25 ms·

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

by 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.
  - dallamaneni 9y ago
    Firefox developer edition allows using unsigned webextensions by toggling xpinstall.signatures.required to false in about:config
    - vetinari 9y ago
      Firefox developer edition is the former Aurora (development) channel. It is not the stable release channel.
      - dblohm7 9y ago
        FWIW, developer edition is now the Beta channel.
      - the8472 9y ago
        It's not labeled as stable, that does not mean it is unstable.
      - johnny22 9y ago
        You could use the unbranded builds. They build them specifically for your use case. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Add-ons/Extension_Signing#Unbranded_Builds https://wiki.mozilla.org/Add-ons/Extension_Signing#Unbranded...
    - bigbugbag 9y ago
      waterfox allows unsigned extensions. It seems to me disabling the xpinstall.signatures.required setting has no effect anymore, at least the last time I tried using it, it had no effect.
  - qovv 9y ago
    IMO it is really shortsighted to treat your best users and evangelists so poorly. This is the absolute creme de la creme of your user base- they should be pandered to, not locked out.
    - digi_owl 9y ago
- Semaphor 9y ago
  Same here. I read a bit about multi process having arrived, so I'm planning to give ff another try soon. But at least all the electrolysis pre release versions I tried ended up disappointing. It's a real shame, I'd love to switch away from chrome.
  - bigbugbag 9y ago
    have you tried vivaldi ?
    - Semaphor 9y ago
      It's crowded, there are way too many things I don't need. I prefer getting the flavor of feature I need by choosing an extension.
- kleiba 9y ago
  Something I could never quite understand. I'm using Firefox but occasionally run Chrome for a few minutes. I do have a couple of extensions installed in Firefox. To me, Chrome might be faster, or maybe not. But honestly, I couldn't care less: even if Firefox takes a second, or two or even three more to show me a page sometimes, so what? I mean, two seconds? I guess I can wait that long, even if I look at tens of websites each day (which I'm not even sure I do). If somebody gave me a Ferrari for free with the caveat that there's a guy sitting on the passengers seat who keeps track of where I'm going at all times, I guess I'd still keep driving my current car (hint: it's not a Ferrari). And before the downvote reflex sets in in some of you: I'm not saying that you should be like me. If you like Chrome, great, good for you! It's just that the speed difference to me personally has never been a good enough reason to switch. YMMV.
  - Pxtl 9y ago
    The problem is that when you get more and more tabs going, Firefox's single-threadedness becomes more and more painful. When one misbehaving tab locks up (or crashes) the whole browser, that's bad.
    - callahad 9y ago
      This has been fixed. Firefox is now fully multi-process on all release channels.
      - jetpacktuxedo 9y ago
        Unless you have an add on that isn't compatible, like the one that ubuntu for some reason bundles with the browser out of the box.
        j605 9y ago
        I hate it when people who know how to disable them don't do it and complain about it. It is really Ubuntu's fault for bundling an addon that is not compatible with multiprocesses.
- monochromatic 9y ago
  Firefox nowadays feels every bit as fast as Chrome, if not faster.
  - jhasse 9y ago
    Not for me and definitely not on Linux, see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1280523 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1280523 for example.
    - monochromatic 9y ago
      Haven't tried it on Linux, just Windows.
    - josefx 9y ago
      Just run it in Wine (currently may not work).
      - jhasse 9y ago
        Most people will just use Chrome instead.
- Narishma 9y ago
  It must be something subjective or system-dependant then because I switched from Chrome to Firefox for that same reason.
  - bigbugbag 9y ago
    It is totally subjective. Except for the cases where it's accumulated cruft and dubious extensions (adblock plus for example).
- ss64 9y ago
  The problem Firefox had for a long time was the terrible Flash plugin combined with a lack of per-tab processes. That meant that a single flash element on one page would slow down the entire browser. I removed the flash plugin completely a couple of years ago and havent looked back.
- michaelmrose 9y ago
  This was the big part of why I dumped firefox. Others included pending depreciation of addon apis, screwy behavior with dark gtk themes and unreadable text, issues where video would straight on skip or freeze max headroom style, yahoo partnership, addon signing requirement, failure to add synced reading lists to desktop browser in favor of pushing pocket. In short screw you too mozilla.
- math0ne 9y ago
  Performance is really good with the new multi threaded implementation.
- Endy 9y ago
  As a fellow Firefox user (writing this on Firefox, btw), I've heard people complain about performance issues all the time with Firefox vs. Chrome... and I've never understood the problem. Firefox with ~20 addons starts up like a charm for me, loads every page I need in moments, and has no problem doing anything I need it to do. Chrome, on the other hand, gums up my machine to the point that just opening a Chromium-based browser usually ends with my machine frozen like an iceberg, me pulling the battery, booting into safe-mode, and uninstalling the product completely.
- nolemurs 9y ago
  Same here. I like the idea of Firefox. Every few months I reinstall it and try it for a day or two, and it's always just painfully slow compared to Chrome. In most other respects I actually prefer Firefox, but the other differences are just much less important to me. Ohh, and the Chrome dev tools are just better. So that helps. But if Firefox weren't noticeably slow I'd use it without hesitation.
  - bzbarsky 9y ago
    If you're willing to spend a bit of time on this, I'd really appreciate a list of at least some of the things that feel slow compared to Chrome when you try to use a current Firefox nightly. It's a lot easier to fix things we know about than things we don't know about. ;)
allengeorge 9y ago
Performance is a big one for me. The Firefox UI feels slower, and every so often it hangs, which is frustrating to no end. When I used Chrome I took speed for granted - something I no longer can with Firefox.
jhasse 9y ago
This is my list, all of which Chrome does better than Firefox (roughly related bug reports included): * Restore the old settings. They copied Chrome's settings-as-a-tab with the UI just being HTML. But in Chrome I can at least search the settings. Why did Mozilla waste their time on copying the HTML-settings without also implemented the most useful feature? It was just a huge regression, because the UI is now non-native, many things aren't resizeable anymore and some other minor bugs where introduced, without any apparent benefit. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1325286 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1325286 * When you start Firefox two times in a row, the dialog "Firefox is already running, please close the running instance" or something like this pops up. Chrome doesn't have this problem, maybe just because its startup time is SO much better. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=489981 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=489981 * On Linux: Integrate the tabs into the titlebar like Chrome does. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=513159 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=513159 * Way too easy to quit the whole browser with Ctrl+Q (Chrome uses Ctrl+Shift+Q) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52821 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52821 * Encrypt passwords with the keyring (like Chrome does) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=309807 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=309807 (btw: that's the second most voted bug of the "Toolkit" product according to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=productdashboard.html&tab=popularity&product=Toolkit&bug_status=open https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=productdashboard.ht... ) * No hardware acceleration on Linux (playing HD YouTube videos lags for me in Firefox out-of-the-box, perfectly fine in Chrome) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1280523 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1280523 * Speed and responsiveness of the UI in general are much better in Chrome. (no bug report link, sorry) Notice how that there's no complain about the look of the main UI, still Mozilla decides to redo it yet again with project Photon ... Did I miss the bug report with lots of votes for that? And regarding the bug reports (most of them reported years ago): There was a comment on Reddit a while ago where a GNOME (!) developer said something along the lines "We're not Mozilla, we're actually reading and answering our bug reports". That says something.
- E6300 9y ago
  > When you start Firefox two times in a row, the dialog "Firefox is already running, please close the running instance" or something like this pops up. On Windows, this only happens if the second instance starts with a specific command-line option (the name escapes me at the moment). Otherwise, the existing instance just opens a new window.
Animats 9y ago
Yahoo as the default search engine didn't help, either. Firefox is about to shoot itself in the foot again. Soon, all old add-ons will stop working, as Firefox tries to get add-on developers to change to their new WebExtensions API. (Which is almost, but not quite, compatible with Google's add-on format.) Many developers are not bothering, and will drop Firefox.
- unknown2374 9y ago
  They do need to make money in some way, ever since Google didn't renew their contract with Mozilla (which iirc was 98% of their revenue back in the day) after Chrome started taking off.
  - kibwen 9y ago
    Mozilla actually moved to Yahoo not because Google refused to renew their contract, but because Yahoo was flush with cash and desperate to gain any foothold at all in search engine share (which they did, briefly; a friend of mine at Google had the job of getting Firefox users to switch their default search back to Google). Yahoo just offered better terms than Google at the time.
  - bigbugbag 9y ago
    It's mozilla who didn't renew with google in the US, because yahoo needed to appear better for negotiating their price tag and made a better offer.
- gnicholas 9y ago
  Yep, I'll be limping along on the "old" version of Firefox so that I can use Tree Style Tabs, which can't be made compatible with the new extension framework. And my startup may or may not update our own Firefox extension this year. We're waiting to see how things shake out — how many people update to the latest version of Firefox, or whether folks are tied to the old version because they have so many legacy extensions.
  - olejorgenb 9y ago
nu5500 9y ago
From my experience, the reasons why people switched to Chrome have been because it renders pages much smoother and everything generally looks better. These were the original reasons that they moved over to Firefox from IE as well. I personally helped a number of relatives and friends make these switches. Late last year, after many years on Chrome, I gave Firefox another serious look and I have switched back. Firefox has improved tremendously and I would prefer to give my support to Mozilla from a philosophical standpoint (the Chrome team does a lot of good work with regards to pushing forward the features of the web and its security but at the end of the day, Chrome is still a strategic piece of Google's business machine and not a philanthropic effort) While I have my reasons for using Firefox, I don't see a compelling reason for most users already happy with Chrome to switch back. The average web user that I know doesn't really understand where web browsers come from and isn't very interested in learning about it. They just care whether the browser runs better or worse for the tasks that they do. (Except many still hate IE and will not even try Edge because the logo looks similar enough - that's a branding issue that Microsoft has) What irritates me now are more and more sites that only work with Chrome (where they literally throw up a page that blocks access and says go download Chrome). These are sites that are not Google properties so I'm not blaming Google for this bad behavior, but again, I would like to support the diverse browser landscape that has existed to this point. I guess my main complaint to Google is to please stop popping up dialogs about Chrome across all of your properties. The browser I'm using works perfectly fine thank you, and you should be supporting the open web with your products anyway.
- Fej 9y ago
  Chrome font rendering on Windows is still broken. Fonts that look find everywhere else are different in Chrome and usually look worse. Why?!
  - pcwalton 9y ago
    I don't know the exact reason why, but it probably has to do with the fact that Edge and Firefox both use Direct2D for rendering and DirectWrite for text, while Chrome uses Skia (which can call into DirectWrite or GDI for text rendering I believe, but may not do so in the exact same way).
pishpash 9y ago
People switch because Chrome is a superior product, just like Internet Explorer was a superior product to Netscape at one time. That's not a concern. The concern is using market position to engage in anti-competitive behavior, like bundling.
- Zardoz84 9y ago
  People begin to use more IE, becasue lazines and that IE was bundled with Windows. Netscape always was better that IE.
  - dep_b 9y ago
    Netscape 4 versus IE5 or 6 was pretty bad. They got stalled a few years while rewriting their browser. Firefox was better than IE almost from the very first alpha tests.
    - bigbugbag 9y ago
      Netscape 4 was facing IE4 not IE5 or 6. firefox was initially named phoenix and it was made as a workaround the performances issue of mozilla suite by removing everything unneeded to run a browser. Except mozilla suite fixed its performance issues way before phoenix was ready for prime time.
      - dep_b 9y ago
        True about IE6, but IE5 was already out before Netscape 6 came out. Funny that the real 1.0 for Firefox came years later.
        vetinari 9y ago
        Netscape 6 was the "new one", with Gecko, XUL and stuff. Firefox itself used to be an alternative - the main browser was Seamonkey, that included mail client, chat client and kitchen sink, just like the original Netscape did. Firefox started later as a lightweight alternative, just the browser.
cannam 9y ago
I'd be surprised if any of those, up to the last three, was a big deal for more than 1% or so of users. And I am inclined to think the original article probably has it right about simple saturation marketing as the cause of most user switching. But performance. Firefox very often outperforms Chrome in microbenchmarks and computationally-intensive code in my tests, but in the real world an awful lot of sites really are much more responsive in Chrome. For me as a user, most recently an update to the FastMail web UI a couple of weeks ago made it lamentably slow in Firefox -- just mousing over the folder tree caused CPU spikes and lag in updating -- and in the end I switched to opening FastMail in a separate Chrome instance while continuing to use Firefox for everything else. I've just switched it back to Firefox as I type this, to see whether anything has improved. The web app I'm working on as a developer just now also has problems updating as smoothly in Firefox as in Chrome, and I'm not at all sure whether we'll be able to do anything about it. I can't think of an example at the moment of a site that feels faster in Firefox. I believe I have come to think of Firefox as a web browser, and Chrome as a platform for web apps. Things written to be web apps are almost always more responsive in Chrome, even though many of their components (number-crunching work) really do run measurably quicker in Firefox.
- emn13 9y ago
  Yeah me too - and even the last three(perf/mem, extension breakage, and OS support) are partially questionable - FF has essentially always been better behaved in low-memory scenarios that chrome; and desktop OS support is (again, to this day) better that chrome's. Even XP still has FF 52 ESR support up to june 2018, and v52 isn't that old yet.
- aibara 9y ago
  I use Firefox (Linux) and Fastmail, and definitely don't have any problems: the web UI is just as fast as always and have no CPU issues. Maybe it's some addon or something?
  - ronjouch 9y ago
    Can definitely be due to addons. That innocuous Emoji keyboard addon [1] for example, caused horrible page load performance and unresponsiveness (due apparently to parsing the entire DOM in order to replace/insert emojis); filed a bug at [2]. Hope the move to WebExtensions lets Mozilla provide less opportunities for extension developers to shoot users in the foot. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/emoji-keyboard-by-emojione/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/emoji-keyboar... [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1339822 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1339822
emn13 9y ago
You seriously think that removing the ability to disable javascript (well, not really, you still can - just not as easily) is in any way a factor? Which other browser makes this easier? Pocket? Hello? Really? Firefox memory usage has for years used less memory; basically since its inception. Apparently it's no different now: https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2017/03/whos-winning-the-browser-memory-usage-war/ https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2017/03/whos-winning-the-browser-... e10s? Come on, give me a break. I bet the vast majority of users have never heard of it, and of the others, most don't know what it's about to any useful degree, and of those that understand this feature, most probably wouldn't know the details of how the various multiprocess implementations actually compare. A vanishingly small proportion of the user base know of this feature, understand it enough, can compare this to other browsers, and then have a strong enough opinion to affect browser choice (and frankly, it's not obvious multiprocess is actually that great of an idea in the first place if you really do know what you're talking about - not one of the browsers actually separates every tab into a separate browser - for a reason!) As to OS support - firefox still is the last browser to support XP, so I'm not sure what you're referring to. Version 52 was the last one; but that's on an extended support cycle until june 2018, which AFAICT is more than two years later than chrome's last v50. Microsoft hasn't "supported" XP with any reasonable browser... well, not ever (the highest IE version was 9!), and it hasn't supported the OS at all even with security patches for years (with certain notable exceptions). As to disruptions caused by signed extensions - so that's why the appstore has failed and nobody is using windows anymore? I get it's annoying, but this is a pattern that's recurring all over the industry, and has for many years before FF made this step. If anything, I think it's more plausible FF is being punished because it was too slow to ban unsigned extensions! Because poor experiences based on bad or even malicious extensions do reflect on FF. And for that matter, signing isn't the real issue, it's add-on sandboxing/threading. Chrome got this "more" right, in that it's less likely for an novice extension author to accidentally bring chrome to a grinding halt. But precisely this feature is still causing lots of addon breakage because FF has not yet completely dumped the old, problematic add-on API, presumably because users really hate losing their cherished extensions (and for a reason). I've witnessed several addons that have chrome+FF equivalents where perf issues occured only in FF - which may have been the addon author's "fault" - but that's a really poor excuse. Poor perf, and the expectation of poor perf sound like more reasonable guesses, but even there I'm not convinced this actually matters as much as you'd hope. Still, that's at least something. But then, the number of people you see working with unworkably slow setups for all kinds of reasons that apparently don't care enough to switch products suggests that even abominable perf isn't necessarily very impactful. Maybe this matters indirectly; in that power users that care influence others in their choices.
ashark 9y ago
I switched to Chrome in ~2011 or 2012 after being a Firefox user and evangelist since... was the first one Phoenix or Firebird? Anyway, that one. Reasons: - Firefox got bogged down with just a few tabs open, and caused beachballs (OSX/macOS) systemwide. Chrome was snappier and didn't harm my system's overall responsiveness with several times as many tabs open. This was the main reason. - Dev tools. Liked Chrome's better. - Profile handling was, at the time anyway, better. - IIRC Firefox didn't do per-tab crashing at the time, while Chrome did, which aided overall stability. Advertising had nothing to do with it. Chrome was just way, way better, especially its (apparent, which is mostly what matters) resource footprint. Now I'm mostly on Safari, even though it's the worst mainstream browser, just because I gain 1-2hrs of battery life using it over Chrome or Firefox.
- DiThi 9y ago
  > Dev tools. Liked Chrome's better. They definitely are. To this day I'm baffled I'm not sent to the debugger when clicking a line reference in the console. But I still use Firefox as main browser. Since the pages I visit and the pages I develop are always in different places it's pretty easy to have one browser for development only.
- gorkonsine 9y ago
  I switched to Chrome around that time too, for many of the same reasons (mainly performance and stability). I've since switched back because Chrome is a terrible memory hog and I can have tons of tabs open on Firefox with no impact on performance (as long as I don't actually load them), and I don't have problems with crashing the way I used to.
  - victorhooi 9y ago
    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_tabs 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-throttles.html 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).
muppetman 9y ago
Thank you! As soon as Pocket was "included" and the response to everyone complaining was a politely worded "fuck you" then I removed FF and haven't looked back. It's understandable they have to find ways to make money, but those experiments alienated users. Once you've started down that path, there's no returning in a lot of users eyes, mine included.
Dirlewanger 9y ago
Yup, FF has just missed the mark on so many points that Chrome just blows past them. Any JS-heavy web applications (YouTube, HBO Go, Netflix) run like garbage in FF. Switch over to Chrome and they are buttery-smooth. Sucks to say this too as someone who's used FF since its beta.
- foepys 9y ago
  For me Chrome and Firefox feel the same performance-wise. Are you sure you don't have some add-ons or other changes in your Firefox profile?
- bigbugbag 9y ago
  Try again from a brand new user account, chances are this issue will go away.
NewEntryHN 9y ago
Those are tech-y reasons that might have repelled tech-y users like us on Hacker News, but the bulk of the market are laymen who don't know the difference between a browser and a search engine on whom marketing is very efficient.
eikenberry 9y ago
> * Frequent breakage of extensions when first switching to the more rapid release schedule. That's why I switched. It broke most of my extensions every time it upgraded. After the 3rd or 4th time it wasn't worth dealing with anymore. I switched to Chromium and I don't remember it breaking an extension.
- bigbugbag 9y ago
  I just skipped upgrading firefox, it's broken under debian anyway.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
f4rker 9y ago
* Taking many years to get .... and at the same time Moz / FF waste time and money on stupid side projects and Virtue Signalling no one cares about.
bigbugbag 9y ago
You have forgotten a few, such as dropping alsa and making pulseaudio a hard dependency blaming alsa when actually it was their own implementation that was falling behind and they did not want to fix it. But the issue here is that mozilla do not listen to user feedback and just push whatever they feel like pushing with an attitude and some hostility towards unhappy users. or as pointed out in the mozillazine forums: they're " making far-reaching and very short-sighted decisions in a vacuum. " It seems inside mozilla they're convinced that firefox is great and answers users' needs, while users feels that firefox is not that good and getting worse. There's quite a gap between mozilla marketing and the reality, which shows that firefox fails to deliver on its promises.
qovv 9y ago
I'm a Firefox user and quit Chrome for the same reason I stopped using Windows after Windows 7: to keep a bare minimum of privacy when using the internet. Here are a few additions to that list: * Firefox Extensions now must be signed, and there is no workaround, not even one for users willing to delve deeply into settings x,y,z. The rationale for making it difficult to add unsigned extensions is sound, but there is none for making it impossible. * Firefox claims to be privacy-friendly, but they use an identifier when calling home that, along with other data, uniquely identifies the user. Firefox claims that this communication is encrypted, but this is not enough for state actors, and likely not for others. * There are about 20 default settings in Firefox that call home to Google behind the scenes. * All of these settings are incredibly confusing and there is no standard documentation on how any of it works, so even for a technically inclined person it is near-impossible to simply use the browser without spewing your data all over the place- and that's _before_ actually calling up e.g. the NY Times and its 50 trackers, data-miners, beacons, ad networks, social networks, etc. * The shameful treatment of Brendan Eich (creator of JavaScript and co-founder(!)) still rankles. All that said, it's the least-worst in the browser world, for now. It seems pretty clear that they have some technically brilliant people as well. Edit: seems that I need to learn how to write lists...
- bigbugbag 9y ago
  > seems that I need to learn how to write lists... insert an empty line between each bullet point. First without an empty line: * bullet point without empty line between each other * bullet point without empty line between each other then with an empty line inserted in between: * bullet point with an empty line between each other * bullet point with an empty line between each other
frik 9y ago
So true. The Mozilla corp lost touch with their users. All early Netscape employees left, now it's official a non-profit but acts like big corp. Firefox become unusable - shut down Firebug replaced by half-assed new DevTools, removed XUL based API, multi-process support that's still not working like Chrome1+/IE8+, still dog slow, can't handle more than a few tabs, Addons-website got useless as most addons aren't working anymore. Sad, but Chrome is so much better, and Firefox is digging in a bigger rabbit hole with every new release. Would be great if we keep another open source competing browser around. Servo based browser could be a fresh start, but they need to focus now, in a year it can be too late.
wodenokoto 9y ago
The visual drops in data shows only one of the things you mentioned had a sizeable impact, and that was discussed in the article. Almost everything you list are things that happen around a certain time and we don't see those events manifest in the graph. The reason of course being that the vast majority of Firefox users are not expert and don't care or know about those advance features. Maybe if you can link to a user satisfaction report...
Markoff 9y ago
I try firefox usually once a year to find out nothing changed about freezing, crashing, slow reactions and bad rendering on machine with 2GB RAM. Meanwhile Chrome just works. It's even worse on Android, they don't have in FF even pull down to refresh and it's the slowest browser I tried.
wutbrodo 9y ago
Yea, I've always been a huge fan of (and donor to) Mozilla, but in the last few years, I've been losing some respect for them. Getting embroiled in absurd political snafus, head-in-the-sand analysis of their situation which ignores product quality, etc. I switched to Chrome a lot later than most of my friends, and actively try to switch to Firefox every once in a while, for literally the last 7 or 8 years. There has yet to be a single time where a couple days of usage didn't reveal the browser as far inferior, in ways that affect my day-to-day life materailly (multiprocess support being the biggest, most basic issue for a long time). I spend a LOT of my time in the browser, and I'm a very heavy user (usually about 100 Chrome tabs open total at any given time, with fairly high turnover). The performance and quality penalty I pay when using Firefox just isn't worth it. I don't disagree with the article's claim that Google's advertising is having a big effect on a drop in FF usage; it's just bizarre for them to act like this is the only possible reason why people are switching.

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.
- dallamaneni 9y ago
  Firefox developer edition allows using unsigned webextensions by toggling xpinstall.signatures.required to false in about:config
  - vetinari 9y ago
    Firefox developer edition is the former Aurora (development) channel. It is not the stable release channel.
    - dblohm7 9y ago
      FWIW, developer edition is now the Beta channel.
    - the8472 9y ago
      It's not labeled as stable, that does not mean it is unstable.
    - johnny22 9y ago
      You could use the unbranded builds. They build them specifically for your use case. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Add-ons/Extension_Signing#Unbranded_Builds https://wiki.mozilla.org/Add-ons/Extension_Signing#Unbranded...
  - bigbugbag 9y ago
    waterfox allows unsigned extensions. It seems to me disabling the xpinstall.signatures.required setting has no effect anymore, at least the last time I tried using it, it had no effect.
- qovv 9y ago
  IMO it is really shortsighted to treat your best users and evangelists so poorly. This is the absolute creme de la creme of your user base- they should be pandered to, not locked out.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
Semaphor 9y ago
Same here. I read a bit about multi process having arrived, so I'm planning to give ff another try soon. But at least all the electrolysis pre release versions I tried ended up disappointing. It's a real shame, I'd love to switch away from chrome.
- bigbugbag 9y ago
  have you tried vivaldi ?
  - Semaphor 9y ago
    It's crowded, there are way too many things I don't need. I prefer getting the flavor of feature I need by choosing an extension.
kleiba 9y ago
Something I could never quite understand. I'm using Firefox but occasionally run Chrome for a few minutes. I do have a couple of extensions installed in Firefox. To me, Chrome might be faster, or maybe not. But honestly, I couldn't care less: even if Firefox takes a second, or two or even three more to show me a page sometimes, so what? I mean, two seconds? I guess I can wait that long, even if I look at tens of websites each day (which I'm not even sure I do). If somebody gave me a Ferrari for free with the caveat that there's a guy sitting on the passengers seat who keeps track of where I'm going at all times, I guess I'd still keep driving my current car (hint: it's not a Ferrari). And before the downvote reflex sets in in some of you: I'm not saying that you should be like me. If you like Chrome, great, good for you! It's just that the speed difference to me personally has never been a good enough reason to switch. YMMV.
- Pxtl 9y ago
  The problem is that when you get more and more tabs going, Firefox's single-threadedness becomes more and more painful. When one misbehaving tab locks up (or crashes) the whole browser, that's bad.
  - callahad 9y ago
    This has been fixed. Firefox is now fully multi-process on all release channels.
    - jetpacktuxedo 9y ago
      Unless you have an add on that isn't compatible, like the one that ubuntu for some reason bundles with the browser out of the box.
      - j605 9y ago
        I hate it when people who know how to disable them don't do it and complain about it. It is really Ubuntu's fault for bundling an addon that is not compatible with multiprocesses.
monochromatic 9y ago
Firefox nowadays feels every bit as fast as Chrome, if not faster.
- jhasse 9y ago
  Not for me and definitely not on Linux, see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1280523 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1280523 for example.
  - monochromatic 9y ago
    Haven't tried it on Linux, just Windows.
  - josefx 9y ago
    Just run it in Wine (currently may not work).
    - jhasse 9y ago
      Most people will just use Chrome instead.
Narishma 9y ago
It must be something subjective or system-dependant then because I switched from Chrome to Firefox for that same reason.
- bigbugbag 9y ago
  It is totally subjective. Except for the cases where it's accumulated cruft and dubious extensions (adblock plus for example).
ss64 9y ago
The problem Firefox had for a long time was the terrible Flash plugin combined with a lack of per-tab processes. That meant that a single flash element on one page would slow down the entire browser. I removed the flash plugin completely a couple of years ago and havent looked back.
michaelmrose 9y ago
This was the big part of why I dumped firefox. Others included pending depreciation of addon apis, screwy behavior with dark gtk themes and unreadable text, issues where video would straight on skip or freeze max headroom style, yahoo partnership, addon signing requirement, failure to add synced reading lists to desktop browser in favor of pushing pocket. In short screw you too mozilla.
math0ne 9y ago
Performance is really good with the new multi threaded implementation.
Endy 9y ago
As a fellow Firefox user (writing this on Firefox, btw), I've heard people complain about performance issues all the time with Firefox vs. Chrome... and I've never understood the problem. Firefox with ~20 addons starts up like a charm for me, loads every page I need in moments, and has no problem doing anything I need it to do. Chrome, on the other hand, gums up my machine to the point that just opening a Chromium-based browser usually ends with my machine frozen like an iceberg, me pulling the battery, booting into safe-mode, and uninstalling the product completely.
nolemurs 9y ago
Same here. I like the idea of Firefox. Every few months I reinstall it and try it for a day or two, and it's always just painfully slow compared to Chrome. In most other respects I actually prefer Firefox, but the other differences are just much less important to me. Ohh, and the Chrome dev tools are just better. So that helps. But if Firefox weren't noticeably slow I'd use it without hesitation.
- bzbarsky 9y ago
  If you're willing to spend a bit of time on this, I'd really appreciate a list of at least some of the things that feel slow compared to Chrome when you try to use a current Firefox nightly. It's a lot easier to fix things we know about than things we don't know about. ;)

allengeorge 9y ago

Performance is a big one for me. The Firefox UI feels slower, and every so often it hangs, which is frustrating to no end. When I used Chrome I took speed for granted - something I no longer can with Firefox.

jhasse 9y ago

This is my list, all of which Chrome does better than Firefox (roughly related bug reports included): * Restore the old settings. They copied Chrome's settings-as-a-tab with the UI just being HTML. But in Chrome I can at least search the settings. Why did Mozilla waste their time on copying the HTML-settings without also implemented the most useful feature? It was just a huge regression, because the UI is now non-native, many things aren't resizeable anymore and some other minor bugs where introduced, without any apparent benefit. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1325286 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1325286 * When you start Firefox two times in a row, the dialog "Firefox is already running, please close the running instance" or something like this pops up. Chrome doesn't have this problem, maybe just because its startup time is SO much better. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=489981 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=489981 * On Linux: Integrate the tabs into the titlebar like Chrome does. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=513159 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=513159 * Way too easy to quit the whole browser with Ctrl+Q (Chrome uses Ctrl+Shift+Q) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52821 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52821 * Encrypt passwords with the keyring (like Chrome does) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=309807 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=309807 (btw: that's the second most voted bug of the "Toolkit" product according to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=productdashboard.html&tab=popularity&product=Toolkit&bug_status=open https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=productdashboard.ht... ) * No hardware acceleration on Linux (playing HD YouTube videos lags for me in Firefox out-of-the-box, perfectly fine in Chrome) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1280523 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1280523 * Speed and responsiveness of the UI in general are much better in Chrome. (no bug report link, sorry) Notice how that there's no complain about the look of the main UI, still Mozilla decides to redo it yet again with project Photon ... Did I miss the bug report with lots of votes for that? And regarding the bug reports (most of them reported years ago): There was a comment on Reddit a while ago where a GNOME (!) developer said something along the lines "We're not Mozilla, we're actually reading and answering our bug reports". That says something.

E6300 9y ago
> When you start Firefox two times in a row, the dialog "Firefox is already running, please close the running instance" or something like this pops up. On Windows, this only happens if the second instance starts with a specific command-line option (the name escapes me at the moment). Otherwise, the existing instance just opens a new window.

Animats 9y ago

Yahoo as the default search engine didn't help, either. Firefox is about to shoot itself in the foot again. Soon, all old add-ons will stop working, as Firefox tries to get add-on developers to change to their new WebExtensions API. (Which is almost, but not quite, compatible with Google's add-on format.) Many developers are not bothering, and will drop Firefox.

unknown2374 9y ago
They do need to make money in some way, ever since Google didn't renew their contract with Mozilla (which iirc was 98% of their revenue back in the day) after Chrome started taking off.
- kibwen 9y ago
  Mozilla actually moved to Yahoo not because Google refused to renew their contract, but because Yahoo was flush with cash and desperate to gain any foothold at all in search engine share (which they did, briefly; a friend of mine at Google had the job of getting Firefox users to switch their default search back to Google). Yahoo just offered better terms than Google at the time.
- bigbugbag 9y ago
  It's mozilla who didn't renew with google in the US, because yahoo needed to appear better for negotiating their price tag and made a better offer.
gnicholas 9y ago
Yep, I'll be limping along on the "old" version of Firefox so that I can use Tree Style Tabs, which can't be made compatible with the new extension framework. And my startup may or may not update our own Firefox extension this year. We're waiting to see how things shake out — how many people update to the latest version of Firefox, or whether folks are tied to the old version because they have so many legacy extensions.
- olejorgenb 9y ago

nu5500 9y ago

From my experience, the reasons why people switched to Chrome have been because it renders pages much smoother and everything generally looks better. These were the original reasons that they moved over to Firefox from IE as well. I personally helped a number of relatives and friends make these switches. Late last year, after many years on Chrome, I gave Firefox another serious look and I have switched back. Firefox has improved tremendously and I would prefer to give my support to Mozilla from a philosophical standpoint (the Chrome team does a lot of good work with regards to pushing forward the features of the web and its security but at the end of the day, Chrome is still a strategic piece of Google's business machine and not a philanthropic effort) While I have my reasons for using Firefox, I don't see a compelling reason for most users already happy with Chrome to switch back. The average web user that I know doesn't really understand where web browsers come from and isn't very interested in learning about it. They just care whether the browser runs better or worse for the tasks that they do. (Except many still hate IE and will not even try Edge because the logo looks similar enough - that's a branding issue that Microsoft has) What irritates me now are more and more sites that only work with Chrome (where they literally throw up a page that blocks access and says go download Chrome). These are sites that are not Google properties so I'm not blaming Google for this bad behavior, but again, I would like to support the diverse browser landscape that has existed to this point. I guess my main complaint to Google is to please stop popping up dialogs about Chrome across all of your properties. The browser I'm using works perfectly fine thank you, and you should be supporting the open web with your products anyway.

Fej 9y ago
Chrome font rendering on Windows is still broken. Fonts that look find everywhere else are different in Chrome and usually look worse. Why?!
- pcwalton 9y ago
  I don't know the exact reason why, but it probably has to do with the fact that Edge and Firefox both use Direct2D for rendering and DirectWrite for text, while Chrome uses Skia (which can call into DirectWrite or GDI for text rendering I believe, but may not do so in the exact same way).

pishpash 9y ago

People switch because Chrome is a superior product, just like Internet Explorer was a superior product to Netscape at one time. That's not a concern. The concern is using market position to engage in anti-competitive behavior, like bundling.

Zardoz84 9y ago
People begin to use more IE, becasue lazines and that IE was bundled with Windows. Netscape always was better that IE.
- dep_b 9y ago
  Netscape 4 versus IE5 or 6 was pretty bad. They got stalled a few years while rewriting their browser. Firefox was better than IE almost from the very first alpha tests.
  - bigbugbag 9y ago
    Netscape 4 was facing IE4 not IE5 or 6. firefox was initially named phoenix and it was made as a workaround the performances issue of mozilla suite by removing everything unneeded to run a browser. Except mozilla suite fixed its performance issues way before phoenix was ready for prime time.
    - dep_b 9y ago
      True about IE6, but IE5 was already out before Netscape 6 came out. Funny that the real 1.0 for Firefox came years later.
      - vetinari 9y ago
        Netscape 6 was the "new one", with Gecko, XUL and stuff. Firefox itself used to be an alternative - the main browser was Seamonkey, that included mail client, chat client and kitchen sink, just like the original Netscape did. Firefox started later as a lightweight alternative, just the browser.

cannam 9y ago

I'd be surprised if any of those, up to the last three, was a big deal for more than 1% or so of users. And I am inclined to think the original article probably has it right about simple saturation marketing as the cause of most user switching. But performance. Firefox very often outperforms Chrome in microbenchmarks and computationally-intensive code in my tests, but in the real world an awful lot of sites really are much more responsive in Chrome. For me as a user, most recently an update to the FastMail web UI a couple of weeks ago made it lamentably slow in Firefox -- just mousing over the folder tree caused CPU spikes and lag in updating -- and in the end I switched to opening FastMail in a separate Chrome instance while continuing to use Firefox for everything else. I've just switched it back to Firefox as I type this, to see whether anything has improved. The web app I'm working on as a developer just now also has problems updating as smoothly in Firefox as in Chrome, and I'm not at all sure whether we'll be able to do anything about it. I can't think of an example at the moment of a site that feels faster in Firefox. I believe I have come to think of Firefox as a web browser, and Chrome as a platform for web apps. Things written to be web apps are almost always more responsive in Chrome, even though many of their components (number-crunching work) really do run measurably quicker in Firefox.

emn13 9y ago
Yeah me too - and even the last three(perf/mem, extension breakage, and OS support) are partially questionable - FF has essentially always been better behaved in low-memory scenarios that chrome; and desktop OS support is (again, to this day) better that chrome's. Even XP still has FF 52 ESR support up to june 2018, and v52 isn't that old yet.
aibara 9y ago
I use Firefox (Linux) and Fastmail, and definitely don't have any problems: the web UI is just as fast as always and have no CPU issues. Maybe it's some addon or something?
- ronjouch 9y ago
  Can definitely be due to addons. That innocuous Emoji keyboard addon [1] for example, caused horrible page load performance and unresponsiveness (due apparently to parsing the entire DOM in order to replace/insert emojis); filed a bug at [2]. Hope the move to WebExtensions lets Mozilla provide less opportunities for extension developers to shoot users in the foot. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/emoji-keyboard-by-emojione/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/emoji-keyboar... [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1339822 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1339822

emn13 9y ago

You seriously think that removing the ability to disable javascript (well, not really, you still can - just not as easily) is in any way a factor? Which other browser makes this easier? Pocket? Hello? Really? Firefox memory usage has for years used less memory; basically since its inception. Apparently it's no different now: https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2017/03/whos-winning-the-browser-memory-usage-war/ https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2017/03/whos-winning-the-browser-... e10s? Come on, give me a break. I bet the vast majority of users have never heard of it, and of the others, most don't know what it's about to any useful degree, and of those that understand this feature, most probably wouldn't know the details of how the various multiprocess implementations actually compare. A vanishingly small proportion of the user base know of this feature, understand it enough, can compare this to other browsers, and then have a strong enough opinion to affect browser choice (and frankly, it's not obvious multiprocess is actually that great of an idea in the first place if you really do know what you're talking about - not one of the browsers actually separates every tab into a separate browser - for a reason!) As to OS support - firefox still is the last browser to support XP, so I'm not sure what you're referring to. Version 52 was the last one; but that's on an extended support cycle until june 2018, which AFAICT is more than two years later than chrome's last v50. Microsoft hasn't "supported" XP with any reasonable browser... well, not ever (the highest IE version was 9!), and it hasn't supported the OS at all even with security patches for years (with certain notable exceptions). As to disruptions caused by signed extensions - so that's why the appstore has failed and nobody is using windows anymore? I get it's annoying, but this is a pattern that's recurring all over the industry, and has for many years before FF made this step. If anything, I think it's more plausible FF is being punished because it was too slow to ban unsigned extensions! Because poor experiences based on bad or even malicious extensions do reflect on FF. And for that matter, signing isn't the real issue, it's add-on sandboxing/threading. Chrome got this "more" right, in that it's less likely for an novice extension author to accidentally bring chrome to a grinding halt. But precisely this feature is still causing lots of addon breakage because FF has not yet completely dumped the old, problematic add-on API, presumably because users really hate losing their cherished extensions (and for a reason). I've witnessed several addons that have chrome+FF equivalents where perf issues occured only in FF - which may have been the addon author's "fault" - but that's a really poor excuse. Poor perf, and the expectation of poor perf sound like more reasonable guesses, but even there I'm not convinced this actually matters as much as you'd hope. Still, that's at least something. But then, the number of people you see working with unworkably slow setups for all kinds of reasons that apparently don't care enough to switch products suggests that even abominable perf isn't necessarily very impactful. Maybe this matters indirectly; in that power users that care influence others in their choices.

ashark 9y ago

I switched to Chrome in ~2011 or 2012 after being a Firefox user and evangelist since... was the first one Phoenix or Firebird? Anyway, that one. Reasons: - Firefox got bogged down with just a few tabs open, and caused beachballs (OSX/macOS) systemwide. Chrome was snappier and didn't harm my system's overall responsiveness with several times as many tabs open. This was the main reason. - Dev tools. Liked Chrome's better. - Profile handling was, at the time anyway, better. - IIRC Firefox didn't do per-tab crashing at the time, while Chrome did, which aided overall stability. Advertising had nothing to do with it. Chrome was just way, way better, especially its (apparent, which is mostly what matters) resource footprint. Now I'm mostly on Safari, even though it's the worst mainstream browser, just because I gain 1-2hrs of battery life using it over Chrome or Firefox.

DiThi 9y ago
> Dev tools. Liked Chrome's better. They definitely are. To this day I'm baffled I'm not sent to the debugger when clicking a line reference in the console. But I still use Firefox as main browser. Since the pages I visit and the pages I develop are always in different places it's pretty easy to have one browser for development only.
gorkonsine 9y ago
I switched to Chrome around that time too, for many of the same reasons (mainly performance and stability). I've since switched back because Chrome is a terrible memory hog and I can have tons of tabs open on Firefox with no impact on performance (as long as I don't actually load them), and I don't have problems with crashing the way I used to.
- victorhooi 9y ago
  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_tabs 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-throttles.html 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).

muppetman 9y ago

Thank you! As soon as Pocket was "included" and the response to everyone complaining was a politely worded "fuck you" then I removed FF and haven't looked back. It's understandable they have to find ways to make money, but those experiments alienated users. Once you've started down that path, there's no returning in a lot of users eyes, mine included.

Dirlewanger 9y ago

Yup, FF has just missed the mark on so many points that Chrome just blows past them. Any JS-heavy web applications (YouTube, HBO Go, Netflix) run like garbage in FF. Switch over to Chrome and they are buttery-smooth. Sucks to say this too as someone who's used FF since its beta.

foepys 9y ago
For me Chrome and Firefox feel the same performance-wise. Are you sure you don't have some add-ons or other changes in your Firefox profile?
bigbugbag 9y ago
Try again from a brand new user account, chances are this issue will go away.

NewEntryHN 9y ago

Those are tech-y reasons that might have repelled tech-y users like us on Hacker News, but the bulk of the market are laymen who don't know the difference between a browser and a search engine on whom marketing is very efficient.

eikenberry 9y ago

> * Frequent breakage of extensions when first switching to the more rapid release schedule. That's why I switched. It broke most of my extensions every time it upgraded. After the 3rd or 4th time it wasn't worth dealing with anymore. I switched to Chromium and I don't remember it breaking an extension.

bigbugbag 9y ago
I just skipped upgrading firefox, it's broken under debian anyway.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

f4rker 9y ago

* Taking many years to get .... and at the same time Moz / FF waste time and money on stupid side projects and Virtue Signalling no one cares about.

bigbugbag 9y ago

You have forgotten a few, such as dropping alsa and making pulseaudio a hard dependency blaming alsa when actually it was their own implementation that was falling behind and they did not want to fix it. But the issue here is that mozilla do not listen to user feedback and just push whatever they feel like pushing with an attitude and some hostility towards unhappy users. or as pointed out in the mozillazine forums: they're " making far-reaching and very short-sighted decisions in a vacuum. " It seems inside mozilla they're convinced that firefox is great and answers users' needs, while users feels that firefox is not that good and getting worse. There's quite a gap between mozilla marketing and the reality, which shows that firefox fails to deliver on its promises.

qovv 9y ago

I'm a Firefox user and quit Chrome for the same reason I stopped using Windows after Windows 7: to keep a bare minimum of privacy when using the internet. Here are a few additions to that list: * Firefox Extensions now must be signed, and there is no workaround, not even one for users willing to delve deeply into settings x,y,z. The rationale for making it difficult to add unsigned extensions is sound, but there is none for making it impossible. * Firefox claims to be privacy-friendly, but they use an identifier when calling home that, along with other data, uniquely identifies the user. Firefox claims that this communication is encrypted, but this is not enough for state actors, and likely not for others. * There are about 20 default settings in Firefox that call home to Google behind the scenes. * All of these settings are incredibly confusing and there is no standard documentation on how any of it works, so even for a technically inclined person it is near-impossible to simply use the browser without spewing your data all over the place- and that's _before_ actually calling up e.g. the NY Times and its 50 trackers, data-miners, beacons, ad networks, social networks, etc. * The shameful treatment of Brendan Eich (creator of JavaScript and co-founder(!)) still rankles. All that said, it's the least-worst in the browser world, for now. It seems pretty clear that they have some technically brilliant people as well. Edit: seems that I need to learn how to write lists...

bigbugbag 9y ago
> seems that I need to learn how to write lists... insert an empty line between each bullet point. First without an empty line: * bullet point without empty line between each other * bullet point without empty line between each other then with an empty line inserted in between: * bullet point with an empty line between each other * bullet point with an empty line between each other

frik 9y ago

So true. The Mozilla corp lost touch with their users. All early Netscape employees left, now it's official a non-profit but acts like big corp. Firefox become unusable - shut down Firebug replaced by half-assed new DevTools, removed XUL based API, multi-process support that's still not working like Chrome1+/IE8+, still dog slow, can't handle more than a few tabs, Addons-website got useless as most addons aren't working anymore. Sad, but Chrome is so much better, and Firefox is digging in a bigger rabbit hole with every new release. Would be great if we keep another open source competing browser around. Servo based browser could be a fresh start, but they need to focus now, in a year it can be too late.

wodenokoto 9y ago

The visual drops in data shows only one of the things you mentioned had a sizeable impact, and that was discussed in the article. Almost everything you list are things that happen around a certain time and we don't see those events manifest in the graph. The reason of course being that the vast majority of Firefox users are not expert and don't care or know about those advance features. Maybe if you can link to a user satisfaction report...

Markoff 9y ago

I try firefox usually once a year to find out nothing changed about freezing, crashing, slow reactions and bad rendering on machine with 2GB RAM. Meanwhile Chrome just works. It's even worse on Android, they don't have in FF even pull down to refresh and it's the slowest browser I tried.

wutbrodo 9y ago

Yea, I've always been a huge fan of (and donor to) Mozilla, but in the last few years, I've been losing some respect for them. Getting embroiled in absurd political snafus, head-in-the-sand analysis of their situation which ignores product quality, etc. I switched to Chrome a lot later than most of my friends, and actively try to switch to Firefox every once in a while, for literally the last 7 or 8 years. There has yet to be a single time where a couple days of usage didn't reveal the browser as far inferior, in ways that affect my day-to-day life materailly (multiprocess support being the biggest, most basic issue for a long time). I spend a LOT of my time in the browser, and I'm a very heavy user (usually about 100 Chrome tabs open total at any given time, with fairly high turnover). The performance and quality penalty I pay when using Firefox just isn't worth it. I don't disagree with the article's claim that Google's advertising is having a big effect on a drop in FF usage; it's just bizarre for them to act like this is the only possible reason why people are switching.