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Serious question, is this too little too late? Firefox has taken a massive nosedive in the last few years, in the UK at least. My two big clients have them on

Serious question, is this too little too late? Firefox has taken a massive nosedive in the last few years, in the UK at least. My two big clients have them on less than 2% share. Just checked one, 5 years ago they had 9.55% share, today it's 1.8%. Even taking into account the growth of mobile, that's dire.

frostwhale 9y ago
Firefox is about more than market share. A state of the art free non for profit browser makes the market much more competitive and better for the consumer. They are there to keep chrome/ other browsers honest. If chrome / google does something too corporate you don't like, there's an alternative.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  That seems a dangerous line of thinking, like arguing that startups are about more than growth. Firefox is looking like Apple circa 1997. They can still recover, but they have to focus on what people want.
  - frostwhale 9y ago
    They are not like apple because their goal is not the same as a for profit company. While you could still argue they're failing, i was just saying market share isn't the only indicator for a corporation in their position.
  - MaxBarraclough 9y ago
    Your Apple analogy might be quite apt. Mac has a market-share of something like 14%, but that's not Apple failing, that's Apple succeeding in targeting the expensive end of the market. Firefox has a chance at doing the same thing with privacy-aware users and/or power users. To that end, they need to stop dumbing-down the browser and endlessly playing catch-up with Chrome.
    - nachosgalore 9y ago
      Spot on. Chrome is not the standard by which all others are judged. Like some others here, I've used Firefox since it existed, even when it was Phoenix and Firebird. The only other browser I will use besides FF-based browsers is Uzbl. Firefox allows me to lock down and customise my browser in ways Chrome does not. Let's not even go into the privacy nightmare that is Chrome.
  - jasonkostempski 9y ago
    I think most users don't care how fast the browser is at the level they're boasting about. They've been fast enough for many years for most use cases. They should do a commercial showing they can run uBlock Origin on Android, how fast sites load compared to without it, and jump on the "annoying ad" train Apple and Google seem to be bragging about fixing latley by "solving" a few problems uO had solved, the right way, for years.
    - jonnytran 9y ago
      I completely disagree. I care a lot about privacy, but I've been unable to use Firefox for a long time now because of speed. Up until now, Chrome has just been significantly faster, to the point where I couldn't justify Firefox for everyday usage. I think a lot of people feel the same, especially those who know less about privacy. I hope the situation changes. If they were in the same ballpark in terms of speed, then my choice would be clear, but they haven't been. It would be like using Tor all the time. You know it's better, but the difference in speed is so great, that you have to make a conscious choice. I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that I want the benefits _without_ compromising speed.
      - addicted 9y ago
        I agree. Browser speed does not affect consumer choice directly. Very few people chose Chrome over Firefox because it was slightly faster or slightly more stable. The vast majority of users chose Chrome because it felt better. Also, Google's pushing it helped. Otherwise consider how Chrome has occupied an IE like market share despite the quality Delta between Chrome and IE/Edge, Firefox or Safari is significantly lesser than the Delta between Firefox and IE was a decade ago, yet Firefox peaked at a much lower marketshare than Chrome's today.
  - Santosh83 9y ago
    They're doing well now, especially since Electrolysis. But they can't beat Chrome being bundled in literally everywhere. Most average Joes will never switch from the bundled browser. Firefox needs to cut some deals to get bundled in as well. Sadly I doubt they have resources for this...
- icebraining 9y ago
  As a dedicated FF user since Phoenix, I fully agree, but if few people actually use the alternative, it probably gets harder to get any kind of revenue deals :|
- TylerE 9y ago
  Mozilla is NOT a non-profit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation
  - r3bl 9y ago
    Mozilla Corporation is, as you can see on the first sentence of that page, a subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation[0], which is itself a non-profit. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation
  - lmkg 9y ago
    The Mozilla Foundation IS a non-profit, with Mozilla Corporation as a wholly-owned subsidiary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation
- tjoff 9y ago
  That is all so very true. But it is also utterly irrelevant if market share drops too much. That will unavoidably lead to incompatibilities which will without doubt ensure that only die hard enthusiasts will use it. Which means it won't be an alternative anymore and it will die.
  - frostwhale 9y ago
    Very fair point. This is why Firefox 57 is so great IMO, i started using firefox again and now I don't think I'll leave it again soon. I think i'm not alone.
AznHisoka 9y ago
I personally think so. I also think their latest work on replacing Firebug and PhantomJS are way way late as well. I commend them on improving their tools, but man, Google has just eaten their lunch the past 10 years.
- kuschku 9y ago
  > but man, Google has just eaten their lunch the past 10 years. Maybe because Google actively pays people to install Chrome without the users knowledge, and force it as default. That’s pretty much the definition of malware already. It’s hard to win against someone that does such hostile behaviour.
  - mastax 9y ago
    Also because Mozilla wasted a lot of effort on FirefoxOS. That's when the browser really stagnated.
    - fabrice_d 9y ago
      You are totally wrong on the wasted effort. FirefoxOS actually pushed a lot of the performance improvements that are seen as wonderful in this release. I kind of LOLed when people re-discovered things like how sync layout was bad. So much knowledge was lost in Moz when they killed FxOS that it's a showcase of bad leadership. The desktop browser was stagnating because the browser owners had no idea where to drive it, and some people with the castle keys were change adverse (some finally "left"). They took as an excuse that they could not get support from the platform team, so the platform team killed FxOS support and ended up being absorbed by the Firefox organization to become just the fx backend team (great strategy!). I guess the platform VP was so frightened by the Tofino experiment and Fx Desktop moving away from Gecko that he didn't understand that was betting on the wrong horse long term.
      - pcwalton 9y ago
        Well, in general, I don't see Quantum as elevating the concerns of desktop over mobile. Moving to parallel implementations of functionality can help even more on mobile than on desktop, since Android phones have tended to embrace multicore faster than desktop has. (Apple phones are a different story, but Gecko obviously can't be relevant there, and even Apple is finally moving to high core counts in the past year.)
eitland 9y ago
Depends a bit: if devs switch back I'd say definitely. If devs are ready to repeat the IE 6 story, this time with Chrome. Getting companies to do cross browser testing seems hard even if it it should be simpler than ever before.. :-/
- fabrice_d 9y ago
  Until they figure out a way to address their irrelevance on Mobile, devs will never fully switch since they have to do testing on mobile devices. It is really sad that Gecko is becoming so good, but is mainly used to power a product in what is becoming a niche market (yes, desktop is becoming a niche in terms of users relative to mobile).
  - eitland 9y ago
    I posting from Firefox monile now. It's my main browser. If I use Chrome only it is for my sockpuppet accounts. I far prefer FF even on mobile.
    - mattmanser 9y ago
      I found it ate all my memory and crashed frequent. Nexus 5X.
      - CaptSpify 9y ago
        One of the things I found was that I had to use their Beta. Their main build wouldn't even start for me.
    - fabrice_d 9y ago
      Sure, I'm not saying that no one uses Firefox on Android. But their mobile marketshare is totally irrelevant compared to Chrome, UCBrowser or the Samsung browser (even this one alone has about as many users as Fx Desktop).
  - hsivonen 9y ago
    The amount of desktop usage hasn't gone down with mobile usage going up. Desktop isn't niche. That said, more market share for Fennec would be nice. (This comment written in Fennec.)
jasonlotito 9y ago
Considering where Firefox started and the dominant browser at the time, it's in a much better position than the first time around. Remember, Firefox was never the dominant browser, and where it is now is where it has almost always been.
digi_owl 9y ago
It may even be worse than that. They have effectively thrown out all that made Firefox distinct in any user facing sense to achieve this.
- iterati 9y ago
  This is sadly true. I switched off Chrome 5+ years ago due to the "vim-like" plugins being much better on FF than Chrome (specifically, my keybindings not working on built-in pages) and since FF56, vimperator and pentadactly no longer function. There have been months of back-and-forth between some developers and the FF team, but the functionality required for these plugins has never been prioritized and I had to disable automatic updating and download FF54 so that everything would function. Today I just gave up caring and installed cVim on Vivaldi (https://vivaldi.com/ https://vivaldi.com/) which is Good Enough for now.
  - gfodor 9y ago
    Saka keys on Firefox has been a suitable replacement for me.
    - nindalf 9y ago
      Not me personally, but there will always be a vocal minority who will complain about having their workflow broken. Any replacement will be missing some critical feature. For a person affected by this, it is a painful experience having their entire workflow broken so they resort to dire warnings on forums such as this one ('Firefox is finished without <my niche plugin>'). In this case, I think Firefox made a good choice in modernising the codebase and the extension APIs. In 2 years we'll find out if the vim people were right or they were indulging in hyperbole.
      - iterati 9y ago
        Less "dire warnings on forums" and more "slow development pace for required pieces to make my workflow even possible again". Here's an issue opened June 9 that hasn't been addressed by the Mozilla team and hasn't had any updates in a month: https://github.com/cmcaine/keyboard-api/issues/1 https://github.com/cmcaine/keyboard-api/issues/1 Here's the request for a better keyboard API (referenced in the above) that's been open for over 2 years with no end in sight: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215061 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215061 I'm sure the new FF is going to make some users happy, but as you said, having your workflow broken is quite painful, and the Mozilla team has known about this for years but still not made the upgrade path bearable.
Paul-ish 9y ago
Percentage of total users is deceptive in some ways. The absolute number of FF users can stay the same, or even rise, and their % share can decline. It is absolute number of users that impacts the deals they can make. That's not to say a larger % wouldn't be good for FF.
- Brakenshire 9y ago
  Firefox needs a serious presence in mobile. If the browser is competitive with Chrome, and also supports webextensions, it stands a fairly good chance, at least boosting up a few percentage points.
  - chungy 9y ago
    Firefox Focus/Klar is a pretty compelling app. :-)
nachtigall 9y ago
FWIW, Firefox is still number one in Germany (desktop only) which is not an to be underrated economy.
keithnz 9y ago
I don't think it's too late, always room for a better browser, I've swapped to Quantum and I think it's better than chrome, especially as a dev. I swapped to chrome when it came out, and it's been the better browser for a long time, but I think that's changed. I'm certainly recommending it. Even Edge feels better than chrome at the moment. The other thing I'm trialing is using duckduckgo as a search engine which is quite good, but google is still mostly better, but since you can google from ddg, I'm sticking with it for the moment.

frostwhale 9y ago

Firefox is about more than market share. A state of the art free non for profit browser makes the market much more competitive and better for the consumer. They are there to keep chrome/ other browsers honest. If chrome / google does something too corporate you don't like, there's an alternative.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
sillysaurus3 9y ago
That seems a dangerous line of thinking, like arguing that startups are about more than growth. Firefox is looking like Apple circa 1997. They can still recover, but they have to focus on what people want.
- frostwhale 9y ago
  They are not like apple because their goal is not the same as a for profit company. While you could still argue they're failing, i was just saying market share isn't the only indicator for a corporation in their position.
- MaxBarraclough 9y ago
  Your Apple analogy might be quite apt. Mac has a market-share of something like 14%, but that's not Apple failing, that's Apple succeeding in targeting the expensive end of the market. Firefox has a chance at doing the same thing with privacy-aware users and/or power users. To that end, they need to stop dumbing-down the browser and endlessly playing catch-up with Chrome.
  - nachosgalore 9y ago
    Spot on. Chrome is not the standard by which all others are judged. Like some others here, I've used Firefox since it existed, even when it was Phoenix and Firebird. The only other browser I will use besides FF-based browsers is Uzbl. Firefox allows me to lock down and customise my browser in ways Chrome does not. Let's not even go into the privacy nightmare that is Chrome.
- jasonkostempski 9y ago
  I think most users don't care how fast the browser is at the level they're boasting about. They've been fast enough for many years for most use cases. They should do a commercial showing they can run uBlock Origin on Android, how fast sites load compared to without it, and jump on the "annoying ad" train Apple and Google seem to be bragging about fixing latley by "solving" a few problems uO had solved, the right way, for years.
  - jonnytran 9y ago
    I completely disagree. I care a lot about privacy, but I've been unable to use Firefox for a long time now because of speed. Up until now, Chrome has just been significantly faster, to the point where I couldn't justify Firefox for everyday usage. I think a lot of people feel the same, especially those who know less about privacy. I hope the situation changes. If they were in the same ballpark in terms of speed, then my choice would be clear, but they haven't been. It would be like using Tor all the time. You know it's better, but the difference in speed is so great, that you have to make a conscious choice. I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that I want the benefits _without_ compromising speed.
    - addicted 9y ago
      I agree. Browser speed does not affect consumer choice directly. Very few people chose Chrome over Firefox because it was slightly faster or slightly more stable. The vast majority of users chose Chrome because it felt better. Also, Google's pushing it helped. Otherwise consider how Chrome has occupied an IE like market share despite the quality Delta between Chrome and IE/Edge, Firefox or Safari is significantly lesser than the Delta between Firefox and IE was a decade ago, yet Firefox peaked at a much lower marketshare than Chrome's today.
- Santosh83 9y ago
  They're doing well now, especially since Electrolysis. But they can't beat Chrome being bundled in literally everywhere. Most average Joes will never switch from the bundled browser. Firefox needs to cut some deals to get bundled in as well. Sadly I doubt they have resources for this...
icebraining 9y ago
As a dedicated FF user since Phoenix, I fully agree, but if few people actually use the alternative, it probably gets harder to get any kind of revenue deals :|
TylerE 9y ago
Mozilla is NOT a non-profit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation
- r3bl 9y ago
  Mozilla Corporation is, as you can see on the first sentence of that page, a subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation[0], which is itself a non-profit. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation
- lmkg 9y ago
  The Mozilla Foundation IS a non-profit, with Mozilla Corporation as a wholly-owned subsidiary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation
tjoff 9y ago
That is all so very true. But it is also utterly irrelevant if market share drops too much. That will unavoidably lead to incompatibilities which will without doubt ensure that only die hard enthusiasts will use it. Which means it won't be an alternative anymore and it will die.
- frostwhale 9y ago
  Very fair point. This is why Firefox 57 is so great IMO, i started using firefox again and now I don't think I'll leave it again soon. I think i'm not alone.

AznHisoka 9y ago

I personally think so. I also think their latest work on replacing Firebug and PhantomJS are way way late as well. I commend them on improving their tools, but man, Google has just eaten their lunch the past 10 years.

kuschku 9y ago
> but man, Google has just eaten their lunch the past 10 years. Maybe because Google actively pays people to install Chrome without the users knowledge, and force it as default. That’s pretty much the definition of malware already. It’s hard to win against someone that does such hostile behaviour.
- mastax 9y ago
  Also because Mozilla wasted a lot of effort on FirefoxOS. That's when the browser really stagnated.
  - fabrice_d 9y ago
    You are totally wrong on the wasted effort. FirefoxOS actually pushed a lot of the performance improvements that are seen as wonderful in this release. I kind of LOLed when people re-discovered things like how sync layout was bad. So much knowledge was lost in Moz when they killed FxOS that it's a showcase of bad leadership. The desktop browser was stagnating because the browser owners had no idea where to drive it, and some people with the castle keys were change adverse (some finally "left"). They took as an excuse that they could not get support from the platform team, so the platform team killed FxOS support and ended up being absorbed by the Firefox organization to become just the fx backend team (great strategy!). I guess the platform VP was so frightened by the Tofino experiment and Fx Desktop moving away from Gecko that he didn't understand that was betting on the wrong horse long term.
    - pcwalton 9y ago
      Well, in general, I don't see Quantum as elevating the concerns of desktop over mobile. Moving to parallel implementations of functionality can help even more on mobile than on desktop, since Android phones have tended to embrace multicore faster than desktop has. (Apple phones are a different story, but Gecko obviously can't be relevant there, and even Apple is finally moving to high core counts in the past year.)

eitland 9y ago

Depends a bit: if devs switch back I'd say definitely. If devs are ready to repeat the IE 6 story, this time with Chrome. Getting companies to do cross browser testing seems hard even if it it should be simpler than ever before.. :-/

fabrice_d 9y ago
Until they figure out a way to address their irrelevance on Mobile, devs will never fully switch since they have to do testing on mobile devices. It is really sad that Gecko is becoming so good, but is mainly used to power a product in what is becoming a niche market (yes, desktop is becoming a niche in terms of users relative to mobile).
- eitland 9y ago
  I posting from Firefox monile now. It's my main browser. If I use Chrome only it is for my sockpuppet accounts. I far prefer FF even on mobile.
  - mattmanser 9y ago
    I found it ate all my memory and crashed frequent. Nexus 5X.
    - CaptSpify 9y ago
      One of the things I found was that I had to use their Beta. Their main build wouldn't even start for me.
  - fabrice_d 9y ago
    Sure, I'm not saying that no one uses Firefox on Android. But their mobile marketshare is totally irrelevant compared to Chrome, UCBrowser or the Samsung browser (even this one alone has about as many users as Fx Desktop).
- hsivonen 9y ago
  The amount of desktop usage hasn't gone down with mobile usage going up. Desktop isn't niche. That said, more market share for Fennec would be nice. (This comment written in Fennec.)

jasonlotito 9y ago

Considering where Firefox started and the dominant browser at the time, it's in a much better position than the first time around. Remember, Firefox was never the dominant browser, and where it is now is where it has almost always been.

digi_owl 9y ago

It may even be worse than that. They have effectively thrown out all that made Firefox distinct in any user facing sense to achieve this.

iterati 9y ago
This is sadly true. I switched off Chrome 5+ years ago due to the "vim-like" plugins being much better on FF than Chrome (specifically, my keybindings not working on built-in pages) and since FF56, vimperator and pentadactly no longer function. There have been months of back-and-forth between some developers and the FF team, but the functionality required for these plugins has never been prioritized and I had to disable automatic updating and download FF54 so that everything would function. Today I just gave up caring and installed cVim on Vivaldi (https://vivaldi.com/ https://vivaldi.com/) which is Good Enough for now.
- gfodor 9y ago
  Saka keys on Firefox has been a suitable replacement for me.
  - nindalf 9y ago
    Not me personally, but there will always be a vocal minority who will complain about having their workflow broken. Any replacement will be missing some critical feature. For a person affected by this, it is a painful experience having their entire workflow broken so they resort to dire warnings on forums such as this one ('Firefox is finished without <my niche plugin>'). In this case, I think Firefox made a good choice in modernising the codebase and the extension APIs. In 2 years we'll find out if the vim people were right or they were indulging in hyperbole.
    - iterati 9y ago
      Less "dire warnings on forums" and more "slow development pace for required pieces to make my workflow even possible again". Here's an issue opened June 9 that hasn't been addressed by the Mozilla team and hasn't had any updates in a month: https://github.com/cmcaine/keyboard-api/issues/1 https://github.com/cmcaine/keyboard-api/issues/1 Here's the request for a better keyboard API (referenced in the above) that's been open for over 2 years with no end in sight: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215061 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215061 I'm sure the new FF is going to make some users happy, but as you said, having your workflow broken is quite painful, and the Mozilla team has known about this for years but still not made the upgrade path bearable.

Paul-ish 9y ago

Percentage of total users is deceptive in some ways. The absolute number of FF users can stay the same, or even rise, and their % share can decline. It is absolute number of users that impacts the deals they can make. That's not to say a larger % wouldn't be good for FF.

Brakenshire 9y ago
Firefox needs a serious presence in mobile. If the browser is competitive with Chrome, and also supports webextensions, it stands a fairly good chance, at least boosting up a few percentage points.
- chungy 9y ago
  Firefox Focus/Klar is a pretty compelling app. :-)

nachtigall 9y ago

FWIW, Firefox is still number one in Germany (desktop only) which is not an to be underrated economy.

keithnz 9y ago

I don't think it's too late, always room for a better browser, I've swapped to Quantum and I think it's better than chrome, especially as a dev. I swapped to chrome when it came out, and it's been the better browser for a long time, but I think that's changed. I'm certainly recommending it. Even Edge feels better than chrome at the moment. The other thing I'm trialing is using duckduckgo as a search engine which is quite good, but google is still mostly better, but since you can google from ddg, I'm sticking with it for the moment.