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.
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.
What do you mean about the apple part? I use FF on my iPhone.
It’s uses safari’s engine, which is the only one allowed by Apple. Doesn’t matter what browser you download from the store.
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.
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.
On losing market share.
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.
-
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.
Safari on iOS supports extensions as of the last couple years, and AdGuard is available for it. Works great!
Firefox does not have a way to force them into it.
- ChromeOS - Chrome only. Default. Google.com beggs you to get an account and try Chrome. Android, comes with Android preinstalled.
- Windows - Annoying Try Edge popup force them during boot. Bing Chat is Edge Only.
Many Linux distributions include Firefox as a default browser, but GNU/Linux is not very popular on desktop either…
- It’s actually faster than Chromium in recent build benchmarks. Firefox runs JS faster.
UI is worse, performance is mostly a bit slower, the morals seem cloudy sometimes.
and… the biggest one: PEOPLE ARE APATHETICI 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.
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
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
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 do not see any killer feature of Firefox right now. Even the Mozilla’s official browser comparison site indicates Microsoft Edge being on par with Firefox, based on Mozilla’s own criteria!
This will change in the future. Firefox will be the only major web browser on Android with full-fledged addon support.
I am already using some extensions on Vivaldi (like Consent-o-Matic, some transliteration addons), but this could make me switch to Firefox.The killer feature is cookie containers, aka no cross site tracking by default.
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.
