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 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.
Corporations hate freedom. Imagine that.
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.
Why make the effort to switch to Firefox, if the browser that came installed with your device works?
Or, more realistically, people don’t even grok the concept of a web browser.
Bingo. We live in the smartphone era where the average user cannot differentiate between facebook (the app) and internet (the web).
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.
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.
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It’s uses safari’s engine, which is the only one allowed by Apple. Doesn’t matter what browser you download from the store.
All browsers on iOS are just reskinned Safari, because that’s the only thing iOS allows you to install.
This is a really great reason not to use iOS.
Spent twenty years burning out every committed advocate with broken extensions, UI whack-a-mole, random half-baked corporate decisions, and finally just giving up and being “like Chrome but.”
Meanwhile Google engages in blatant anti-competitive behavior to claw ever more market-share away from everything and everyone, and American politics are too much of a dumpster fire to stop them.
Literally the only other browsers that are other browsers are Firefox and Safari, and people only use Safari because iOS is a prison. iPhone users will insist their reskinned Safari webview is-too Firefox or Chrome or whatever, and then wonder why anyone makes a big deal about browsers when everything they’ve tried works exactly the same.
Yup. If I used iOS, I’d probably use Brave because it seems to be the only one with an ad blocker.
But I don’t use iOS, so I use Firefox with an ad blocker installed, and I think it’s great. But I can’t really recommend mobile Firefox because many of my coworkers use iOS and that recommendation won’t work for them.
So if someone asks what to use, I need to ask what platform they’re on. And that sucks.
- It’s actually faster than Chromium in recent build benchmarks. Firefox runs JS faster.
I use Firefox, but it has been becoming a chore.
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.
On losing market share.
I truly appreciate all of the efforts Mozilla has brought, but there are things I cannot tolerate, and @mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 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:
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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.)
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Installing the Mr. Robot extension without warning, let alone consent. (This was 6 years ago. I should let it go.)
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Whitelisting only 6 mobile add-ons. (Add-on manager now announced to be “(re-)opened” later this year.)
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Making it very difficult to opt-out of said mobile add-on decision, and impossible without opting-in to telemetry.
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about:config unavailability in mobile Firefox.
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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.
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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’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
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
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.
what do you mean you’re conservative?
He means “waah waah! They’re oppressing me by not agreeing with me!!!” Conservatives hate the consequences of their actions.
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.
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.
Well, what browser did you switch to?
First Vivaldi, then Brave.
Now, let’s the insults begin.
Brave is niet zo braaf als die kuthond die jij bent
Non ho capito una beata minchia. Scrivi in inglese.
لا
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.
UI is worse, performance is mostly a bit slower, the morals seem cloudy sometimes.
and… the biggest one: PEOPLE ARE APATHETIC
