now) and you would be right.
Thank Mozilla for this. They're too busy with other shit and between feature removals and crappy UI changes, they've managed to loose a huge amount of users. I used to be one of them. Now I wouldn't touch FF with a 10 feet pole. I simply refuse to give Mozilla more visibility.
Firefox lost it's shares to normies because it was bad. Then it lost shares of tinkers because it moved extension, user agent and so on to chromium. Small market shares means developers don't give a damn about testing on firefox. Firefox doesn't show correctly pages and has no good support for pwa, microsoft teams etc. Chromium invents new things wich only edge and chrome have/support. Normies use browser wich just work out of the box for work and pleasure. It's a circle. You can tinker with your niche browser but massed decides what is what. Chrome/Edge are just better for every day use. Simple as that.*
I suppose I never considered switching off of Chrome because I didn’t need my browser to do anything better for me. I’ve always been fine with Chrome’s speed, the UI is nice, and in general I don’t experience any issues with it.
Despite the memes, Firefox was the one which decided it wanted to deep throat 30gb of my ram by default for no discernable reason so I stopped using it. Only extentions I had installed were ad block and the reddit enchantment suite. Since then I've been really enjoying the video pop out of opera.
Some time ago Firefox started eating tons of RAM. I googled a bit and found it was actually AdBlock Plus eating RAM, so I switched to uBlock Origin. But not all people switched to another extension, some of them switched to anotger browser.
If you like Opera try Vivaldi, it's made by the same guy who did OG Opera and has a lot of the same features but the ad and tracker blocking is much better.
It's got video pop out (most do, but only V and Opera/GX had good controls for miniaturized video.)
It doesn't have native integration for features some people find incredibly useful. For example, tab stacking and the eternally useful side bar of Opera/Vivaldi. These features are hand waived away by FF fans but to those that find them integral it's worth staying on a browser that doesn't require bloating it up with extensions just to replicate the baked in features of another offering.
People are starting to realize that all the "Mozilla is the hero in the fight against chromium!" Bullshit is really just talking points since they're funded primarily by Google. Taking the bite out of any moral arguments to use it. Convincing the couple hundred thousand fediversians to switch would be consider a rounding error in the global user base of chrome, and the future of the web will continue to evolve as browser suppliers find ways of circumventing whatever crap Google cooks up. Nothing is ever "the end." As long as software exists something will be designed to crack it.