32 ms·

Firefox marketshare revisited

• rossdavidh 9y ago
  While Firefox on mobile is virtually nonexistent, what this post asserts just doesn't look true to me. He's basically asserting that Chrome is where Internet Explorer was in the late 90's, but when I see what browser people are using for presentations, or when I am pair-programming or otherwise able to see directly what people are using, I see Firefox commonly. Outside the U.S., I don't have much visibility, but the StatCounter data (https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=1&qpcustomb=0 https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qpr...) which shows Firefox on the increase in the last year, looks a lot more like what I am witnessing.
  • fencepost 9y ago
    Just the fact you're on HN means that you're in a small percentage of users, and anyone doing pair programming or many related activities will also fit into a small subset of overall Firefox users. The vast majority of users will start with IE (now with Edge) or Safari, and will be exposed to Chrome when they go to Google for a search or because they have an Android phone and got directed there. I'd say that the best thing that could happen for Firefox would be Google banning ad blockers, but in my experience with end users in office environments most users don't realize they even exist. Similarly they could partner with Facebook or some major destination sites, but that would have its own issues and complications.
  • adventured 9y ago
    Firefox is being squeezed out of the browser market for the same reason Opera was. They have no monster platform/s to leverage. IE/Edge has Windows. Chrome has Android and Google services broadly. Safari has iOS & Mac. Firefox has... nothing. Unless Chrome suddenly gets a lot worse, it's pretty clear what's going to happen to Firefox. Even IE/Edge is finding it difficult to hold market share against Chrome on the PC (where Microsoft still has an effective monopoly), Firefox doesn't stand a chance by comparison.
  • Hnrobert42 9y ago
    I believe they were saying Ff on ios is non-existant. However on Android it is decent and growing. I exclusively use it on android. I even have Chrome disabled.
    • digi_owl 9y ago
      Well FF on iOS is basically a wrapper around the iOS browser that provides bookmark sync with Firefox on desktop.
      • Zardoz84 9y ago
        The samae with Chrome for iOS
      • gnicholas 9y ago
        I love Firefox Focus on iOS. It's a stripped-down browser that has ad-blocking built-in and forgets your history with every new session. It's perfect for doing web searches that you don't want associated with your device. If you're on your home wifi, you can probably still be tracked, but if you're on cellular I imagine it's pretty anon. In the first version you were stuck with Yahoo! search (which is surprisingly bad), but now you can use Google.
      • tolle 9y ago
        Partial sync, or whatever you'd call it. You can't add or edit the desktop bookmarks and bookmarks added in Firefox for iOS won't show up on the desktop.
  • mtgx 9y ago
    I was one of those few who used Firefox on mobile because I could install ublock origin on it, so I preferred it over Chrome because of that. However, at the time (about a year ago), I didn't think Firefox was as fast as Chrome. So I eventually switched to the Chromium-based Brave (run by Mozilla's former CEO) due to its speed and (Chromium) security architecture (and of course ad-blocking). I would use Brave on the desktop, too, if not for the awful UI decisions there (on mobile it's more like a Chrome clone). They really need to replace their UI guy, because I feel like he (or she) has been getting it wrong since day one. Too much UI fluff getting in the way and controls being hidden from you.
    • digi_owl 9y ago
      On that note, Opera Mobile have built in Adblocking as well these days.
    • BrendanEich 9y ago
      Hi, which controls do you want that are hidden from you on desktop Brave? Thanks.
      • adrianlmm 9y ago
        I'm not that guy, but I'd like to see a dark chrome in Brave, I dislike bright colors.
        • BrendanEich 9y ago
          Got it, on our todo list.
• ue_ 9y ago
  I've seen people frequently say that they don't use Firefox because Chrome is faster, and despite being a Firefox user myself, it's close to what I've noticed. In Chrome (on GNU/Linux and mobile at least), pages seem to load instantly. I don't know why that is, but apparently it's not just me who has noticed this. Meanwhile, the most frequent complaint about Chrome is RAM usage, and only when using many tabs. Most people don't use many tabs. It's a shame that Chrome which appears to be on track to become the most popular browser by a considerable margin is proprietary software. And before I get a reply telling me that Chromium exists, I know that - but I also know that it's not Chromium that's popular. I think it is also a shame for two more reasons: Mozilla wants to make Firefox look like Chrome, probably to replicate features which seem to draw users in, by changing the extensions API to make it less powerful, by supporting standardised DRM in the browser (though this is a different issue) etc. Secondly, we may see a world in which only Webkit matters, and standards no longer rule, similar to the situation with Internet Explorer years ago. This will also put pressure on Mozilla and other "third party" browser authors to support features just because Webkit supports them, or even to break standard features so that they render like they do in Webkit. I'd probably get shouted at for thinking it would become a "monopoly", but that's exactly what it is, just not in the legal sense.
  • jorvi 9y ago
    There's also a far bigger difference: Chrome looks native (with elements of Material Design mixed in) on every platform. Meanwhile, Firefox aims to have the same Firefoxy look on every platform. Users definitely notice this and choose accordingly.
  • smacktoward 9y ago
    Using your dominant position in one sector to push your products in others is the exact kind of behavior that gets you tagged as a monopoly in the legal sense of the term.
  • sp332 9y ago
    Firefox isn't simply aping Chrome, even visually. The next UI refresh is going to look more different, not more similar. https://www.primeinspiration.com/mozilla-firefox-getting-new-ui-part-project-photon.html https://www.primeinspiration.com/mozilla-firefox-getting-new... The extensions API is being changed to disengage addons from the guts of the browser, which will let the team make bigger changes to CPU- and RAM-hungry areas of the codebase. The new extensions API has had a huge amount of work put into it to expand it before the old-API cutoff around November. The point is to make the browser perform better, not to make it less capable.
• shmerl 9y ago
  It is indeed a monopoly problem. Google should be required to give browser choice in such ads, same as MS were. What I worry about, is the increasing situation of "best viewed in Chrome" and sites starting to break in Firefox. That's going to be very bad.
  • dblohm7 9y ago
    We're already at that point IMHO.
    • shmerl 9y ago
      Yeah, I mean it will only get worse. And it is highly annoying, since I have no interest in using Chrome.
  • alxmdev 9y ago
    I can't pay my phone bill with Firefox, for example, and have to use Chromium for that. It's a redirection problem between the company's website and the external payment service they use, been going on for years. Similar annoyances all over the place from all sorts of major corporations that all seem to invest the bare minimum in cross-platform QA.
• oconnor663 9y ago
  > monopoly position in Internet services such as Google Mail, Google Calendar and YouTube Seriously?
  • smacktoward 9y ago
    Name one video site that has anywhere near the usage level of YouTube.
    • ajross 9y ago
      That's "success", not "monopoly". To be the latter you need to show that the big player is preventing the entrance of new competitors to the market. The existence of a robust and competetive ecosystem alongside Netflix, Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, (even smaller players like Imgur, Reddit, Gyfcat) etc... indicates that "video hosting" isn't really a monopoly. Seriously, everyone who is anyone is streaking headlong into a play for video hosting. If Google has a monopoly here they're managing it extraordinarily badly.
      • jorvi 9y ago
        Windows was (is) considered a monopoly despite having a rock-solid competitor in macOS. Monopolies don't necessarily mean absolute control of the market, having the ability to significantly sway it (say 80% marketshare) is also considered a monopoly or at least monopolistic.
        • ajross 9y ago
          Arguments about Apple's and Netscape's ability to compete were actually core to the windows antitrust case. It wasn't about market share. Again: an argument that Google is exploiting a monopoly in video needs to be able to explain why Instagram et. al. were so successful in the face of it.
        • digi_owl 9y ago
          I think the legal term is antitrust. Bringing up the term monopoly seems to always make people assume something with 100% marketshare. The only thing needed to come under antitrust scrutiny is to be in a position that allows said entity to warp market behavior, be it by bundling, price fixing, or some other means.
• bla2 9y ago
  Google has been pushing chrome on their sites for years. Firefox's drop in desktop is recent. So just marketing can't be the explanation.
  • adventured 9y ago
    I've been a loyal Firefox user since the earliest couple versions. Something like 12-13 years or whatever. I like the interface more than Chrome, among a few other things about how it operates. I can't leave Firefox open on even simple pages, without it consuming ~5% or more of the processor with one tab doing nothing. If I open numerous tabs, forget about it, Firefox will eat the processor (brand new machine, i5-7400, new Firefox install). I can leave Chrome running almost perpetually without problems with tons of tabs open. Right now I've got seven tabs open in Firefox, and it's consuming 706mb of ram, for a few stackoverflow pages and HN. I've had that resource abuse problem with Firefox essentially since the beginning, across a lot of varied PC systems. Over the last year I've gradually stopped using Firefox because I can't stand its horrible performance any longer.
    • deleted 9y ago
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    • minitech 9y ago
      This is exactly the opposite of what I experience; Chrome eats up 6GB of memory with a couple dozen tabs open, but I can have as many and more active in Firefox on 2GB (and over 1000 tabs open but inactive – leftovers from when tab groups were removed… that was a shame). Firefox just also feels faster in general. I am using the developer edition instead of stable, though, and there have been a lot of somewhat recent improvements; maybe that accounts for the difference.
    • deleted 9y ago
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  • the_common_man 9y ago
    It's way more aggressive now. I have also dismissed the convert to 'youtube red' popup like 20 times now and the damn thing keeps coming up on the phone. I never expected my phone to be infested with marketing and ad popups like this :/
• dhekir 9y ago
  Some crappy companies such as Eurostar currently experience issues in their website when using Firefox (e.g. impossibility of using vouchers in some cases), and when you contact customer support, they clearly state that "Chrome is recommended" for better results, and that "there are known issues with Firefox". I initially thought it was due to some Firefox add-ons, but even with all of them disabled, things do work better in Chrome. I've also seen other (somewhat badly-designed) websites where using Chrome leads to less issues, probably because its developers are only testing with it and using non-standard or legacy features/plug-ins. Because of those issues, I am forced to recommend family members to try Chrome when things seem broken, to the point that some have now switched to it by default. I really hope this will not become another IE-like situation...
  • Ygg2 9y ago
    But you seem to point, that it already is an IE-like situation.
  • wichert 9y ago
    I have heard designer friends say that Firefox is the new IE for them: so many rendering problems that they always need to do special Firefox-specific workarounds. Now the next remark tends to be that Chrome is pretty awful as well with very weird rendering errors happening all too often - for example HTML comments can shift paragraphs up or down (lots of fun with React inserting those everywhere), or toggling a class from JS making things disappear completely. Safari seems to be a designer-favourite with a very strong focus on things designers need. I don't think I've heard any complaints about Edge either.
    • soperj 9y ago
      Safari is the worst for me. Everything works as it should in Firefox/Chrome, and it's always Safari with the weird issues, like not doing flex-box properly.
      • dest 9y ago
        experienced problems with Safari and flex-box as well. And when you don't own a Mac to run Safari on it, it's difficult to do tests! You have to annoy friends/colleagues with Macbooks.
• Aissen 9y ago
  I've been a firm Firefox on Android user for years, but I recently switched to Brave. While Desktop performance is acceptable, Android cold-launch performance is very bad, and Chromium-based browser beat it to the punch. And the native (implemented in C++) adblocking means better performance than uBlock Origin. Too bad, I really liked Firefox Sync, it was such a superior solution (for privacy, at least).
  • digi_owl 9y ago
    Yeah i have noticed this cold launch issue myself.
• JohnTHaller 9y ago
  One additional cause of new Chrome installs taking over from Firefox: bundleware. Chrome is foisted upon users as install-by-default bundleware when users install or update lots of different apps, especially free antivirus apps on Windows. Just clicking "Continue" when your free antivirus on Windows updates will cause Chrome to be installed and set as the default browser. Here's an image of Avast tricking you into installing Chrome: http://imgur.com/hNZLbmL http://imgur.com/hNZLbmL I've had to fix this for three family members previously as they were using a free antivirus and couldn't figure out why their browser looked different and didn't have an ad-blocker now.
  • digi_owl 9y ago
    I recall even the standalone flash installer coming with Chrome bundled (or at least pushing for it) at one point.
    • kibwen 9y ago
      Indeed, I'll never forget how my first exposure to Chrome came as a result of updating Flash and finding that it had not only installed Chrome, but set it as my default browser. That was the day that I began weaning myself off of Google services (still don't know if I'll ever make it off of Gmail, though...).
      • cpeterso 9y ago
        The irony is that Chrome bundles (Pepper) Flash, so a Firefox user would download the Flash installer, which downloads the NPAPI Flash plugin, Chrome, and Chrome's Pepper Flash plugin. The NPAPI Flash plugin would be downloaded but never used after the Flash installer changed the user's default browser to Chrome.
        • Doctor_Fegg 9y ago
          Flash is now significantly broken on Firefox under Ubuntu anyway (Bugzilla #1374559) and it's been classified as a wontfix (P5), so continuing the irony, downloading Chrome is probably closer to what the user wanted to do.
• epoch1970 9y ago
  I think the "Why?" section's conclusions are off the mark. It basically blames Google's advertising of Chrome for Firefox's decline, and even goes so far as to say "Firefox’s decline is not an engineering problem." While I don't doubt that Google's advertising of Chrome has drawn away some Firefox users, I also don't think that we can ignore or deny the many controversial changes to Firefox that have likely had an impact, too. Just off of the top of my head I can think of things like: * Frequent breakage of extensions when first switching to the more rapid release schedule. * Frequent and disruptive UI changes that didn't bring users much benefit, such as Australis. * Removing the ability to easily disable JavaScript. * Taking many years to get multiprocess support working. (Not that I'm suggesting they should have rushed it, of course.) * The inclusion of Pocket and Hello. * Sponsored tiles. * Users who report experiencing poor performance and high memory usage. * Disruption caused by requiring signed extensions. * The removal of support for OSes or OS releases that are moderately older, but still do have active users. I'm sure there are others that I'm forgetting. Even if they seem minor, those are the kinds of things that can cause users to switch away from Firefox, or not even start using it in the first place. Losing a small number of users for a variety of minor reasons can add up very quickly, as well. Furthermore, those issues don't really have anything to do with Google or Chrome.
  • Pxtl 9y ago
    Honestly, as a firefox die-hard who finally gave up, all of those issues were dwarfed by the performance one. The only one I even bothered to config away was the search-engine change. I stopped using firefox because of performance. Nothing more, nothing less.
    • f4rker 9y ago
      Exactly. Every now and then I try to switch back to ff but the performance just isn't there.
    • epoch1970 9y ago
      It was the extension signing that caused me to move on. I had written several small, but useful, extensions for my own personal use. I knew they were harmless, yet Firefox made it difficult for me to actually use them. If I'm remembering this right, I think there was initially an about:config option for disabling the signature checks. But that was eventually removed from the stable releases. The workarounds were to waste my time getting the extensions signed, or to use some special unbranded build, or to use the Nightly or Developer Edition releases. None of those were acceptable to me. Then I learned about the planned WebExtensions changes, and knew it was time to move on. I'm aware of the security-related reasons that were used to justify such changes. But for me they ended up taking away the main benefits that Firefox offered, namely being easy to extend, and giving me the freedom to use the browser as I see fit.
• carussell 9y ago
  Side note. From Andreas's post: > looks like the site requires a login now. It used to be available publicly for years and was public until a few days ago I'm no longer a Mozillian, but stuff like this is really, really weird. I'm referring in general to things being hidden or locked up—Mozilla as an organization operated more openly than anything else I can think of, which is part of what used to make it so beautiful (and successful)—but specifically, I'm talking about sign ins. I stopped touching stuff on developer.mozilla.org 5+ years ago (or even consulting it, really), but I was reading some docs on the site last week and saw something that was so outright wrong that I felt it had to be fixed. I tried to, and it turns out that you have to use GitHub to sign in. The idea of requiring a social media sign in for a Mozilla web property is one of the most un-Mozilla things possible and really blew me away.
  • coldpie 9y ago
    GitHub isn't social media, dude.
    • 0x006A 9y ago
      GitHub Is The Next Big Social Network, Powered By What You Do, Not Who You Know https://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2012/07/15/github-is-the-next-big-social-network-powered-by-what-you-do-not-who-you-know/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2012/07/15/github...
    • Endy 9y ago
      Then what else is it? There's a strong focus on community building (i.e. push/pull requests) (social), and those people create the bulk of the site's content (media), which in turn draws in outside users and encourages them to sign up and through a combination of sharing content (i.e. forks/clones) and new content (i.e. new projects). Of course it's social media. The difference is literally only in terms of what the media in question is.
  • dao- 9y ago
    https://www.arewestableyet.com/ https://www.arewestableyet.com/ is for internal tracking and rather hard to make sense of externally. It's cluttered with jargon and abbreviations and raw numbers. (I can tell because I just logged in. I work for Mozilla.) For example, this is how the rows are labeled in one table: usage_khours, Main (M), M + Content (M+C), C - Content Shutdown (C-S), M + C - S, NPAPI + GMP Plugin Crashes (P), GPU. It's easy to see how exposing this site to the world might not be a good idea, especially when it's referenced from a blog post appearing on the hacker news front page and people start drawing all kinds of uninformed conclusions.
• blunte 9y ago
  Google definitely has been a (major) contributor to the decline of Firefox, both with all the google site notices suggesting users switch to Chrome and the works-on-chrome-first features of Gmail, Drive, etc. That last issue is years old, but I would bet it got a lot of people to first try Chrome. Another factor could have been Mozilla's defaulting to Yahoo for search (and the difficulty some people had with changing and keeping the change to another search provider). For quite a few years Yahoo has not been very good at search, and Mozilla's insistence on teaming up with them probably brought Mozilla's name down.
  • suby 9y ago
    The change over to yahoo as the default search, as well as the ui changes a few years ago which made it a hassle to change search engines has, I would wager, done more harm to mozilla than whatever monetary benefit they gained from the switch. The fact that they made it difficult to change search engines is probably the worse offense. It's just blatantly anti user. i like firefox, but they needlessly erode people's goodwill toward them.
    • pessimizer 9y ago
      Firefox's primary advantage was that it was pro-user. At some point, it started consciously herding users by intentionally making certain choices that they didn't like which users made more difficult or impossible to find in the UI. That's a distinct philosophical break, and an open user antagonism. That didn't make it worse than other browsers; that made it the same as other browsers. The only criteria you're left to choose on are distinct features, and Firefox started methodically eliminating theirs. After the ending of the old extensions API, Firefox has finally reached its goal of having absolutely no advantages compared to any other browser, with the bonus of not working as well with google properties as the google-owned browser.
      • reitanqild 9y ago
        For the Mozillans around here: This is sadly almost what I feel. Then again I'll stick with FF for now since Google has managed to annoy me with their Chrome campaign and since FF is slightly better for my use cases and uses less resources AFAIK.
• ksk 9y ago
  Its quite surprising that Google has avoided anti-trust scrutiny for as long as it has.
  • digi_owl 9y ago
    EU seems more on top there than USA. And frankly USA seems unwilling to engage any kind of antitrust against tech companies since the anemic slap on the wrist Microsoft got.
• rrggrr 9y ago
  Extensions are tipping in favor of Chrome. Many of the extensions I use are Chrome only.
• deleted 9y ago
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• deleted 9y ago
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• moocowtruck 9y ago
  I was expecting a bit more than blaming google... The reason I stopped using firefox is because it became nothing more than a 'meh' chrome clone and slowly killed its ecosystem.
• mcjiggerlog 9y ago
  I really want to like Firefox Android (addons are awesome!) and try it out every now and then, but every time I just end up uninstalling and reverting to Chrome. The number one reason is that scroll seems to work differently to every single other app I have installed. It's "sticky" and doesn't feel native. It also takes a noticeable amount of time to render the page when scrolling quickly, which is not something I've ever noticed with Chrome. What gives?
  • rwmj 9y ago
    The most annoying thing is that Firefox's tabs don't integrate with the normal Android mechanism of switching windows.
    • glogla 9y ago
      That's probably because you can't do it without using special Google-only API - I don't know of any other Android app that could do it. So this is a monopoly problem again.
      • veeti 9y ago
        This is not true at all. https://developer.android.com/guide/components/activities/recents.html https://developer.android.com/guide/components/activities/re...
        • BoorishBears 9y ago
          It's true, Recents showing Task instances isn't the same as the integrated tabs feature
          • veeti 9y ago
            It is literally the same thing. You can download a third party browser called Chromer that opens every link as a separate task and see it for yourself. It's based on Chrome custom tabs, which is a pluggable protocol. Firefox is working on support for it as well [1]. There doesn't seem to be any ongoing work to support per-tab tasks in Firefox for Android itself right now [2]. [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1208655 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1208655 [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1098543 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1098543
• digi_owl 9y ago
  For me at least Firefox have been burning bridges like crazy. The change in UI to Australis i could deal with, as it could be mitigated with extensions. But "recently" they changed to GTK3 on *nix, and are now in the process of making extensions less potent. All this makes it harder to continue using Firefox where it used to be the flagship browser.
• dannysu 9y ago
  It's not just marketing. It's also Google websites that only work with Chrome. For example, Hangout. I can no longer use Hangout using Firefox. Or I think Gmail Inbox, which also came out only working on Chrome initially. It's the sum of all these things that look very much like "best viewed with internet explorer" type stuff. I don't ever want to go back to such a world.
  • cakeface 9y ago
    Yes! It's really frustrating that Hangout / Meet don't work on Firefox. This isn't just Google's fault I think. Firefox changed how plugins work and I think that broke Google's Hangout implementation. Also I can only use my U2F security key for Google when on Chrome. Firefox doesn't support it.
    • nachtigall 9y ago
      > Firefox changed how plugins work and I think that broke Google's Hangout implementation. IIRC, there was s public notice by Firefox about the API change more than a year in advance. Google does not have the resources for implementation? Firefox support is just low prio for Google. I think it's a deliberate (non)-action because instead of switching away from Hangout, people rather start using Chrome... So not-browser-compat seems to help Google :-/ (see also my other comment)
      • cpeterso 9y ago
        Google Hangouts switched from the NPAPI plugin to WebRTC in Chrome back in 2014 [1], but still used plugins (NPAPI or ActiveX) for other browsers. Hangouts depends on non-standard WebRTC functionality in Chrome [2]. Google has had three years to adapt to other browsers' standard WebRTC stacks, but it was apparently not a priority for the company as long as the legacy Hangouts plugins still worked in other browsers. Mozilla announced in 2015 [3] that it would remove NPAPI plugin support in 2017, so Google had plenty of notice that the Hangouts plugin would stop working in Firefox. Google's new "Hangouts Meet" service is supposed to work with standard WebRTC in Firefox and Edge, but Hangouts Meet is still in beta and its system requirements page still only lists Chrome. [1] https://plus.google.com/103171586947853434456/posts/39TCW3PcLye https://plus.google.com/103171586947853434456/posts/39TCW3Pc... [2] https://webrtchacks.com/hangout-analysis-philipp-hancke/ https://webrtchacks.com/hangout-analysis-philipp-hancke/ [3] https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2015/10/08/npapi-plugins-in-firefox/ https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2015/10/08/npapi-plu...
• morekozhambu 9y ago
  I was a firefox fan until recently. I guess it was firefox 51 or so and I switched to chromium purely for usability and performance sake. The page loading and bookmarks management was horrible at that point. Not sure how it is now.
• Karunamon 9y ago
  I really don't think the author backed up their hypothesis here. I'd place a lot more of that blame on Mozilla's poor decision-making (detailed elsewhere in this thread) than any amount of google.com popups. If I were to boil it all down, (and I say this with zero snark), I'd say that they have little to no differentiation with Chrome. It looks like Chrome, it will soon be no more powerful than Chrome, it's developed ignoring community input like Chrome, and the kiss of death: it performs worse than Chrome. With all that in mind, why not just use Chrome like those popups suggest I should, and get a speed boost while I'm at it? (Note: open source politics do not factor into this)
• badpenny 9y ago
  Now and again I'll try switching to Firefox but it's just incredibly sluggish compared to Chrome so I end up switching back.
• cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
  I have both Chrome and Firefox installed but try very hard to stay away from using FF unless I'm testing cross-platform stuff or if I want to sign into multiple accounts of a same service (one on chrome and one on firefox) And this has nothing to do with monopoly. That's just a rationalization for their fuckup. I don't even know where to start, let me just list a couple: 1. The "Yahoo.com" by default is the worst: I know users can switch to google, etc. but if a developer like me doesn't even want to go through trouble, why would any ordinary person go through all the trouble when they can just use chrome? And we all know Yahoo doesn't provide customer-centric search results but ad-optimized results to squeeze out revenue. 2. Bad performance: YES IT IS ALL ABOUT ENGINEERING. As someone who keeps a lot of tabs open I can't use firefox because the cpu level reaches the stratosphere if i keep opening tabs and leave them around. The firefox browser performance sucks. Period. But I think the main reason FF is failing is because the developers are out of touch with the reality, just like in this article where one of the developers complain it's because Google is pushing chrome through monopoly. He's forgetting that before Chrome, it was Firefox who won despite MS pushing IE through monopoly. If the developers were more self-aware, they wouldn't have let all this happen.
• fimdomeio 9y ago
  I want to use firefox, I really do. But I can distinguish when it's running and when it's not by my macbook fan noise. And yes I've tried all kinds of clean ups. but it just sits there on the background consuming 40% of a cpu while doing nothing.
  • bqe 9y ago
    For an opposing anecdote, I do not have this problem at all. Firefox is always snappy and uses less memory than Chrome on my Macbook.
    • spiderfarmer 9y ago
      Is it a retina macbook? Because I think that's one of the problems. Also: connecting a 4k monitor to your Macbook to run Firefox on and things will get hot real fast. Shame really, I love Firefox but keep coming back to Safari because of the CPU usage.
  • wryun 9y ago
    about:performance can now help you figure out what's going on.
• HellDunkel 9y ago
  I know how much better Chrome is yet i stick with Firefox all because of the idea of a free web. It is slow. the ui sucks. it looks dated. it crashes far too often and eats up loads of mem. Don't blame Google for its ads, the problems are homegrown. Its sad to say this but i guess i will turn my back on it too if things dont change.
• notatoad 9y ago
  With every new version, i give firefox another try and it always just feels sluggish compared to chrome. The UI is not as responsive and the pages don't seem to load as quickly. I don't know if there's any actual data or measurements to back this up and i haven't tried to measure any speed differences, but for me the reason I use chrome instead of firefox is absolutely an engineering problem and not a marketing one. I'd much rather use a Mozilla product than a Google one, but chrome is simply a better browser.
  • mouldysammich 9y ago
    At least for me, since the e10s updates, firefox has been quite snappy even compared to chrome. Ive been enjoying the experience.
  • nachtigall 9y ago
    I am running Firefox 56 (Nightly) and it is very fast due to project Quantum. Even faster than Firefox 54 which also got a big boost due to e10s. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/channel/desktop/#nightly https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/channel/desktop/#night... If Firefox 54 is still slow for you, I would be interested if multiprocess is enabled (look at about:support). Also, what does about:performance say? If still slow you might want to do a Refresh: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-add-ons-and-settings https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-a...
    • lucb1e 9y ago
      For me things only got worse since they started that multiprocess thing. It's great that tabs hang instead of the browser, but previously it would just never hang. Now tabs hang randomly, even when they're not doing anything. I guess because it's all still beta and testing. Anyway, still not annoying enough to switch away. It'd take a lot for me to switch away again. Edit: Ironically, that about:performance page you linked reports everything runs fine, except the about:performance page!
  • piggybox 9y ago
    My experience exactly. Every time people told me it's getting better I downloaded and just felt differently...to the point I'm too tired to try it anymore.
• bahjoite 9y ago
  Not included in these numbers are installs of Trisquel's Abrowser and The Tor Project's TorBrowser. Both are rebadged Firefox and neither one is downloaded from or phones home to Mozilla. I don't suggest that this would make much difference to the numbers.
  • netule 9y ago
    Are Chromium installs counted in the Chrome count as well?
• corford 9y ago
  Maybe Firefox is slow on Linux but on Windows I don't notice a difference between it and Chrome. If anything FF starts faster on my Win10 box. The UI is just as snappy and I vastly prefer FFs settings dialogs to the kid gloves one in Chrome. Also can't remember the last time FF crashed on me (and I usually have hundreds of tabs open for weeks/months on end). Dev tools are a toss up but I tend to use the ones in FF more than Chrome, probably simply out of habit. Once servo becomes mainline (and assuming it delivers on its promise) I can't see why anyone would choose anything other than FF. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ works for me Edit: I'm not big on extensions but do have a few installed: session manager, foxyproxy, one tab and fireshot.
  • octorian 9y ago
    > Maybe Firefox is slow on Linux but on Windows I don't notice a difference between it and Chrome. I really think this is a big part of the discrepancy in opinions of performance here. In my own experience, Firefox on Linux just has sluggish responsiveness. It doesn't happen everywhere, and sometimes the effect feels cumulative (depending on how long the process has been running). I've also found the occasional website (usually forums) where the text input box is painfully sluggish in Firefox (for no good reason), while its just fine and dandy in Chrome. Now I've also run Firefox on Windows, where it seems quite snappy and I don't really have any performance complaints. (Of course there's also the part where "hip web designers" are now treating Chrome like the modern MSIE6, which probably affects "internal" sites more than public-facing ones. But that's a topic for rants elsewhere in this thread.)
    • digi_owl 9y ago
      Do wonder if it has anything to do with their switch of GTK version "recently"...
  • driverdan 9y ago
    FF is great on Windows but slow on OS X. I really wanted to use it but it was maybe 10x slower for heavy JS pages. The whole browser would hang all the time from JS. I still use it on Windows but had to switch back to Chrome on my MacBook.
• dep_b 9y ago
  I don't use Firefox that much because I'm mostly on macOS, but every time I use Windows and I open Firefox it seems more snappy again. I am making sure nobody in my family uses Chrome because it's a resource hog and effectively helps the same kind of monopoly we had with Internet Explorer.
• gator-io 9y ago
  Here is a view of browser market share with detectable bot traffic removed. https://truemarketshare.com https://truemarketshare.com Firefox is dropping, but not collapsing. And my opinion as to the primary reason why is the Yahoo default search.
• makecheck 9y ago
  I really wish Google's Chrome spam wasn't "working" because I am so tired of it (and anything like it). This is a variation of the "Here's what's new in the app that you didn't know you updated!" dialogs that developers seem to like now. If I could have software and services not totally derail what I was trying to do, that would be greaaaaaat.
• satysin 9y ago
  I can only speak for myself but I didn't leave Firefox for Chrome because of advertising. I left because a year ago Firefox was painful to use. Sync was (might still be?) incomplete, setting up quick searches was annoying, font rendering was poor, HiDPI support was crap, overall performance was noticeably slower than Chrome and they announced killing off advanced XPCOM based extensions so I figured I would just change over now rather than later.
• FollowSteph3 9y ago
  I disagree with the article. When Firefox first got popular the default was internet explorer which was already installed on your computer. However because Firefox was so far ahead word spread and people took the time to install it. These however there is no really big advantage to using Firefox over chrome, and when the difference is that close marketing and convenience will win. In other words if Firefox would've been on or with internet explorer years ago it would never have gained the market share it did in the first place. It's not just a marketing issue but a combination of a marketing and engineering issue.
  • DiThi 9y ago
    > no really big advantage No _user perceived advantage_ but they are important: Privacy, freedom and avoiding the monoculture of a single web engine. The amount of websites that don't quite work well or outright has bugs on firefox is increasing.
    • davidcbc 9y ago
      The average user is going to care more about whether or not websites work than about privacy, freedom, and avoiding the monoculture of a single web engine.
      • DiThi 9y ago
        Web standards are supposed to work everywhere the same. The result of having a vast majority with a single rendering engine is having pages use quirks of this engine and not following standards. (edit: also a security risk when a vulnerability affects most people) The average user does not care but it should care. People like us should inform them since we can.
• tschellenbach 9y ago
  Chrome is just a (much) better product. Combination of building a better product and a lot of advertising.
• Touche 9y ago
  I still believe that Mozilla biggest mistake with mobile was not Firefox OS, it was that they started on Android too late. They should have been on Android from day one, but they weren't, and when they did build Fennec, it was really bad. They eventually fixed it, but by that point Chrome for Android was already out. And then they pivoted to Firefox OS. At a time when WebOS had already failed, Nokia had already failed, and the writing was on the wall for Blackberry and Windows Phone. It was already well known that the market couldn't support another mobile OS, and that was the moment they decided to build one, totally bizarre. I firmly believe that if Mozilla had gone all-in on Firefox for Android at the time when Android's browser was just atrociously bad, they could have been the hip option there, and had a leg-up on Chrome for Android. To everyone that says "people don't install 3rd party browsers on mobile", that's 100% wrong. Chrome for Android was a 3rd party browser for several years and was popular.
  • digi_owl 9y ago
    What has been going on with Mozilla as of late, as well as Gnome and various other FOSS projects, is a overton distraction on "social". This in the form of "helping" the third world etc. Mostly all this ends up doing is adding to some execs ladder climbing scorecard, and draining the project of focus and manhours.
  • tedmielczarek 9y ago
    The redesigned Firefox for Android was roundly praised as the best Android browser for a while. (It's still very good!) It gained very little market share. Unfortunately it's very hard to compete with defaults these days without paying for distribution deals like Google is doing with Chrome.
    • Touche 9y ago
      It was too late. Chrome for Android was not the default for about 3 years iirc and had good market share.
  • lucb1e 9y ago
    > They eventually fixed it And then broke it down, step by step. It used to be perfect but over the years gradually got changed/removed features that I loved, with no about:config option to get them back. Things like no menu button[1] (my device has a physical menu button), text reflow when zooming was removed, double tap to zoom to a paragraph now (sometimes?!) selects text instead of zooming, the tab you have open is no longer on the bottom side of the tab menu (it would slide open fast, as soon as your finger touched it and would feel super snappy; now there's some fancy animation)... etc. It got to the point where I started looking for other browsers, but there just are no good options. Chromium sometimes bugs and uses 100% CPU for hours until I notice, and most other things are closed source. So I'm stuck with a mix of Firefox and Habit browser. Habit seems to be what Firefox used to be: configure it any way you like (and it does a fantastic job at that). The trouble is that it's closed source and it has an inferior rendering engine, so I don't dare using it for things with a login that are valuable and it doesn't work for some websites. Edit: by the way, the desktop story is completely different. I could never go without Firefox on non-mobile for various features (besides the privacy matter). [1] What does that matter: Well, space (now there's two buttons next to the already-small address bar) and usability. I used to be able to hit the tab button without really looking. It was on the side of the screen, I'd just finger along that edge and I'd open my tab menu. Now I need to tap somewhere specific, and if I accidentally hit the menu button, I need to either reach over to the other side of the screen (on a 5.5" phone, that's a stretch for my thumb) or hit the back button (which would require shifting my phone, then touching it, then shifting back, all balancing it in one hand, oftentimes at least). How friggin' difficult is it to make an about:config setting to hide a button?
• ssivark 9y ago
  > Firefox’s decline is not an engineering problem. Its a market disruption (Desktop to Mobile shift) and monopoly problem. There are no engineering solutions to these market problems. The only way to escape this is to pivot to a different market [...] Privacy is the one problem that Mozilla/Firefox can address, which Google and Microsoft will be fundamentally conflicted about addressing. It is also a growing market; that is the market Firefox should be aiming for! It seems to me that Mozilla/Firefox folks don't appreciate this at a deep level. They are eroding user trust in the attempt to gather data for engineering better features. Eg. see the recent controversy regarding Firefox's usage of Google Analytics: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14753546 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14753546 . I made some comments on that thread, on how Mozilla/Firefox could try to win the privacy market. I don't want to repeat those comments, so I'll just link to them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14754672 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14754672
  • Glyptodon 9y ago
    Pretty much this drives my Firefox usage... I use it on mobile because I can still use various adblock/privacy extensions without trouble. Use it on the desktop, too, because Google being deeply linked into my browser creeps me out.
  • drdaeman 9y ago
    No reason to do so when world clearly shows all one need to do is to stick "private", "secure", "end-to-end encrypted", "anonymous" etc labels (and keep buzzwords up-to-date with current year's trends) and just don't do something too obviously contradicting that. That's really sad but seem to be true. Too many examples out there.
  • tedmielczarek 9y ago
    Note that Mozilla is working more closely with the Tor project with an eye towards making it easier for more people to get the privacy enhancing benefits of browsing over the Tor network.
    • Endy 9y ago
• tonmoy 9y ago
  Forefox installation numbers maybe declining, but how does it compare with any browser install? Maybe desktop growth has stagnated, maybe with always updating OS and Firefox itself, people just don't need to "install" Firefox anymore?
  • lucb1e 9y ago
    Not sure why you're downvoted. This is a question I feel stupid for not thinking of myself.
• maxharris 9y ago
  I don't use Firefox because it's a power hog compared to Safari.
• iopq 9y ago
  I love the chart that goes from -7% to -22% it cuts off exactly where you would think there's ten times fewer Firefox users
• norea-armozel 9y ago
  I think half the problem with Firefox is that it has a marketing problem. Most folks today just trust Google and so Chrome is a product that has trustworthiness that will stand out for folks especially on the matter of speed/reliability. If Mozilla wants to do anything to save their project then they have to start re/building their brand recognition and trustworthiness among COMMON USERS (technical users tend to inform themselves so it's really not an issue IMO beyond actually talking to us). It'll be an uphill battle all the way but I think they'll find it's worth it.
• rubatuga 9y ago
  Well maybe if they updated their shitty UI, I would be inclined to install it. Why can’t firefox combine the search and address bar like every other major browser? Why can’t Firefox ditch their slow animations, buttons, menus, and do with less skeumorphisms? They need a serious refresh if I were to ever start using it again.
  • bzbarsky 9y ago
    > Why can’t firefox combine the search and address bar like every other major browser? Because they don't want to send all your keystrokes in the URL to your search provider just so you can get autosuggest. So there is one bar that does autosuggest and a different bar where you can put things that your search provider should not see. Obviously Chrome doesn't have that problem, since they _want_ your search provider to see all the URLs you visit.
    • rubatuga 9y ago
      You can combine them and then turn off search autocomplete. Seems like the best option for me.
      • bzbarsky 9y ago
        Except users actually want search autocomplete. If you personally don't, then you can combine them yourself in Firefox right away: just remove the search bar entirely via the normal UI customization mechanism, and use only the URL bar, which doesn't do search autocomplete.
        • glandium 9y ago
          Note that the URL bar does search autocomplete now (new in 55 maybe?).
          • bzbarsky 9y ago
            Hmm. It doesn't seem to in 54, but you're right that it does in a 55 beta. If that's the case, then there's really no point to two separate bars. Looks like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1344928 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1344928 is where the behavior change happened. Based on the diffs there, looks like the 55 feature can at least be turned off by setting the "browser.urlbar.suggest.searches" preference to false... (That preference doesn't affect the search bar.) Also looks like there's preferences UI for this (the "Show search suggestions in location bar results" checkbox).
• swiley 9y ago
  They argue they're privacy minded and then remove control from the user. Everyone who doesn't care about control is just going to use chrome, edge or IE so going after that market is probably not a good use of resources. I don't quite get the whole performance thing, chrome eats memory constantly and trashes the machine which is something firefox doesn't do. It's single threaded though so shitty pages will hang it.
• cpeterso 9y ago
  The article's ADI charts do not account for Mozilla moving Windows XP and Vista users from the Firefox release channel to the ESR (Extended Support Release) channel in March 2017 [1]. New versions of Firefox do not support XP or Vista, but XP and Vista users will continue to receive ESR security updates at least through 2018 Q1. You can see a similar "drop" in Mozilla's Firefox Hardware Report [2]. [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2016/12/23/firefox-support-for-xp-and-vista/ https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2016/12/23/firefox-s... [2] https://hardware.metrics.mozilla.com/ https://hardware.metrics.mozilla.com/
  • andreasgal 9y ago
    A comment said the same and I added a note to the text. If you have concrete data happy to update charts. Pull request welcome :) All code and data for charts on github.
• ashitlerferad 9y ago
  Since my 10AM EST blog post comment has not been approved . I'll paste it here: "...the “falling off the cliff” is just the snowball effect of bad management and decisions made many years ago. Its to late now to stop the bleeding as-is. The solution is right there, although obvious, its probably to much for Mozilla to undertake at this point."
• owly 9y ago
  Lots of haters on here! :) Like most of you, I use all browsers to test sites and applications. But Firefox is my main browser on all platforms for a bunch of reasons and I have no issues with performance. It has all the add-ins I need. I like the way it looks compared to the alternatives. The test pilot add-ins have been great. https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments And last but not least, by using it I'm supporting the open web and not feeding a monopoly.
  • Rotareti 9y ago
    Don't forget to mention privacy. Why would I use a browser which is spying on me if there is an alternative that doesn't? Same goes for other software.
    • victorhooi 9y ago
      Could you substantiate this claim? Because it sounds like FUD at this stage, until somebody provides a shred of evidence.
      • Rotareti 9y ago
        No I can't since it's closed source software. But why would they not read your personal data in the browser, if they did (do?) with other products like Gmail? Give me one reason why I should trust them? There are people who care more about their private data and others that care less. If you find Chrome trustworthy, go with it. For me a closed source browser is not an option.
        • victorhooi 9y ago
          I'm sorry - but this just comes across as wild paranoia - you're basically saying they could read your data - so they must? That's like saying your school could install cameras in the toilets - so they must have? Or that your landlord is secretly going through your stuff, because he has keys? Actually - the Chromium browser project is open source: https://www.chromium.org/ https://www.chromium.org/ It's what Google Chrome is built on - you could just compile that if you wanted. (You lose out on a bunch of integrations - but it sounds like that might be what you want, anyhow).
• blauditore 9y ago
  I've been saying this for years, that Chrome's market share is mostly caused by Google's aggressive advertisement. Many users don't even know exactly what a browser is, they just clicked that button at some point because the text next to it told them to do so.
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  • victorhooi 9y ago
    I don't buy it. Chrome for years and years was sold as lightning fast and secure from malware - and it delivered. That was why I switched back in the day. Even today, it has a reputation for being lightning fast, and having a fast pace of development. In my (admittedly mostly/predominantly) technical circle - I don't know many who switched to ads. In fact, those people are the least likely to click on ads. Most of them switched because Chrome is fast, and lightweight - or for the non-technical people, because their technical friends told them to.
    • blauditore 9y ago
      Yes, it's fast in many aspects, but totally not lightweight. It eats memory like there's no tomorrow, and spams the OS with processes. But to be fair, that's not super relevant for most users. I've seen technical people switch because of performance, and I occasionally use it for certain tasks too for that reason. But almost every time I see it on a non-techie computer and ask them something like, "ah, you're using Chrome?", they look at me like I'm speaking a different language. So I suppose they were not aware when they installed it.
      • victorhooi 9y ago
        Our of curiosity - how many tabs do you have open? I have many tabs open, and did notice high memory usage. I'll reference my comment elsewhere here - tl;dr - they/we aggressively throttle background tasks now: > Chrome recently introduced some changes to background tabs (to a bit of grumbling from sites that wanted to use background resources/service workers): > https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/03/background.. https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/03/background.... > And also - they're aggressively throttling background tabs: > http://blog.strml.net/2017/01/chrome-56-now-aggressively-thr.. http://blog.strml.net/2017/01/chrome-56-now-aggressively-thr.... > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13471543 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13471543 > I'm on Chrome Canary - and there's been noticeable improvements in memory/responsive wise for a few months now. > I have around 320+ tabs open, spread over 2 Chrome profiles (around 160 per profile).
• remir 9y ago
  The reality is that for a while, Chrome was simply a better browser. Extensions "just worked", it silently auto-updated (huge for non technical users), was very secure (anti-phishing), it came with Flash, sandboxing from day 1, etc... I installed Chrome on the PCs of family members and it was trouble free for them. No need to update Flash separately, no random crashes, the anti-phishing is great, too.
• hendersoon 9y ago
  I used Firefox since it was called Phoenix in 2002. Fifteen years. None of my friends or acquaintances used Firefox. I was the last man standing. I switched to Vivaldi last month due to webextensions breaking fully functional mouse gestures in the Firegestures addon. They finally forced me away. Thankfully Vivaldi exists!
  • pvdebbe 9y ago
    I'm using firefox 50 until it's not safe to do so. When the time comes, it's going to be hard to choose from bad & worse. Firefox is the only browser out there that supports text-only page zooming! And until recently, the only browser that supported these total-conversion extensions like Vimperator.
    • hendersoon 9y ago
      There are chrome extensions (which also work in Vivaldi) to do text-only zoom. I haven't tried them and can't vouch for them, though. Before Vivaldi added customizable mouse gestures, my plan was to stick to a Firefox fork that will still support XUL addons, like Pale Moon. That's my suggestion, if the text zoom addon doesn't work and your use-case really needs that.
      • pvdebbe 9y ago
        Pale Moon might be my refuge too. Currently it looks like a minor hassle but if/when Firefox does south...
• abiox 9y ago
  > Firefox’s decline is not an engineering problem possibly. however for me, technical problems are why i avoid it in general. i still use it a bit, as i'm lazy about switching between user accounts with various services and separate browsers makes this easy. sadly, nearly every day firefox will crash, often when i'm not even using it. it happens so often i don't even get annoyed anymore... it's just normal. my system is a fairly new build and nothing else crashes (or at least, so infrequently i don't recall anything).
  • thr0w__4w4y 9y ago
    Came here to quote the same sentence and post a similar reply. I've been using Firefox forever, esp. b/c of some of the extensions, but it just isn't stable, reliable, or performance-oriented anymore. Chrome is more stable, snappier, and smoother. I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for Firefox, but the reality is that Firefox's engineering is inferior when compared to Chrome or Safari IMO. To deny this is perhaps illustrative of why Mozilla's browser is suffering. It crashes, it leaks, it sputters, it freezes. It's shameful and embarrassing.
  • bzbarsky 9y ago
    Do you mind looking in about:crashes and pointing to some of the crash reports involved? I normally have multi-week uptimes in Firefox before I remember to restart just so I can get an update... I would really like to try to figure out why you're seeing so many crashes.
• jchw 9y ago
  I find it pretty amusing that nobody is going to acknowledge the idea that maybe, just maybe, there's also a component of the fact that Firefox has simply fallen behind Chrome in many aspects, losing the preference of many developers and power users. They are far from the majority, but there are without a doubt cascading effects. Google's marketing is probably only getting more aggressive because there's going to be diminishing returns the further they go.
  • lucb1e 9y ago
    If you read the thread, you'll see that many people are discussing points on which it fell behind, sometimes on specific platforms and sometimes in general. (Then again, your comment is 6 hours old, maybe it wasn't discussed yet back then.)
• nevir 9y ago
  > This explains why the market share decline of Firefox has accelerated so dramatically the last 12 months despite Firefox getting much better during the same time window. (this quote is from the article, in reference to Google aggressively advertising Chrome) I'm pretty sure that all the ads mentioned in the article have been around for far longer than 12 months. What else might have happened 12 months ago to influence the decline?
• smegel 9y ago
  Prevent Javascript from running HTML5 videos and I will switch in a heartbeat. But I guess Mozilla is just as corrupt as Google...
• kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
  It couldn't possibly have anything to do with breaking extensions once again.
• spiderfarmer 9y ago
  I love you Firefox, but you're horrible on retina screens. Just scrolling takes 2 times as many CPU cycles when compared to Safari. It's troubling because I'm the biggest Firefox supporter I know and even I switch to Safari when I hear the CPU fan spinning.
• reacweb 9y ago
  For me, the compelling feature of Firefox over chrome is that using Firefox portable, I can avoid company policy and configure proxy to bypass bluecoat filter.
• PeterStuer 9y ago
  Long term FF user here. I still use it as I stand behind the independence, but ... I have found FF speed and stability gradually lacking. What was once a fast and lean browser has turned into a behemoth. Of course, part of it is beyond their control as it seems more and more publishers only QA on Chrome nowadays leaving FF behavior in the 'hope and pray' category of UX. I'll stick with it for now, but saying I'm at the verge of switching wouldn't be far from the truth. If it were not for the ideological, I would have switched to Chrome long time ago.
• zimbatm 9y ago
  Chrome has other advantages as well. If you buy into the Google Suite then you get synched profiles. Firefox has the same but the account is only useful for keeping Firefox in sync whereas Google's also give you access to all their other products, plus oauth to third party services. Google Chrome exists inside of an ecosystem, which means that is stays simple. On the other hand, Mozilla has a tendency of treating the browser as a goal in itself, which is understandable but creates things like the Pocket extension and other UX complexities. Android's unremovable Google search doesn't open the default browser but presents the result in a Chrome WebViewer.
  • midgetjones 9y ago
    > If you buy into the Google Suite then you get synched profiles. Firefox has the same but the account is only useful for keeping Firefox in sync whereas Google's also give you access to all their other products, plus oauth to third party services. That's the exact reason some of us avoid Chrome :)
    • digi_owl 9y ago
      Especially as Google have locked whole accounts because it was found to violate the TOS for one of their services...
• zimbatm 9y ago
  One thing the author didn't touch upon is the amount of manpower available on both sides. I am under the impression that Google has much less people involved in the construction of their browsers.
• dandare 9y ago
  Dear Mozilla team, I for a change think Chrome is better browser than Firefox. I am not talking about the performance of JavaScript, compliance with standards or developer tools, no, I am talking about Firefox's outdated UI and inconsistent user experience. Chrome is slick and fast while FF often lags, wastes space in the tabs and address bar and confuses me with additional search bar.
• twobyfour 9y ago
  Returning to a browser monoculture would be a loss for the web and its users.
• twobyfour 9y ago
  Returning to a browser monoculture would be a loss for the web and its users.
• self_awareness 9y ago
  I didn't switch from Firefox to Chromium because Google puts the "Chrome" name all over the place. I did the switch because Chrome is 2x faster than Firefox.
• Rjevski 9y ago
  One of the issues I see with Firefox is that they did some stupid stuff like Pocket, Hello and this awful Australis UI that as a result alienated a lot of power users. Power users are Firefox's best chance at regaining market share, and some of those users are now gone as a result of Mozilla's stupid decisions.
• johndoe489 9y ago
  I originally switched to Chrome soon after it came out because it was fast. I still use it today because usability wise it's just better for me. I can't for the life of me get used to a separate search box. The "omnibar" is simply fantastic. Coupled with turning off "search suggestions" in the Settings, you have a wiki on hand pretty much. Anything you type will match a personal bookmark, or a personal search. Or title of a page visited earlier. This means I don't need to make bookmark in many cases. I can also manage omnibar to give optimal results by making random, useless searches in a private window, which again, is so easy to use in Google Chrome (Ctrl Shift N). And then if a search match is inconvenient for speed or just not useful anymore, just shift+del to remove it. Firefox completelty lost me when I looked back and it was like version "52" instead of the version 14 or something I was one, just a year or two later. I was like "what the hell??" "WOW what are all these amazings updates they made?" Only to realize barely anything changed at all. And lately they just lost me completely as a developer. They wanted to integrate the Firebug extension, arguably the most useful aspect of Firefox for developers. I kept using Firefox for firebug for years, while Chrome was my main browser. But since they integrated it, it just performs worse. It's so damn slow and unusable, meanwhile Google console just gets better and better.
• buster 9y ago
  So not true. I try Firefox once in a while, but Chrome still is more responsive and has the better UI -> better UX. Basically i am waiting for a Servo-based browser which will hopefully change the UX in favor of Mozilla again. Oh, and PLEASE Mozilla. Unify that f* search toolbar into the adress bar, already. It's stupid.
  • jrimbault 9y ago
    You can remove the search bar, as the address already acts as a search bar. (the "customize" menu) edit: but sometimes the separate search bar is useful eg. when searching wikipedia instead of google? maybe it's just not your use case, I know it's not mine, I just append "wiki" to my searches, but we have to consider many different users.
• baalimago 9y ago
  firefox is important. don't let it fall
• faragon 9y ago
  Firefox: please lower the priority of the religious stuff (Rust, etc.), and increase the priority for actual work involving better user experience.
• osoba 9y ago
  Maybe this is a good opportunity for Firefox to abandon its "forced mediocrity" model. The vanilla installation of Firefox lacks basic UI components (mouse gestures for example), lacks session management, and the bookmark and history interfaces look like they were made in 1995. When you click an old entry in History I don't understand why it's so difficult for the selection to stay near the formerly clicked item, instead of it selecting the top most entry forcing you to scroll all the way down again if you want to open another entry that's near the previously clicked entry. Why can't Bookmarks employ a simple logistic classifier? OK I've stopped using Firefox's bookmark system a long time ago (because its so shitty) but if I were to be still using it I would expect the browser to be smart enough to figure out that if all my bookmarks from a certain site are in a specific bookmark folder that most likely means this new bookmark from that same site should go there and should be offered as the 1st choice. Now, yes, of course you can add all these features in a slow JavaScript-based addon which will eat your memory and cpu time and allow the Firefox team to blame the addons when something goes wrong with Firefox, but at some point you have to reconsider if this is such a good idea. Sure very few people use mouse gestures in Firefox and adding them out of the box could be interpreted as bloat, but maybe if more users even knew what mouse gestures were and how useful they are, they would start considering them a fundamental aspect of a browser's interface and not just a fancy knick-knack. I miss the old Opera so much :(
  • yamaneko 9y ago
    What are your thoughts on Vivaldi? I try it occasionally and I'm enjoying it. Most tools come out of the box, like Adblock, screenshot, window tiling, and mouse gestures. Not sure if the Adblock is as good as uBlock origin, though. Some new features like an improved history (haven't used thoroughly yet) and tab stacking. It still is a bit buggy for me on Ubuntu 16.04. Sometimes when playing videos the window flickers.
  • everybodyknows 9y ago
    I've been slogging along with FF Bookmarks, but breaking the XUL-dependent "Show Parent Folder" extension may be the last straw: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1299016 History of bookmark SNAFU goes back 9 years: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=469426
• MichaelMoser123 9y ago
  I would be glad to use firefox on Windows, but there are installation problems, after install the browser crashes on any attempt to use it (on my Linux VM it works just fine). The firefox people should take care of such details when they deal with the most widely used desktop OS.
  • cmiles74 9y ago
    I'm not sure that it's reasonable to blame Firefox for this issue. I use Firefox on Windows 7, 8 and 10 without issue; the installation went without a hitch.
    • MichaelMoser123 9y ago
      O wonder, just tried again with firefox 54.0.1 and install worked fine on windows. Thanks.
• apeace 9y ago
  It strikes me that the reason Firefox rose to prominence in the first place was because of the same thing: web sites all over put banners on the top of their pages (for IE users), saying something like "You should upgrade to a modern browser". The difference is that in those days, it was the developers of many different web sites doing it. I did it on many sites I worked on. We were sick of working in IE and wanted a browser that followed web standards we could all use. I don't think Chrome's dominance is a bad thing. Because if Chrome ever breaks the web for developers, we'll just do it all over again (or force Chrome to follow us, as we did with NaCL vs. WebAssembly).
• sriram_iyengar 9y ago
  I'm a firefox user for a very very long time - i do not remember using IE or Chrome for any serious time - i'm using mac for a decade now and not even safari ! Have never found firefox disturbing my dev work anyday. Will continue to use firefox.
• rocky1138 9y ago
  > Mozilla publishes aggregated Firefox usage data in form of Active Daily Installs (ADIs) here (Update: looks like the site requires a login now. It used to be available publicly for years and was public until a few days ago). The site is a bit clumsy and you can look at individual days only so I wrote some code to fetch the data for the last 3 years so its easier to analyze (link). These two things are probably related :)
• nfriedly 9y ago
  > ...Firefox Desktop is probably headed for extinction over the next couple years,... Yikes! I hope that was an exaggeration! I'm a long-time Firefox user on desktop and mobile, and I certainly don't want to see it die on the desktop. I prefer FF both because of the motivations behind the browser, and because on Android it supports extensions, making it much more useful to me. I do wish they'd release an iOS version that had the ad blocking of Firefox Focus, and the tabs and Sync and such from regular Firefox.
• usharf 9y ago
  It is really a shame as Firefox is really great to use these days. I've noticed that when switching back from safari and chrome. I now use it both on macOS, Linux and on my iOS devices, where I mostly use Firefox Klar for privacy. I find the the sync feature is very useful (bookmarks, history, passwords) and I trust Mozilla more than I do google. Those notices though, when I do use google services are frustrating and annoying, not to say off putting.
• baybal2 9y ago
  Firefox looses marketshare because they hired talentless GUI designers who made thing not better, but actually worse