77 ms·

Firefox desktop market share now below 9%

• baroffoos 8y ago
  All of the other browsers have some other vector to push their browser. Safari, Edge and Chrome are all preinstalled on OSs and chrome is advertised on the biggest website in the world. Even if firefox is slightly better than the rest it doesn't matter. Chrome only exists because IE was so bad people went out of their way not to use it.
  • sciurus 8y ago
    Considering that, it's interesting that Firefox still has more desktop market share than Edge and Safari.
  • muxator 8y ago
    Historically, that crown goes to Firefox. Its 2004 1.0 release was also publicized in the New York Times. Way before Chrome came out.
    • godelski 8y ago
      To be fair, FF shot themselves in the foot. They didn't keep pace with Chrome. I use FF and think it is better NOW, but that wasn't always the case. I think that's where they lost their market share. I'm glad they put the work into Quantum. But it is going to be hard to regain that market share.
      • wvenable 8y ago
        The classic problem of being first to market in software, is that your competition can learn from your design and move forward with a fresh code. Firefox is still trying to shed off code from a decade ago. The history of browsers is littered with legacy code being defeated by new code.
        • baroffoos 8y ago
          The rust rewrites are ripping out loads of old code.
          • dralley 8y ago
            "Loads" is relative. There's still 20x more C++ in Firefox than Rust.
        • zanny 8y ago
          Except Chrome wasn't some brand new project. It was Webkit which was KHTML and dated back to the mid 90s. They just wrote their, uh, chrome layer and js engine a half decade later which were, and still are, reaping tangible benefits.
      • broodbucket 8y ago
        Easier said than done when comparing a traditional open source project with a strategically important project for a massive corporation...
  • _wmd 8y ago
    Chrome only exists because Google were afraid of lacking control over the stack they use to deliver their content. Firefox was already 'good enough' long before it ever appeared, and Google could easily have dedicated engineering resources if the problem with Firefox was purely technical, much as they do with Linux. FWIW a lot of Google behavior can be cast as an analogy to a paranoid control freak. Net neutrality is an obvious one, the incredible lack of any demarcating information useful for traffic shaping in QUIC is another. But of course both of these are really about citizen rights and privacy :)
    • acqq 8y ago
      > Firefox was already 'good enough' long before Only if you as "good enough" define "with Javascript even slower than IE." I've personally never used Chrome, because since even the first days it already had more "protected" installation than some malware, and that never made me confident in their intentions (and I've never liked Chrome UI) but Firefox has always had performance problems. As Chrome appeared it had extremely fast JS, and only then others "woke up."
      • jcranmer 8y ago
        Mozilla was working on a tracing JIT for JS before Google announced V8, although I believe V8 was released before the first version of Firefox with TraceMonkey was.
• kristopolous 8y ago
  Being visually nearly indistinguishable from chrome hasn't really worked in its favor. (quick, which is which: http://9ol.es/double-browser.png http://9ol.es/double-browser.png). Probably north of 95% don't know about or understand licensing differences or differences in rendering engines or core architecture. Interfaces and obvious features with compelling narratives are what matter because that's how the user engages with the product. Asking users to go out of their way to install and use something that looks and feels identical to what they already have for reasons most people don't know, understand, or deeply care about and do not get surfaced in any meaningful way is not a winning strategy. A case has to be made in the battle of perception and the decreasingly small visual differentiation hasn't helped build it. Al Ries's laws of marketing and branding and Donald Norman's models of differentiation apply equally to all products regardless of the economic and institutional structure that builds them.
  • saagarjha 8y ago
    > Transforming itself to be visually nearly indistinguishable from chrome hasn't really worked in its favor. Chrome changed its style more recently and ended up being more similar to Firefox.
    • kristopolous 8y ago
      Is that the timeline here? In that case it was Chrome using its market position cleverly and Firefox not responding adequately. I can only speak for linux interfaces btw. Small "bullshit" interface changes can have dramatic user and marketshare impact. We can all sit around and wish the world didn't work this way but it's not going to change.
      • Groxx 8y ago
        Firefox has alternatively had closer-to-curved-rects or boxy tabs for practically its whole lifetime. Chrome went heavy on diagonal-edged tabs early on, and relatively recently they've been undoing that. they're even mimicking Firefox's scrollable tab-bar since it's such an obvious win over a million super-narrow tabs that you can't possibly identify.
• rocky1138 8y ago
  I didn't see any indication as to their methodology for how they're calculating these stats. It's probably been said a zillion times before, but if it's JavaScript-based you can safely assume that they are incorrect as it's likely there is a large intersection between people browsing with an ad-blocker, private browsing, or with content blocker and those people using Firefox.
  • jopsen 8y ago
    Does it matter? Even if the measure is somewhat flawed it's hard to argue that drop isn't related to a drop in the underlying number of users. Mozilla is awesome, but growing Firefox is an uphill struggle.
    • kibwen 8y ago
      > it's hard to argue that drop isn't related to a drop in the underlying number of users We would need more data to determine that. What the site here is showing is a decline in the percentage of marketshare, which is a relative measure, not an absolute one. Even if Firefox were seeing a net gain of users, if it's doing so at a slower rate than the market is growing overall, then that would be reflected as a decline in marketshare.
      • fabrice_d 8y ago
        According to Mozilla's own data (https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity) they went from 303M monthly active users at the end of Nov. 2017 to 277M this year. This is a serious drop.
        • kibwen 8y ago
          Very interesting link, thanks! Frankly, I'd much rather see that submitted to HN than a site like netmarketshare, who are known for applying opaque weights to their data in an attempt to normalize regions.
    • 8y ago
• whalesalad 8y ago
  I flip flop between Firefox and Chrome often. Lately I am on Firefox because I was trying to isolate a fatal crash I kept having on my brand new Macbook Pro (it would lock up completely, but cursor would still move and audio would still work and then it would inevitably shut itself off) Since ditching Chrome the issue has not come up again ... but not sure if it's correlation or causation. There are a few things I do not like about Firefox but the web inspect or is definitely miles ahead of Webkit. Chrome is faster based on the butt-dyno: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=butt-dyno https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=butt-dyno
• Ycros 8y ago
  I give Firefox a chance every few months, and even after all their work I still feel like it has occasional performance issues and I end up right back in Chrome.
• foolfoolz 8y ago
  if there was a warning that said “all activity on this browser will be sent to google and sold to advertisers” chrome would still have 60% market share
• muxator 8y ago
  In the same timespan, firefox mobile has a share of 1.2%. Market dominance has almost nothing to do with technical merits.
  • freehunter 8y ago
    But technical merits don't keep a company in business. Market dominance does.
    • kodablah 8y ago
      I don't believe either of those are necessarily true. They would be if you changed "in business" to "growing".
• bjz_ 8y ago
  Been really enjoying Firefox, especially after Quantum. More devs should support and use it, lest we be beholden to Chrome for the rest of time.
  • dak1 8y ago
    I would love to use Firefox more for dev, but until it has a first class way to disable CORS, I can't. "CORS Everywhere" is not sufficient (it alters responses, but does not actually disable CORS, which doesn't cover all needs). Chrome I can at least disable CORS via the command line, and Safari does it best by putting it in a Developer menu that I can easily toggle. Firefox's dev tools also seem to still be behind — I haven't seen a good way to inspect WebSocket frames, for instance. I would really prefer to use Firefox due to Mozzila's stances on privacy, especially in contrast to Google; however, I have to use the tool that lets me actually get work done.
    • sombremesa 8y ago
      I love using Firefox as my daily driver, and I can always pop open chrome if I really have to. What kind of life do you lead where your browser needs to have CORS constantly disabled?
      • cjcampbell 8y ago
        This can be helpful in development scenarios. I’m supporting a team that uses localstack to support local development against some AWS services. Unfortunately, the CORS settings for localstack break the development environment. With Chrome allowing them to disable from the command-line, I can provide a shortcut to launch with degraded security, no plugins, no user settings, etc. My only wish is that Chrome would make it more obvious that it’s running with these protections disabled.
        • chipperyman573 8y ago
          >My only wish is that Chrome would make it more obvious that it’s running with these protections disabled. I know this is beginning to become off-topic, but why? Presumably, if you're using a flag that has to be run from the command-line, you're either doing it on purpose or using hardware you don't own (and a keylogger is a much greater risk than anything else at that point)
• Puer 8y ago
  Just my personal $0.02: 1. The biggest thing keeping me tied to Chrome over any other browser is the extension support. Extensions are second class citizens in any other browser. This is partly because other browsers keep overhauling their systems and deprecating old software which discourages extension developers, and mainly because (as an extension developer) why would you code for browser X when you can get more users on browser Y? 2. Anecdotal evidence, but every time an update of Firefox (and most notably Quantum) is released people laud how fast it is. On my 2015 Macbook running Mac OS Firefox has never been faster. Maybe there are things behind the scenes such as caching playing a role, but web pages load slower, scrolling feels sluggish, videos drop frames and freeze or get out of sync. It isn't an enjoyable experience compared to Chrome or Safari.
  • hnaccy 8y ago
    Are there specific WebExtension APIs you care about that Chrome supports and Firefox doesn't?
    • Puer 8y ago
      There are a few niche plugins I use for specific sites to enhance usability that I definitely don't expect to be ported to Firefox, but even the ones that are take an understandable backseat in terms of developer priority. For example, for more than 10 years I've been using Chrome extensions that allow you to hover over image links to view them without clicking. There are dozens of these extensions in almost any browser, but they require constant updating to keep up with 1) new image/video hosts and 2) changes to existing image/video hosts. For me, these extensions are an essential part of the browsing experience of many websites. I've found that the same extensions by the same developers often lag behind 6+ months on Firefox vs. Chrome which makes them really useless when gfycat, streamable, imgur, etc. all stop working.
      • bjz_ 8y ago
        You can use most WebExtensions from Chrome with Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-store-foxified/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-store-...
• whymauri 8y ago
  Quantum would make my work laptop (Macbook pro, 13 inch touchbar 2017) overheat constantly. It just always had performance issues and I troubleshooted every way I could. I never figured out what exactly was causing it. I tried to switch to Firefox for 2 solid months, but I just couldn't do it :(
  • crawrey 8y ago
    There is an outstanding bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429522 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429522 that I became aware of due to a Firefox related topic a few months ago[1]. You can improve the performance by setting "gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque" to true in the about:config settings. This will disable the transparency of the window, but it will reduce the overall resource consumption. The reduction is significant, approximately several extra hours of Firefox use, and your lap will thank you. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17934764 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17934764
• nichos 8y ago
  Sad news. Firefox is my favorite browser, and I like their Dev tools the best. All the important stuff done in a browser should not be trusted to one that is closed source. (I know chromium is open source, but almost no one is using it). A good balance of browsers is important, I've already seen "you must use chrome to view this site."
  • godelski 8y ago
    User agent switcher will get you around that. It worked when Netflix was blocking FF and hasn't failed me yet.
    • craftyguy 8y ago
      > User agent switcher will get you around that I wonder how many FF users roll with a user agent that identifies as chrome or some other browser, and how much (if even significantly) it affects surveys like the one in this article.
      • godelski 8y ago
        I wonder that too. I used to have it always on and set to Chrome when Netflix was blocking DRM enabled FF. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people just always have it on, especially considering how popular of an add on it is.
    • acheron 8y ago
      The true spirit of Internet Explorer lives on, I guess.
      • Groxx 8y ago
        What's dead may never die.
• Causality1 8y ago
  Dropping support for legacy extensions absolutely gutted what made Firefox different from every other browser. I'll use Firefox 56 and NoScript until the end of time before I use a browser with tabs above the address bar.
  • yoavm 8y ago
    Dropping support for these extensions made it possible to create Firefox Quantum. Also, I'm using Firefox with tabs on the side with Tree Style Tab and a simple userChrome.css hack. No need to stay with an outdated version just for that.
    • acemarke 8y ago
      Yeah, I resisted the upgrade to FF Quantum for a while, but ultimately made the move and it's worked out well. The biggest things I needed were a WebExtension version of Tree Style Tabs, plus the restyling options from https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomCSSforFx https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomCSSforFx .
  • sorenjan 8y ago
    Having the tabs at the top is much better because of Fitts's law [0], essentially making their size infinite in one direction and therefore much easier to reach with a quick flick of the mouse. Although it is possible to move the tab bar using user CSS [1]. You're also missing out on a much faster browsing experience with the newer versions. In the older version I remember the scrolling lagged when I opened a new tab in the background, that hasn't happened in a while. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law [1] https://www.userchrome.org/what-is-userchrome-css.html#movetabbar https://www.userchrome.org/what-is-userchrome-css.html#movet...
  • PurpleRamen 8y ago
    Not enough people are using addons to be such significant. It seems more that firefox had a slight growth last year because of quantum, but market grew faster, while some of that growth inflated again. Usernumbers went something like 250->300->275 Million. Seems they are somewhat stable in numbers.
• yial 8y ago
  I still use Firefox on my work computers and personal. The reason simply being that I feel the performance is better than chrome most times. I used Firefox / Mozilla for many years, then went to chrome when it was new and shiny, but I’m back to Firefox as I believe it truly is the better product. They just need to somehow market it better to people.
  • techntoke 8y ago
    I have not shared the same experience, with Firefox often being much slower than Chromium. Especially on Linux.
    • lostmsu 8y ago
      AFAIK, Linux is a second-class target for Firefox. On Windows its quite snappy.
• claydavisss 8y ago
  That's tens of millions of people, what the problem?
• pdimitar 8y ago
  Firefox is still slow on a very beefy Win10 PC and a MacBook Pro 2015, if you have more than 7-8 tabs open. I keep giving Firefox a chance but not much is changing. Not sure if the rewrite in Rust was worth it.
  • taneq 8y ago
    It's nice and responsive on my 4-year-old Win8.1 desktop and my 1-year-old Win10 laptop, with dozens of tabs open. I'd be curious to see the common factor between the people who say it's slow, because it certainly isn't for most (some?) of us.
  • FridgeSeal 8y ago
    I had close to ~220 tabs open in 3 windows open on a windows machine that's not especially powerful and didn't have any performance issues. It wasn't even using that much memory...
    • shittyadmin 8y ago
      Yeah, I'd say it performs better than Chrome at load times and extreme levels of tabs generally speaking.
  • wvenable 8y ago
    Firefox is only browser where multi-row tabs works -- all other browsers are impossible to navigate with more than 8 tabs open. I frequently have 30+ tabs open in Firefox (sometimes as much 100). That being said, Firefox has a bunch of small performance / hang issues that have nothing to do with the number of tabs but add up over time.
    • pdimitar 8y ago
      I might have mistaken the cause for my lagging problems but in any case the nagging feeling of Firefox being laggy and not always very responsive is there, and as you said it adds up over time. I mentioned in another sibling comment of mine that my 2nd gen i7 CPU was very heavily hit by all Spectre and Meltdown mitigation fixes and is noticeably slower now. Still though, Chrome works snappily and Firefox does not. :(
• jeswin 8y ago
  I have switched to Firefox on mobile as well. There are some occasional hiccups (rare), but the speedup and battery life you gain from ad-blocking makes it totally worth it. For those who are evaluating, please install AdBlock before you take a call - and do try it for a few days.
  • meddlepal 8y ago
    Also in love with mobile Firefox. Definitely give it a try folks (with ad blocking)
  • L0stLink 8y ago
    * install ublock origin[0], it is far superior to ad block. [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...
  • dajonker 8y ago
    Yes, having ad blocking on mobile makes a huge difference in usability as well.
  • jabl 8y ago
    I'm also using firefox, on both mobile and desktop. With ublock origin, decentraleyes, privacy badger, and https everywhere add-ons.
    • richjdsmith 8y ago
      That's my exact config on all my devices as well! Whenever I'm roped into fixing some family member's computer, I always install all of those except privacy badger.
  • favadi 8y ago
    Firefox is clearly inferior compare to Chrome on Android, but I can't browse the web without adblock anymore, so it is Firefox + uBlock origin for me.
    • 8y ago
• threatofrain 8y ago
  For me Firefox desktop differentiates itself from all other major browsers for their built-in content blocker and support for other privacy-oriented features.
• kerng 8y ago
  How sad... I have switched to Firefox about 8 months ago and have been really enjoying the browser. It's just difficult to compete against the giants of Google and Microsoft. I mean anywhere you go there will be messages like "Try a faster browser- Download Chrome" on any Google site, or the extremely difficult user interface to switch default browser on Windows. I really wish for Firefox to succeed in the long run, just dont know how it could be possible.
  • EpicEng 8y ago
    >or the extremely difficult user interface to switch default browser on Windows. I agree that it's annoying and user hostile, but "extremely difficult"? It's one button in settings.
    • kerng 8y ago
      It's not really a button, they convert the button to switch to a weird link and clicking the actual button means to keep Edge. Its misleading, and most people thought they switched because the clicked the button but actually that didnt do the switch. But agree it's not necessarily difficult, just misleading.
      • EpicEng 8y ago
        Wow I completely forgot about that, you're right.
  • lmedinas 8y ago
    Unfortunately this is becoming more and more frequent. We are back to 2000s I.E. only websites... :( I'm afraid there are only some options: 1) Mozilla aggressively tries to be Chrome compatible. 2) Focus on Developer Tools in order to "motivate" Developers to use Firefox instead to develop their apps. 3) Somehow a miracle comes and they gain market share. Actually i like the direction of Mozilla is taking now days where they are adding lots of interesting usability to Firefox. Like taking screenshots, share/send menu etc... But it seems this is not enough to get new users :(
• atombender 8y ago
  I'd like to use Firefox. I've tried it out several times the last year. It's okay. Unfortunately, I always end up going back to Safari. Despite the performance improvements, Safari still feels like a faster, smoother browser. Firefox is still pretty ugly, too. On macOS, it feels chunkier and less natively integrated. Safari's "omnibar" is superior to Firefox's. Safari actually suggests web sites, which I use all the time. Wikipedia is a major one. Start typing "Richard Fey", for example, and the first hit will be the Wikipedia page for Richard Feynman, complete with a short summary and photo. Firefox forces me through a Google search. I also tried out Firefox on iOS some time ago, and it wasn't as nice as Safari. For there to be a point to this, I'd need the same browser in both places, with perfect syncing of bookmarks, cookies, tabs, etc., just like Safari. Lastly, migrating is a pain. There's apparently no way to import my current Safari session (I have probably 60-70 tabs) or history (I keep everything I visit, going back years), which means I'd lose stuff by migrating and would have to migrate tabs over incrementally. Hard to try out a browser in any significant way this way.
  • kovrik 8y ago
    I really want to use Safari, but for me the deal breaker is the fact that Safari doesn't seem to block pop-ups properly. Yes, they've changed it in the latest version. I have Block and Notify option selected in Privacy tab. But many popups still go through -- sometimes they open in a new tab, sometimes in a new window. Is there a way to fix that? Also, is there a Tree Style Tab alternative for Safari?
    • saagarjha 8y ago
      What websites are you getting these on?
      • Ibethewalrus 8y ago
        Any tech site has this annoying feature. Also: Some parts of NYTimes, and Slack.
      • kitsunesoba 8y ago
• baby 8y ago
  And yet, it is one of the only usable browser for most users thanks to the Tree Style Tabs extension. I still don't understand how people can browse the web with Chrome :|
  • saagarjha 8y ago
    > And yet, it is one of the only usable browser for most users thanks to the Tree Style Tabs extension. You mean, it's the only usable browser for users like you. I assure you, most users don't use this and don't really care for it.
    • baroffoos 8y ago
      You can't care about something you don't know exists. Most users do things in inefficient ways and don't know the better options.
  • millstone 8y ago
    Why not just group related tabs into different windows?
  • PurpleRamen 8y ago
    With how bug-infested TST is now, this is not a strong reason anymore. Also TST has not many users anyway. Seems it's something around 115k, so majority can live well without it.
• jorblumesea 8y ago
  Firefox is super fast and most importantly, isn't supported by a company who has a vested interest in tracking you. Unfortunate to see these results.
  • hndamien 8y ago
    You might like Brave more if that is important to you.
  • ngokevin 8y ago
    It is pretty fast for me. Although there is some vested interest, although indirectly. Decisions are still tied to money, which is why Google has traditionally been the default search engine in Firefox.
    • qwerty456127 8y ago
      > Google has traditionally been the default search engine in Firefox. There is little if anything wrong in tracking people who don't care about being tracked, those who do can easily switch the search engine to startpage.com, duckduckgo.com, Searx, Seeks or whatever.
      • ngokevin 8y ago
        Agree. Though default options hold great power, Chrome users could also navigate to DDG. Also hard to advertise themselves as the user champion of privacy going up against Google, and then route everyone to Google, while pocketing their money. I think it's okay to take their money but seems hypocritical.
• wycy 8y ago
  I switched from Firefox to Chrome around 2009. I switched back to Firefox this year with the release of Quantum. Its performance has seemed fine to me even on my late 2012 iMac. I think the switch back to Firefox was worth it if only for the privacy and to claw back some control from Google.
• moron4hire 8y ago
  That's less than proportion of the population with color blindness, yet I bet more developers test their sites for Firefox compatibility than making them usable by differently-abled people.
• ancorevard 8y ago
  Why is it that not more people use Safari? On a MacBook Pro it is not only faster but your battery life lasts noticeable longer. Not to mention the Safari engineers' stand on privacy as compared to Google Chrome...
  • kevindqc 8y ago
    I doubt the engineers make the privacy decisions?
    • saagarjha 8y ago
      Since they write the software, I'm sure they have more than a little sway.
      • kevindqc 8y ago
        Damn I've been working wrong all this time! I didn't know because I write some of the code I get to make the product decisions!
        • saagarjha 8y ago
          I don't want to attack a strawman here, but your comment makes it seem like you think that programmers simply write code that they're told to write, providing no input on the project at all. This isn't true at all: just because you're not a product manager doesn't mean that you don't have a chance to influence the final product; in the extreme case that you're told to essentially "shut up and code", you can exercise your control by walking away from the project if you don't like where it's going.
  • saagarjha 8y ago
    The most common complaints I've seen have been that it doesn't support their extensions or they need their web sessions to sync to their Android/Windows/Linux device.
  • baroffoos 8y ago
• burtonator 8y ago
  We just shipped a chrome extension for Polar... I did a big analysis of the distribution of extensions on Firefox vs Chrome. You could expect Firefox to be maybe 1/3rd that of Chrome. Nope... it's 1/40th.... So 40x more people use the same extension on Chrome vs Firefox. I'm not sure why this is... it might be that Chrome users adopt extensions more readily than Firefox users? I think there's a lesson here on long term user growth but it's somewhat complicated. Link to our chrome extension btw. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/save-to-polar/jkfdkjomocoaljglgddnmhcbolldcafd https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/save-to-polar/jkfd...
  • r00fus 8y ago
    Perhaps because Chrome is the new IE? Google has consistently pushed Chrome and profits from it.
  • Osmose 8y ago
    If you're looking to see adoption rate, what you really want to be comparing isn't absolute numbers of Chrome vs Firefox users, but rather the adoption rate of your add-on vs your potential users. If Chrome has 10,000 potential users of your add-on, Firefox has 100, and you have 98 Chrome users and 2 Firefox users, then the add-on adoption rates are 0.98% for Chrome and 2% for Firefox. Of course that's just shifting the hard bit, which is figuring out who your potential users are.
  • gpm 8y ago
    Thanks for sharing your data! I just installed polar. Immediately after install, it prompts you to install a chrome extension, it has a big google chrome icon that takes up 1/16th of my screen. It has no mention of how to do the same in firefox. Naturally, I responded by searching both "polar firefox addon" and "Save to polar firefox addon" on both DuckDuckGo and Google. All return a long list of results that don't include a save to polar addon. I go to addons.mozilla.org and search "Save to Polar", I don't find your extension. At this point I would typically have given up and assumed you just don't have a firefox version of the extension... but since you've just told me that there exists a firefox extension and I'm curious I'll keep going. Your website mentions it nowhere. The chrome store doesn't let me install it in firefox. The GitHub readme doesn't mention it. No GitHub issues mention it. The subreddit linked from the website has no sidebar. Searching on it finds no mention of firefox. Checking the other github repos under the same account as the polar repo I see a "Polar Chrome Extension" and not a "Polar Firefox Extension", but maybe those are the same things these days since both support web extensions. Nope, that repo is a placeholder with nothing in it. Going back to addons.mozilla.org and just searching "polar", filtering for extensions, and scrolling through the results (only 5 thankfully) reveals nothing. I search "Save to Polar" github' on both duckduckgo and google, hoping to at least find the source of the addon. Neither return any relevant results. At this point I'm astonished there are any firefox users of that addon... as far as I can tell it doesn't exist for firefox. Edit: It occurs to me that maybe you meant looking at other people's addons. So I looked at the most popular addon I know of, ublock origin. Chrome says "10,000,000+", Firefox says "4,794,583"... which is 40%!
• pie_hacker 8y ago
  I use Firefox - Chrome is too slow/buggy. Also, who knows what code Chrome is executing when you start it up on your computer?
• wopwops 8y ago
  Can I get my beloved Firefox addons to work again? (No.)
• judge2020 8y ago
  Based on GlobalStats statscounter [0], the data source for caniuse.com, FF is at 5%. [0] http://gs.statcounter.com/ http://gs.statcounter.com/
• Brakenshire 8y ago
  Quantum I think was too incremental and conservative, trying to integrate Servo into Gecko. They’ve ended up making a desktop browser which is as good as Chrome, but not good enough to demand attention. Mobile, where parallelism should be most beneficial, has lagged behind, and parallel layout, which is where the real prize is, has disappeared over the horizon. Servo has been relegated to WebVR experiments which are speculative at best, at a point when VR is only available to a truly tiny percentage of the population, and should it be successful will probably be dictated by market share anyway. Do Quantum by all means, but follow five other paths to make Servo a success. Servo was designed to be embeddable, why for instance not attempt competition for Electron. Even if it only implemented a subset of the spec it could be a big success. This is Mozilla’s lifeblood, and it just seems attention is elsewhere.
  • kodablah 8y ago
    > Servo was designed to be embeddable, why for instance not attempt competition for Electron. It should be noted there have been side projects to back nodejs with spidermonkey [0] and have electron APIs backed with gecko [1]. I agree with you and the thing I want more than anything is a cross platform browser engine embeddable with a supported C API that's not Chromium. Servo was on its way, but work has definitely slowed. But I acknowledge that even though I would build my own browser UI on top of an embeddable gecko engine, it probably won't affect adoption that much to be worth the effort. 0 - https://github.com/mozilla/spidernode https://github.com/mozilla/spidernode 1 - https://github.com/mozilla/positron https://github.com/mozilla/positron
  • pcwalton 8y ago
    If you've been following #servo lately, you'll see that we're starting a reboot of parallel layout right now (which I'm leading, more or less). It just so happens that I'm also juggling a million other things simultaneously. For example, I'm working on power usage improvements on macOS that should help address some of the complaints upthread. Also there's the entirely new GPU font and SVG renderer (which is a novel technique). Also there's making sure WebRender ships. Etc.
    • 8y ago
• romwell 8y ago
  Just providing my piece of anecdata that me, and everyone in my family, have switched to Firefox Quantum on all our desktop machines, and aren't looking back. (My wife has never used anything but FF, but she begrudgingly updated, and is now a happy user. I switched from Chrome; I can get way more tabs open on my cheap Asus 2-in-1 with FF.)
• TrainedMonkey 8y ago
  Is there a way to see the raw numbers? Eyeballing last few months it seems that Chrome grew significantly mostly at the expense of internet explorer, but also other browsers. This trend could be explained by a large number of new chromium users. Or maybe Google figured out how to push Chrome better.
  • 43920 8y ago
    The absolute number of users seems to be declining as well, although I'm not sure why that is: https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
    • ngokevin 8y ago
      Oh, interesting. 50 million to 40 million MAUs in the US since Mar 17, seems to match up.
• jdlyga 8y ago
  I just switched to Firefox at work, and I'm surprised. It's so much better now than even Firefox 57.
• cjpb 8y ago
  I've recently moved back to FF (from Chrome) for performance reasons, however I'm still forced back to Chrome to debug anything websockets related.
• NelsonMinar 8y ago
  I switched to desktop with Quantum and love it. But the huge win for me was switching to Firefox Mobile on my iPhone. It may just be a wrapper for WebKit. But it integrates with Firefox Sync. The killer feature is "send this tab to your iPhone". Great when you're looking at a recipe / restaurant address / funny picture on your computer and want to have it on your phone.
  • tqkxzugoaupvwqr 8y ago
    > The killer feature is "send this tab to your iPhone". You can do the same in Safari with AirDrop and Handoff. If you enable iCloud for Safari, you can see all your Safari tabs from other devices.
    • UnrealIncident 8y ago
      Not everyone with an iPhone uses all Apple devices.
    • NelsonMinar 8y ago
      I can't run Safari.
  • rmm 8y ago
    Yes yes yes. This is my favourite feature by far. If I notice something cool whilst at work I can send to my Home desktop, and vice versa. when at home and see something that would be useful at work send it there. Awesome feature.
• pippy 8y ago
  netmarketshare collect data from their slim clientele base. A few years they had to modify their data using weighting to get inline with other websites. Other sites have more accurate data which will reflect browser usage more accurately. I recommend using wikimedia's data. It's one of the biggest sites that open up their usage to the public: https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#all-sites-by-browser/browser-family-timeseries https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#all-sit... If you select all the browsers, you can see Firefox numbers are even more dire. going from 10% to 5% in the last 5 years.
  • ngokevin 8y ago
    There's also https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity showing similar declines in the US market.
• shmerl 8y ago
  I've never jumped on the whole Chrome hype train, and while Firefox for a while was slower, it didn't bother me that much. A pity many jumped and never returned, even when Firefox caught up. Now three major milestones I'm personally waiting for (for the Linux version) are Firefox using Webrender (efficiently) with Vulkan on Wayland. Another one that's still missing is fully functional Servo, that can run in browser.html on some mobile Linux UX like Plasma Mobile.
  • qwerty456127 8y ago
    > I've never jumped on the whole Chrome hype train, and while Firefox for a while was slower, Firefox has always been slower than Chrome. I was resisting Chrome very hard and long yet at some point Firefox's slowness became intolerable and I was forced to go Chrome. With the introduction of the Quantum engine Firefox has became reasonably fast again and I switched back but as soon as I've installed all the extensions I want it became extremely slow again so again I have switched back to Chrome (which runs all the extensions I want without a noticeable slow-down). I will switch to Firefox as soon as it becomes as fast as Chrome is (and I only have 5-8-years-old built-in Intel Graphics in my laptops, not fancy GPUs so GPU-accelerated rendering won't help).
• vmchale 8y ago
  Pretty shitty that that's going to Chrome tbh. Especially with the new developments.
• Animats 8y ago
  I've been on Firefox all the way back to when I had to pay for Netscape. Still happy with it. Haven't used Chrome in years.
• swozey 8y ago
  I switched last week to Firefox after trying to go back to it over and over again, maybe once a year, for 5+ years. I absolutely love the Container system it has. I was fumbling around between Chrome profiles for GCP and back to my personal for gdrive/docs/etc. It just got cumbersome. I didn't really understand what the Containers were until I installed the extension and started to split up domains by Work and Personal containers. It's fantastic. Now I have a ton of work-only domains that as soon as I go to them it opens them automatically in my "Work" container. If I pop over to reddit or hn it automatically uses a "Personal" container. The UX could be better, I'd like to dump a list of sites in and bulk select their containers but you can't do that AFAIK. I'd also like to open a URL and just hit a checkbox that says "Always open this in Work/Personal" instead I need to open a Personal container and then "always open in this container." Haven't really paid attention to resource usage vs chrome. I don't immediately feel like it's incredibly lower, if lower at all, but that's just taking a cursory glance that having a decent amount of static tabs and a video player running (not 1080p) is using 2gb of ram. I feel like chrome would be right there, maybe higher, like 3gb. edit: Also, I found this which turns the entire thing into a dark mode (I use Dark reader as well) https://github.com/overdodactyl/ShadowFox https://github.com/overdodactyl/ShadowFox It's got some quirks that bug me. On Windows (I use OSX mostly) it seems to have issues with dragging links out but nothing to get me running away from it.
  • nunodonato 8y ago
    OMG THANK YOU SO MUCH! I was unaware of this. Been keeping chrome and chromium to use on specific cases for work accounts (email, banking, social media, etc). And now I can just consolidate everything with firefox, love it!! I can finally get rid of google's browsers :D
    • k__ 8y ago
      The containers don't seem to be synchronized on multiple machines. But otherwise it's great.
    • bootloop 8y ago
      Don't really know what to say because I use 3 flavors of chrome + incognito mode to make sure my sessions are well separated. I didn't know about this. Guess I have to give it a try now.
• eli 8y ago
  On our business news sites, Firefox is 5% of desktop traffic. Which isn't too crazy; lots of our readers probably can't install their own browsers. The crazy part is Chrome is at 65%. Chrome ate all the marketshare that IE/Edge lost in the enterprise over the past few years.
• kgwxd 8y ago
  If you don't want it on desktop for some crazy reason, at least replace Chrome with Firefox if you're on Android. uBlock Origin support alone is worth leaving behind any benefit you get with Chrome.
  • chipperyman573 8y ago
    Seconded. Plus, you can install HTTPS everywhere. One thing I would mention, though, is that using google services will all downgrade themselves if you use firefox for android. For example, this is the exact same search in chrome: https://i.imgur.com/uK8Tr9I.png https://i.imgur.com/uK8Tr9I.png and in firefox: https://i.imgur.com/pEBphaQ.png https://i.imgur.com/pEBphaQ.png (both using the same android phone). It's even worse if you're trying to use a "near me" search. I don't want to put an image for privacy reasons but major functionality is removed, such as the ability to view the business's hours(!) Also, google maps doesn't seem to work in firefox. And when it does, it's very slow. However, there's a really easy solution to this! Install a user-agent switcher and have firefox identify as chrome. These problems will all immediately go away.
    • kam 8y ago
      Or search from the Google widget on the home screen instead of the browser. Results are displayed in the native app but web links open in Firefox.
  • remir 8y ago
    If you don't mind having a Chromium-based browser, Brave is also quite good and include a native ad blocker.
  • lmedinas 8y ago
    Firefox for me is really slow compared to Chrome, specially with uBlock. I would recommend Firefox Focus/Klar instead.
  • maple3142 8y ago
    I use Adguard because I want block ads not only in browser but also apps. If you want FOSS ones, blokada might be a good alternative.
• nerdbaggy 8y ago
  Looking at the results for November it looks like it’s at 9.11% not below 9%
• jbergstroem 8y ago
  Dear lazyweb: How can I make my favorite browser - Firefox - use MacOS's native full-screen when clicking "full screen" in a video? Thanks for your reply.
• sunstone 8y ago
  Sure but 9% is still a lot of people and the browser is now on the rebound after a few missteps by Chrome. https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/15/17239548/firefox-chrome-safari-competition https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/15/17239548/firefox-chrome-s...
  • ngokevin 8y ago
    Not sure where the rebound is, the trending numbers show a strong decline even since the article. It’s even more bleak when you factor in mobile.
• red023 8y ago
  Mozilla is way better then the others but still not great. The numbers are so low because people do not care about any privacy whatsoever. I hope the pay the price one day and regret it. To name just one reason FFX sync is prate and secure by default unless all the others who use your bookmarks to sell them. You by default (you can disable it) share all you bookmarks with Google. Hell yeah hi Google I have torrent sites or whatever PRIVATE stuff bookmarked. Here have it all and store it instill I am dead. And when I find out about it and disable it you already have what I need from my initial sync. Thanks yeah you are so nice to me Google. I know a few year(s)? ago FFX was still the most user in Germany (where people generally do care more about privacy and things like that). But when I look at the stats now it seems Google has managed to even Brainwash the Germans. Mozilla is not even very good on the claims they have. They may be working closely with the Tor browser team but I think Firefox should essentially become something like the Tor browser. Their Addons have become a walled garden as the recent cause about that paywall prevention Addon that got kicked of the "store" showed. If I got that right people can not even install it in stable versions of FFX. Also that "Profile" Generator showed here on HN as well shows they have several deeps flaws in the browsers that need addons for fixing like canvar tracking and stuff I did not even know about. The Tor brower does all this things by default. Why does Firefox do not even have UI to some of those settings and others even need extra addons ... I could go on. Here I am criticizing Mozilla when I actually thing there are the best browser Vendor ever. They are an non-profit. They have done so many great things for the web and there was only as extreme short tiem where I was about to switch to Chromium because the devtools or Firebox where really really slow and clunky. I am a Forefox user from the very start and I am really disgusted how Google pushed their Browser in their searches to the point that even Linux users who have if they really want to install Chromium. They should just use FFX. But what are they doing? They install Chrome. Google has even brianwashed Linux users into thinking they need Chrome. Chrome is 99% chromium with 1% proprietary Google crap on top of it. If really baffles me how stupid people are. I lost could on how many Linux tutorials and "First things to do after installing ..." I read that had Chrome in there. Just yesterday I read a top answer on AskUbuntu about how to enabled unattended installs for PPAs and Chrome was yet again there in the example. Chromimum is right there in the sources you Idiots. Why would you infest your almost entirely open source OS with this Google crap? Firefox is a good browser and Quantum made is faster and less resource hungry. Mozilla works on this new Browser engine with Samsung that speeds things up by a lot. Many parts are already in FFX today but I think the main parallel GPU rendering stuff is not yet. Not up to speed with that. Anyway Chrome may be "faster" in benchmarks or "feel faster" but believe me this few milliseconds are really really not worth it. Mozilla also (until now) allows Adnauseam that clicks every ads it finds, based on uBlock origin. Chrome forbids this Addon lol but you inlike in FFX just can sideload it. I love that concept and its the Adblocker I use. It may help them with tracking me but I just love the fact that I might cause them pay per click losses. Mozilla is not as good and as anti advertising as I would like them to. I mean Google payed 40% of their income at a time how independent can they be? They redirect search tos the this evil data snake for money to this day. I heared their CEO talk about how she likes some ads but she does not like the tracking lol. So she wants ads that do not relate to her so why not just no ads at all? Oh the other hand where would they be without Google money? I am wondering if they would be able to make it crowd funded with Wikipedia style "annoy beg to donate ads" across half the screen. Ok </rant>
• brador 8y ago
  When you stop listening to your users they stop using your product. Remove pocket. Respect user privacy again. Maybe they’ll return.
  • Groxx 8y ago
    Probably worth pointing out that they now own pocket. So it's a bit different than sending data to a 3rd party: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/27/mozilla-acquires-pocket/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/27/mozilla-acquires-po... But I completely agree with how it was initially integrated, it was a terrible decision.
• snek 8y ago
  chrome also decreased this month, perhaps there is something larger here?
• SwellJoe 8y ago
  This is pretty disastrous for the world. I don't know how much it effects Mozilla, but it's terrible for people's privacy and a web that is at least a little independent of a small number of giant companies who have a history of being bad actors. Also, how the heck is Internet Explorer more popular than Firefox? Even Microsoft doesn't want people using it.
• beizhia 8y ago
  I use Firefox as my main browser (but I'm a Linux user, so I'm already away from mainstream). (edit: tree-style-tabs is the killer feature/extension, and I can never go back) I do still pop open chrome for the devtools when I'm working on web stuff. I wish I didn't have to, but there's one thing that FF doesnt have that I need at work: goto line in the sources browser. Lots of our files at work are several thousand lines (I know...), and its a huge missing feature to me. I might see if I can code it up myself and submit a patch, but that's not exactly trivial.
• Semaphor 8y ago
  While I regularly get annoyed that our users (Germany) use IE so much, at least we have a bit over 20% FF users.
• qwerty456127 8y ago
  Now as Microsoft has given up and switched to Google's Blink engine, given importance of the web and scary perspectives of it becoming owned by a single corporation Google competitors (as well as its industrial customers - it's never good to rely on a single vendor that can always do just whatever it wants), NGOs and GOs should start funding and promoting Mozilla now IMHO...
  • ngokevin 8y ago
    It’s unfortunately already been the case. Mozilla’s money comes directly from Google and Google has had the heavy hand over all web standards decisions for years now.
• StillBored 8y ago
  The problem is that firefox is only getting faster if you happen to have a half dozen 4+Ghz cores to burn. If you run it on low end hardware all these rewrites in rust/etc to improve parallelism seem to actually be slowing it down and apparently increasing its overall resource consumption. Older versions would run up against a gig and a half or so, and start garbage collecting. Now, its not unusual for me to see 5+GB pinned across assorted firefox processes. I've been meaning to play the high speed video capture game with a couple of versions running on the same hardware to see if my feeling that the GUI is actually getting laggier despite posting better benchmark numbers. More and more I find myself spinning up falkon, or other browsers because I want to actually be able to play streaming radio in the background with my browser without having it skip if I open amazon.com, or some other JS heavy site. Worse, I'm still running 56 on a couple of my machines because I can't stand how laggy the newer versions are on those machines.
  • TangoTrotFox 8y ago
    I've been having the exact same issue. I tend to leave a relatively large number of windows/tabs open and Firefox is starting to edge towards unusability on a 4x3.2ghz + 16GB RAM system simply because its performance and memory consumption is interfering with other applications. Though I really think most major browsers are somehow all simultaneously losing the thread. Websites are fundamentally just formatted text and extremely basic graphics, for the most part. It's not like I have 50 high end webgl demos running. Rendering text and basic graphics is not something that should be consuming anywhere remotely near the resources that have become typical. If javascript is the problem, then that should be dealt with and not simply accepted as the price of doing business. In many ways I feel like the mantra that 'premature optimization is the root of all evil' has gradually turned into 'any form of optimization short of making sure you don't run O(n) in O(n^2) is not a priority.' But like anybody who's worked on a project knows those placeholders that 'you'll get to later' end up being exactly what goes live. And when optimization is disregarded, you get text/graphics rendering struggling to perform on systems millions of times stronger than what sent us to the moon.
  • puzzlingcaptcha 8y ago
    >Now, its not unusual for me to see 5+GB pinned across assorted firefox processes. I've been using Firefox continuously since version 3.1 and it's been bothering me a lot recently. Circa 2011 Firefox was perceived as a memory hog, and MemShrink effort was started to keep it under control, which resulted in the nifty areweslimyet.com website (which was transparent and good PR too). Now MemShrink seems defunct, areweslimyet is obsoleted with seemingly all the progress undone as of last update in 2017, and the new Perfherder website is inscrutable for an outsider. In my case, Firefox balloons to gigabytes of RAM with just a few tabs open. If you need more than 8GB of RAM on your system to do basic office work something has gone rather wrong (and RAM prices are historically somewhat high right now).
• jbarham 8y ago
  I use Google Docs and noticed that one apparent dark pattern Google uses with Chrome is that you can print directly to a printer from Google Docs in Chrome whereas with Firefox (and presumably any other non-Google browser) you're forced to download a PDF first. It's confusing enough that my wife, who prints periodically from Google Docs, asked to switch back to Chrome.
• taf2 8y ago
  I like this http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-200901-201811 http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-20090... I just wish it went back further so you could see just how much marketshare IE6 held
• __erik 8y ago
  I've been using firefox on my personal computers and phone as my main browser for ~18 months. Honestly at this point I prefer it to chrome. On mobile the ability to use native extensions like ublock origin is amazing.
• linuxhansl 8y ago
  That is a true shame. I've been happily using Firefox and will continue to do so. How people trust Google's Chrome (with many closed bits) is beyond me - but of course we're all free to do whatever we want to do. Also last time I benchmarked Firefox and Chrome (on Linux) Firefox turned out to be faster at least for the sites that I frequent.
• agumonkey 8y ago
  So Quantum didn't do any good in terms of market share... so much effective efforts. I hope they keep going.
• MattyRad 8y ago
  I use Firefox as my desktop browser and love it, but I generally use Chrome in Android for mobile browsing; seeing this stat was discouraging, so I just now switched to Firefox for Android. The [-] collapse buttons for these threads are weirdly a lot more difficult to click (specifically, register a press with your finger) than in Chrome... Anyway, I think committing to FireFox is more important so I can deal with it.
• im3w1l 8y ago
  This makes me sad. Of the big browsers, firefox is the one that respects the user the most.
• s9w 8y ago
  Still puzzling to me. Chrome with its non-native, childish looks, questionable google integrations; and on the other hand the non-optional vertical tabs for firefox. I've never seen a tech-savy chrome user in the wild. Neither among colleagues, nor among friends.
• thomasknowles 8y ago
  Firefox on Linux appears to adopt the GTK themes (in my case Dark Themes) for web elements (Forms, message poxes, etc) and I have great difficulty removing the customisation. Chrome based browsers do not do that and it's one of the primary reasons I still use Chrome.
• interesthrow2 8y ago
  Personal reasons why I'm using Chrome right now instead of Firefox: Chrome is faster, or feel faster, why I don't know, but it seems to perform better on low end gear. It starts fast and most pages don't seem to "block" while loading. Second, I despise Firefox dev tools, period. I hate the console input being stuck in on a single line, this isn't how most CLI UI work, so why does it make sense for Firefox to do that? it doesn't. Obviously since Google started pulling that "logged in Gmail == logged in Chrome" stupid stunt, I want to move away from Chrome, but Firefox will seldom be my first choice as an alternative.
  • qmarchi 8y ago
    Have you made any attempts to try out the new Firefox Developer Edition? They've done some revamping recently of the Dev tools (to the point that, yes, multi line is supported in the console)
  • polskibus 8y ago
    I find FF much faster in web apps (ie.Zeplin) or large websites than Chrome. I switched to FF also on Android, no regrets.
• slyrus 8y ago
  Alternative headline: Firefox market share greater than Edge, Safari, and Opera combined.
  • ngokevin 8y ago
    Or smaller than IE :0 Also remove the desktop filter and watch Safari jump up to like 20% and FF down to 4.5%. Usage of the Web on mobile is huge, and it's even bleaker for FF there.
• mnl 8y ago
  There are deprecated extensions that can't be ported to Quantum and were actually useful to many users. And then Quantum is a memory hog, jumping from ESR 52.9 to the current version it needs a couple GB more for my workflow. It's faster and looks nice, but my computers are powerful enough to make that pretty much irrelevant. For this small speed gain and unless I switch to Waterfox or some other community effort that tries somewhat hopelessly to keep alive what many users want, I have to buy more memory and stop using FireFTP and Session Manager. I just needed Firefox, not a Chrome competitor.
• OpenBSD-reich2 8y ago
  Should have put more money toward building a better more modular browser than toward diversity programs. This is the natural result of enterprise SocJus. Google will go this way too in five to ten years.
• mherrmann 8y ago
  Chrome lost me when it started to force-login me to Chrome when signing into Gmail, thus sharing all my website visits with Google. I switched to FF two months ago and haven't looked back. FF is like Linux: less polished, but works, and you are in control. A fair tradeoff for me.
  • feanaro 8y ago
    Less polished in what way?
    • mherrmann 8y ago
      The window and rendering is a bit more jittery. The UI is less slick. I do find static sites render faster in FF. But JS-heavy pages are (somewhat) faster in Chrome.
      • feanaro 8y ago
        The UI being less slick seems like a very subjective thing, especially when phrased vaguely and without concrete detail of what's wrong. This is especially surprising to me given how similar the two browsers now look (see a comparison someone posted in a comment elsewhere: http://9ol.es/double-browser.png http://9ol.es/double-browser.png). Firefox has actually been more responsive and less jittery for me than Chrome for quite some time, but I've seen various differing experiences in large enough numbers that I suspect this is dependent on many variables. Yet any difference I observe is still minimal. Can it really be that bad?
        • mherrmann 8y ago
          No, it's not bad at all. Merely noticeable for me.
  • fyfy18 8y ago
    I switched over summer and the only thing I really miss is the translation built into Chrome. S3.Translator seems to be the recommended alternative, but compared to Chrome it's next to useless. I find it very slow, constantly nagging and often it breaks websites. in Chrome the translation 'just works'.
• bluescrn 8y ago
  Firefox has always tended to have the best ad blocking add-ons. Have other browsers caught up?
• javitury 8y ago
  What an irony. I've been using firefox for 10+ years and now it is faster, uses less resourses and doesn't crash. As a user, this is the browser I have been waiting for. Yes, dev tools features could be expanded as well as the plugin franework(vimperator!).But these are non-issues for regular users.
  • mk89 8y ago
    The only thing I disliked in so many years is the bunch of imcompatible extensions due to the switch to the new plugin system. For example, I was unable to use NoScript, because it didn't really work well. Still, this is something you can forgive considering that for more than 15 years they released always good software.
    • cf498 8y ago
      No it is not. If all the alternatives werent so dismal I would have wiped FF from all my machines when they first switched to quantum and then had no extended support frame for ESR52. It was a slap in the face of the core user base and they did it carelessly. They did not have the necessary information in place early enough and did not fix bugs that prevented people from porting their addons before the end of the last pre quantum ESR. They more then deserve where they are today
      • mk89 8y ago
        Do you ever wonder why the alternatives are so dismal? Man, a web browser that works on all the current existing devices on the planet is not something that I would consider trivial, at all. Internet Explorer needed a brand new operating system that forces it for anything you do to regain some momentum... Apple has to offer obviously stuff that you can't do easily with other browsers, like integration with the password manager, etc... Google Chrome... We will see what happens in 10 years. They are making more and evident what they developed that browser for.
        • cf498 8y ago
• wiz21c 8y ago
  Obligatory (and useful) FSF quote : "... And because our computers control much of our personal information and daily activities, proprietary software represents an unacceptable danger to a free society."
• InclinedPlane 8y ago
  I use Firefox nearly every day and it's pretty good. If it was the only browser in existence it would be hard to complain. However, when switching between chrome and firefox I'm always much happier when I switch to chrome than I am when I switch to firefox. And it's not because of site rendering or anything like that, it's always a matter of UI, speed, and resource usage. The firefox UI is pretty clean but it has just too many weird clunky edges. For example, there are many situations where chrome just "does the right thing" while firefox does not (and it's more common for chrome to be easily configured to do something different if you want it to), this is especially true with handling tabs and the new tab page. Updates are another example though, chrome's updates are fast and nearly painless, firefox is a lot better than it used to be but updates are slow and it's far too common to launch the browser and for some reason see that it's not updated. There are also many cases where doing "ordinary things" while browsing will lead to firefox slowing to a crawl or using crazy amounts of resources. Chrome is a notorious memory hog and yet somehow it manages to behave better than firefox in most situations, at least for my browsing habits. I also really like chrome's search integrations, if I want to search wikipedia all I need to do is hit ctrl-t then type "wiki <tab> search string" and boom I'm there. Same thing for youtube, amazon, etc. It's a small thing, but it's the addition of all the small things which make for an overall superior experience. For reference Mosaic was my first browser and I've always been open to switching over to whatever browser had the best experience. I was using phoenix project builds before they renamed them, I was using Chrome back when it was in beta (speed, process isolation, minimalism, better acid2/3 scores, what wasn't to like?), and I keep checking on other browsers to see if they're worth switching to. The Mozilla org is great and firefox is a solid browser but it needs to up its game if it wants to be seen as a state of the art browser.
• mk89 8y ago
  Quite sad to see Firefox going down like that, after having seen it as a top ranked browser for quite a few years.
• graycat 8y ago
  A Web browser can put video on the screen and audio on the speakers. So, any such browser should also be able to put video also into a file, say, file type MP4. Know of any browser that can do this?
• Illniyar 8y ago
  To me Firefox is just blundering with it's marketing. It should be touting it's amazing features and showing how it eats chrome's lunch until chrome has no choice but to implement those features. They should showcase containers, tree style tabs and other things that chrome can't do and are massive productivity and quality of life changes. Instead they market privacy and performance features and change their brand, which let's be frank barely interest even 9% of the people. Any time I explain to people who see my browser about tree style tabs or containers, at least 30% switch, usually within days.
• city41 8y ago
  I’ve tried to switch to Firefox many times, primarily on Ubuntu 16 and 18. But Firefox crashes about once a day for me. I can’t remember the last time Chrome crashed :-/
• fwef64 8y ago
  One thing keeping me from using Firefox full-time is that when using heavier web applications like Google Cloud Console or Stackdriver it always hangs, shows a warning that the webapp is taking too long and asks me if I want to wait or stop it. This happens every time I try to load something. I looked for a way to disable this behavior but with no luck.
• warpspin 8y ago
  I switched back to Firefox after Quantum (where its speed on my MBP became finally tolerable again, even if still slower than Safari) after a brief intermezzo with Safari (where the extension "eco system" plainly sucks) after being a long time Chrome user. The problem is, I still have to actually force myself to actually like Firefox. Chrome IS, all-in-all, the better the browser - except that annoying privacy thing which caused me to switch in the first place... A major source of pain are still the development tools in Firefox. They work flawlessly in Chrome, hardly work at all in Safari after their dev tools rewrite a couple of years ago, and show annoying quirks in Firefox (like the Debugger, which sometimes simply loses a source file, making it impossible to place breakpoints there) and have, in general, a slower UI than Chrome's.
• elken 8y ago
  I switched back to Firefox a few months ago and haven't looked back. I've also noticed that people are increasingly distancing themselves from the Google ecosystem. I have even had less technical friends looking at alternatives such as Brave. Looking at the numbers, Perhaps the non-ie/Safari/Chrome crowd is being fractured by the alternatives available but to me it certainly seems to be growing.
• tyteen4a03 8y ago
  When you can make Quantum feel like Safari (or at least Chrome) on my Mac, then I'll switch. Right now it drains my battery faster than I can say the word "battery drain".
• swoorup 8y ago
  I find quantum quiet fast for user-operation. But the initial page loading and data transfers appears to be so slower than all browsers.
• ssvss 8y ago
  Their mobile market share is 1.2%. I tried to use Firefox in android, their scrolling behaviour doesn’t feel native.
• shams93 8y ago
  Still has more market share than desktop Safari and is still #2 behind chrome on the desktop. Probably its market share is being eaten by chromeos devices. Ultimately it would be really bad for the internet to have Google effectively own it, regardless of whether they have made mistakes or not firefox as a project is too important to allow to fail.
• huxflux 8y ago
  Return from years with Chrome to after the release of Quantum and I really happy with FF once again.
• childintime 8y ago
  Coincidence or not, I got a request from the Microsoft Feedback Hub just yesterday, asking me about my experience with Firefox. I found it very strange, Microsoft asking about a non-Microsoft product. Today I read that MS is replacing Edge with Chromium. Or maybe not?
• karmakaze 8y ago
  There's a very interesting pattern in the data if you look back from 2016-05 to 2018-04 (chart has 24 month limit). Each April and October shows an appreciable drop in Firefox market share. This tells me that the Firefox desktop/laptop we are losing are on Linux and decide to switch to another browser when they upgrade their (probably Ubuntu based) disto. I myself run Firefox on Xubuntu but stick to the LTS releaaes. The biggest impediment from switching from Chrome to Firefox was being familiar with the Dev Tools. One day I just did it and the change wasn't as big a deal as I thought it to be. We really need to keep Firefox alive, it's our best, free-est option. With Microsoft replacing Edge with a Chrome-based browser this is as important as ever.
  • botverse 8y ago
    > One day I just did it and the change wasn't as big a deal as I thought it to be. This is so true, if everybody here thinks that should change but worried about this. It takes just a few hours, almos all features have an equivalent if not exactly the same and in the same place.
    • krageon 8y ago
      Except FF's tools are slower and the experience is overall worse. A lot has improved about firefox (including my old main complaint, that the renderer was slow) but saying the dev tools are at all acceptable when you're used to Chrome's is sadly still a stretch.
      • karmakaze 8y ago
        Which dev features do you find unacceptable? I still do switch back and forth, mostly at work when pairing. The other times I use Chrome and Safari is for web dev on mobile devices. Beyond that I don't find much difference and there are as many times I find that the Firefox dev tools can do things that I can't in Chrome.
      • ittgsv 8y ago
        Not only that, you will even find people here saying that Firefox dev tools are faster!! I wonder what kind of computers those people have.
• varjag 8y ago
  but now it has own programming language https://twitter.com/varjag/status/1069890007597506560 https://twitter.com/varjag/status/1069890007597506560
• netcan 8y ago
  It's hard, being FF. Before chrome, FF outcompeted IE & safari on features. FF's features against OS makers moats like making their browser default and unlimited finances. Once mobile got added to the mix, default, preinstalled browsers had even more advantage. The feature/quality gap just isn't enough anymore. When FF gained all that market share 10-15 yrs ago, it had tabs years before the competition. It had add-ons before the competition. You could have IE6 or you could have FF with firebug, "tabbed browsing," as blocking, and cool web 2.0 stuff like social bookmarks and whatnot. It was a massive feature gap. That's no longer the case. Hard times.
• _pmf_ 8y ago
  Maybe concentrating on inclusiveness and social justice is not the best route.
• maverick74 8y ago
  I'm loosing faith in mankind! People ARE DEFINITELY DUMB!!!
• maverick74 8y ago
  I'm loosing faith in mankind! People ARE DEFINITELY DUMB!!! There is no other choice than Firefox if you value privacy, features and a "company" that does not trick you!
• jillesvangurp 8y ago
  Basically chrome seems to continue to be popular. MS is struggling to get people to use Edge and Firefox is doing way better than Edge and is just barely out-competed by Internet Explorer (what's up with that?). I'm guessing a lot of old devices are stuck on some old version of windows. But bottom line is it holding up nicely against MS. A lot of people seem to default to installing Chrome/Firefox instead of whatever MS/Apple is pretending is the browser of choice. To the point that these are not even the default choice on their own OS and struggling to remain in second/third position. So not that bad for Firefox. I'm back to being a full-time Firefox user since about one and a half year. Really liking the post quantum performance and also really enjoy having fine grained control over trackers, ads, and other crap. As other people point out, their mobile browsers on Android are worth using as well. Unless you like being tracked and blasted with ads of course.
• pedro2 8y ago
  I think Firefox still needs performance improvement on the graphical side on Windows. Chrome somehow bypasses compositing [it is a white window on OBS screen recorder]. Firefox seems to only get fast when I disable Windows animations; otherwise gets sluggish as soon as more than 4 tabs open.
• ojosilva 8y ago
  A few months back I've started a journey to move to FF. 1. First installed it on my Android phone so I could use uBlock Origin. Then found 2 other amazing extensions, Cookie Autodelete (less tracking, more privacy and no newspaper paywalls) and I Don't Care About Cookies (no more annoying Agree to Cookies popups). I couldn't be happier! 2. Despite some reports about FF issues on MacOS, I went ahead and installed it. Memory usage having many open tabs dropped considerably, maybe 30% to 40% compared to Chrome. Everything works great, speedy and solid. 3. I've installed FF on my home Windows 7 media center. Strange, but that's where FF is noticeably slower than Chrome and seems to have memory swapping issues, where some tabs will be swapped out of memory and take a while to load. The machine has only 4GB RAM though and is not very performant. 4. I've discovered Pocket and I'm really liking it. Although the recommendation engine is a total waste of time, the text extraction is great. 5. I love Firefox Focus, which I use sporadically, and I wish that was the default engine everywhere. I'm not sure if the next generation FF will be based on Servo or Blink. Whatever it may be, I hope it's as snappy as Focus. Some issues or quirks I had with Firefox: - Bookmarks with search keywords. Chrome OpenSearch integration was much nicer. I had to define several bookmarks on FF to have at least the searches I use the most. - YouTube videos in Windows feel sluggish and I had to install a Windows Media extension to be able to see them. Chrome has video support out of the box. - PDF viewing feels less responsive, but the FF viewer interface is fine. - Downloading UX is better on Chrome. The FF down arrow on the top bar is very hidden, I tend to forget I was downloading something.
• nathan_f77 8y ago
  I just switched back to Chrome last night, after about 10 months on Firefox (on Mac). The only reason I switched to Firefox is because Chrome started showing these little blue notification dots on pinned tabs, and these were really distracting. Firefox had them too, but I figured out how to hack them away with CSS. I found out that these dots disappeared after Chrome redesigned their tabs, so I switched back. Chrome feels much faster and nicer to use. Firefox would often get really slow and start freezing. The Firefox dev tools were often really slow and unresponsive. If I was working on a big React app the devtools UI would often just disappear and freeze for 10-15 seconds. I think it was known issue related to source maps. My workaround was to close the developer tools before I refreshed the page, and then reopen them. So I'm glad I don't have to do that anymore. I really missed Chromecast support. If I ever wanted to watch a video on my TV, I would have to pick up my phone and open the YouTube app, or just open Chrome and paste in the URL. I had to open Chrome every time I had a Google Meet call. Clearbit only provides a Chrome extension and doesn't support Firefox (but that's a problem with Clearbit. They really need to add support for Firefox.) I liked Firefox's "Multi-Account Containers". It was nice that I could sign into multiple accounts at the same time, and have all the tabs in the same window. Chrome has profiles but they can only open in a new window. (But that works fine.) One other advantage of Firefox: It kind of lags behind Chrome in some ways, so if your website works in Firefox, it almost always works in Chrome. When I was only developing and testing in Chrome, I would occasionally get an error report from a Firefox user. That never happened while I was using Firefox. Now that I'm back on Chrome, I'll need to be more careful about cross-browser testing.
• mrfusion 8y ago
  It’s the smallest feature but I’ve never been able to switch to chrome because of it. The ability to highlight text, right click search and have it open in a new tab in the background. Chrome insisted on opening in the foreground and I found it really disruptive. They have extensions that change this because but they never worked well for me.
• mark_l_watson 8y ago
  Time to make another contribution to Mozilla. I have not been using Firefox on my MacBook or iPad, but I recently bought a Linux laptop and as an experiment I am only using Firefox. Nice experience. I might install Chrome just for accessing Google properties because I like to isolate interactions with Google, but that is in no way in criticism of Firefox.
  • bad_user 8y ago
    You don't need to install Chrome to isolate Google's properties. Firefox can do that automatically: 1. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account... 2. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-container/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-contai... 3. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-container/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-cont...
    • mark_l_watson 8y ago
      Thanks, I appreciate the links.
• bad_user 8y ago
  Why am I seeing 10% for Firefox while the title says "below 9%"? Is it an incorrect title?
• tunap 8y ago
  I wonder what the numbers would be if FF forks were included. I see Seamonkey in the list, but no Waterfox or Pale Moon, etc. Surely wouldn't be any great number, but is curious the forks are not listed.
• tscolari 8y ago
  I tried Firefox for the last few months as my default browser, I just switched back to chrome. The amount of lag it caused to the system was beyond bearable. It's a shame because I really like the features, like containers, unfortunately, it's just not good enough for my heavy use.
• ssvss 8y ago
  One thing I love about firefox is, it has a top bar which shows the title of the webpage in full, when have multiple tabs open, the title in the tab-bar is invisible.
• kansi 8y ago
  Reading this breaks my heart. I have been a Firefox user for almost a decade now and I have good and bad memories with it. Since Quantum release my experience with FF has been nothing but exceptional. On a general day I have around ~15 pinned tabs and more than 50 other tabs open and FF handles it like a breeze. The memory usage is good given the fact that my workload is heavy. On a dual-core machine, I am able to restart FF under ~3 seconds. I have read comments in this thread suggesting that FF's performance is not that snappy but I cannot seem to notice any difference. Maybe my dev senses are not that strong ... maybe the benchmarks do show a difference but I have never felt FF to be any less performant than Chrome. I am tired of listening to people screaming their lungs out about privacy when their actions don't reflect their opinions.
  • TheArcane 8y ago
    The day Firefox integrates a seamless translation solution (Bing/Google/anything) is the day I get rid of Chrome from all my devices.
  • alexott 8y ago
    I Ihave around 50 tabs in FF, but active only maybe 15-20. On Mac OS I see a standard problem when I connect external monitor after wakeup, FF starts to "eat" memory like crazy, until I either kill it, or it's crashed. I need to restart FF every 2 days to get my memory back. Here is screenshot from App monitor: https://www.dropbox.com/s/rh133wnhk1wgbe2/Screen%20Shot%202018-12-03%20at%2008.26.26.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/rh133wnhk1wgbe2/Screen%20Shot%2020... Sometimes, after 2 days of work each worker consumes ~7Gb of RAM (on machine with 16GB of RAM)... P.S. mostly opened documents in google doc, gmail, calendar, JIRA/Confluence...
    • fbender 8y ago
      There is a well-known bug[1] with non-standard resolutions. Try changing the resolution and see if it makes any difference. If not, please file a new bug :). Otherwise you can see if you can help fixing the issue. Unfortunately, it requires some re-engineering of core graphics processing and they are working on it, but it'll likely take a few more months to fix completely. [1] I think this was the bug I thought about: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042, see also https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1422090 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1422090
• skc 8y ago
  People should just admit that they don't really mind a Google Chrome monoculture. Because that's where we're headed and nobody cares.
• z3t4 8y ago
  Firefox keeps getting faster and faster. (Firefox dev tools are however terrible slow, so I use Chromium for the dev tools). I'm afraid that if Chromium get 99+ market share the community will become lazy and it will get slower and slower as new features are bolted on and we will get "designed by committee" issues.
• xte 8y ago
  I came back to Firefox after years on Chrom{e,ium} because of their bad evolution. FF is far for being good IMO but far less obscene than actual Chrome. Anyway, brace yourself: an era of "proprietary web" is coming, with a worst lock-in than Windows era in the '90s.
• 2T1Qka0rEiPr 8y ago
  I begrudgingly left the FF community when it became far, far easier to debug and develop on Chrome. At that time Chrome was competing with Firebug, and it was clear that the Chrome team had far more resources to be able to make continual improvements to the development experience than Firebug made. So I switched for development, and for practical reasons all other usage followed. I wonder if my story is similar to others. From what I've seen Firefox now looks as though it has much better tools in-built and so I could consider the switch back, but I'd love some input on that. Also, things I develop obviously have to work on Chrome, so that's another impediment to me switching over entirely, which is a shame.
• dgzl 8y ago
  As a lifelong FF user, I simply hope they manage to stay in the game long enough to earn back market share.
• LondonAppDev 8y ago
  I recently switched to FF with DuckDuckGo for privacy purposes. I do find the dev-tools to be noticably less user-friendly than Chromes, however I think it's a small price to pay for the priacy.
• sureaboutthis 8y ago
  I started my web dev company in early 2003. My son, a big gamer, pushed me to not use IE as our primary development browser and to use this new thing called Firefox which I think was version 0.9. To appease him, I would test our web pages in Firefox and started noticing differences with IE. So I started asking questions. "Why does the HTML standard say things are supposed to work one way, and it does in Firefox, but not in IE?" I would be laughed off any forum I visited. I would still be laughed off a lot of forums until 2012 or so. With this announcement, you will still find people who think there was nothing wrong with IE and will even think "Edge is great!". Well, like I used to tell people years ago, if Edge is so great, why is Microsoft dumping it?
• pvinis 8y ago
  Honestly, I haven't cared about the speed of Firefox for a long time now. I use it everyday, and I want to keep using it in the future, not because of it's speed, but because of the features and options. For example: there is a way to completely hide the 'X' from the tabs. I love that. It's weird for some people but I like it that way. Chrome cannot do that. There is a feature request, but it was marked as won't fix for a long time now. Who decided that, I don't know and I don't care. I want my options like that and many others that Firefox has and Chrome hasn't. And with the danger of being misunderstood here, I would consider switching, if Chrome had a few features/options I want. But the fact that Mozilla people care and spent 10 min to add the option for me or an add-on, makes them stand much higher in my mind.
• V-2 8y ago
  I switched away from Firefox years ago, because it felt very bloated, plus they'd break backwards compatibility pretty often, and every other update meant one or more extensions would stop working. Over time I grew tired of the "eeny, meeny, which one this time" routine.
• mosselman 8y ago
  Firefox is still too slow for my liking. I use Brave instead, but I'd rather use firefox.
• w3news 8y ago
  This isnt good for the users, because Firefox respects the user. Firefox is build for the users, and all features are made with the idea that the user has control. Many privacy features are started at Firefox. Chrome isnt a bad browser, but isnt made for the user, it is made for commercial websites/webapps. An example is that Firefox has a good tracking protection system.
  • btgis 8y ago
    Firefox didn't respect me when they sent my data to Cliqz, when they installed Pocket without my permission, when they started showing me ads on my home page, when they remotelly installed a Mr. Robot addon without my permission, and so on. The "Mozilla sides with the user" argument needs to die and be buried already. Mozilla is at best sloppy and at worst as evil as Google is.
• ajobforme 8y ago
  i use chrome because firefox mobile is so slow on my iphone 5s and i like to sync tabs between mobile and desktop, so chrome on mobile means i have to use it on desktop too
• perfunctory 8y ago
  Some corporations seem to do adopt Chrome as an official workplace browser (next to IE). I am wondering what would it take to lobby them to adopt Firefox. Does anybody have any experience pitching Firefox inside their own company? Is Mozilla doing anything to get into the enterprise?
• anechoe 8y ago
  This sucks :( I'm using firefox now, after 55 it's faster than Chrome for me. I hope they regain market share. We need an option not tied to a massive company.
• ac130kz 8y ago
  I left Chrome after it started to overload my dual-core cpu (it simply can't properly handle more than 15 tabs), lag, stutter and delete my tabs around version 56. There were also horrible font rendering issues, which were fixed I think by the 68th (unbelievable) release. Firefox Beta is my browser of choice now, both on Windows and Linux based OSs
• thrower123 8y ago
  They have been trying really hard to squander any advantage that they might have had. Shipping an inferior product has costs.
• amitkapit 8y ago
  You want to support Firefox? Donate to Mozilla! https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/ https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/
• k__ 8y ago
  I switched back to Firefox this year, but recently the performance on Google sites went really bad, especially on macOS. Now I'm thinking about switching to Brave.
• lunchables 8y ago
  I've been using Firefox for a couple of years now. It is genuinely very good and I encourage people to give it a shot if you haven't. You might have been like me and swapped to Chrome when it got stable and Firefox was in bad shape. Let me tell you, Firefox has made ENORMOUS improvements in every area. It really is worth trying again. Remember how crucially important it is that we have more than one web browser.
• exodust 8y ago
  Why trust this as a source of data? Sounds unimpressive where they get the stats from. Unspecified "Social bookmarking sites". Probably something I've never visited.
• bfrog 8y ago
  We've come full circle on monopolistic companies deciding how the web should work, again.
• pessimizer 8y ago
  Firefox solely exists at this point to protect Google from antitrust action. Becoming a Chrome clone was an intentional destruction of the product.
• zzzcpan 8y ago
  Mozilla can do a lot to help users that other browsers don't do, like block ads by default, ship with a bigger collection of fonts and block external fonts by default, make all animations click to play, disable annoying featuring by default, CSS features that are used primarily to break UX or render things too slowly, like "position: fixed", etc. But Mozilla chooses not to do any of that. It chooses advertising corporations and publishers over its own users, just like Google, but tries to offset that with controversial "privacy" PR. What is the point in having a separate browser engine if you don't leverage any features to make it more attractive to users? You can't beat Google by just chasing it.
• smcg 8y ago
  I switched to FF from Chrome when I got a new computer for work and it has been great. I was a FF user back in the day when it was a massive improvement over IE. Now it feels "fine enough" in terms of feature richness, and it has great performance.
• newscracker 8y ago
  I'll never give up on Firefox (been using it since the Phoenix days). Mozilla has the right intents for its users, and Apple probably comes a distant second if you consider both privacy and the open web. I believe we would all lose if we don't evangelize Firefox and improve its numbers, since its marketing budget may not be as big as the others'. More people need to know that Firefox is good (or good enough). As others have said, I also find Safari on macOS to be faster, smoother, and consuming lesser power. But it just doesn't have the extensibility of Firefox (the extensions that I depend on regularly), and no Container-like system. The only other browser I use occasionally is Brave, having boycotted Chrome permanently a little while ago (with the user profile/cookie fiasco that the team backed out of later on). P.S.: Of course this comment was written from Firefox. And donating to Firefox (in addition to regular donations to Thunderbird).
  • superkuh 8y ago
    I used it since the Phoenix days too. But I stopped at version 37 because they no longer had the right intent for it's users. In fact, they no longer target the same users at all. Now it's all about making sure DRM protected video plays, making sure Facebook works, and making sure ignorant users doesn't accidentally break their config or install malware. No longer can the user determine what add-ons they can use without switching to a buggy beta build. And lets not forget the removal of all of the customization code and the add-on holocaust right before this. Most new add-ons still have only a fraction of their former functionality. And they'll never get it back because Mozilla isn't about that any more. Mozilla has abandoned their long time users in an attempt to become Chrome. And it has, just like all the other browsers. And that's why it's losing market share. It's the same crap but without a monopoly position to promote itself like Google or Apple. I used to install it for my family and friends that needed help in building or setting up their computers. Now I do not because Firefox has the same anti-user policies as Chrome or Safari.
• metalliqaz 8y ago
  I use both. I mostly use Chrome for Google apps and for video streaming. I use Firefox as my main browser. I've been using Firefox since before it was called Firefox. One thing I've noticed is that Firefox's plugins don't work as well anymore. Lastpass on Chrome just works. Lastpass on Firefox is always fighting with me. Downthemall disappeared. Using UBO breaks sites on Firefox much more often than on Chrome. That makes me sad.
• jhcl 8y ago
  The internet Moloch has thrown its weight around and now most of us sheep are using its browser to get tracked daily. I'll hang on to Firefox as long as I can and might move to Chromium (i.e. NOT Chrome) if necessary.
• satysin 8y ago
  I like Firefox but I don't use it as my main browser anymore as it just feels too out of place. I use macOS and it doesn't zoom with pinch to zoom, it doesn't scroll like everything else on the system, etc. I know these are pretty small things in the grand scheme of things but they make it feel awkward to me. Chrome isn't perfect but it feels a lot more 'at home' on macOS than Firefox does.
• jnurmine 8y ago
  Is it really...? are they measuring the right things? You get what you measure. So what do they measure? Do they ask for User-Agent logs from various sites around the net? Or do they rely on third party cookies or how does it work...?
• demarq 8y ago
  > On a general day I have around ~15 pinned tabs and more than 50 other tabs open and FF handles it like a breeze. I just commented about this somewhere else but basically no. Something here is wrong. Firefox fans say it's fast, Marketing materials say fast, even benchmarks say it's fast ...but it just feels slower than the rest to the average joe. There is something somewhere that isn't translating to speed somewhere. In a previous comment I've highlighted my experience with youtube and amazon as places where Firefox feels slower/clunkier compared to chrome. I really like Firefox, even love Rust but there is a problem somewhere that the firefox devs and hardcore fans just keep denying exists.
• caycep 8y ago
  Is their vision "big standards player" or "niche, boutique" browser? If the former, I guess this is bad. If the latter, as long as they execute well and have a critical mass of users/contributors then they should be ok
• justfor1comment 8y ago
  I always wanted to be the 1%. Looks like I made it to 9%.
• LiterallyDoge 8y ago
  It's the UI style.
• cafebabbe 8y ago
  Firefox died to me when they rewrote their plugin system and i had to give up on vimperator. Yeah, yeah, quantum is snappy, but so is Chrome. The plugin ecosystem was an actual differentiator.
• wyqydsyq 8y ago
  The main thing stopping me from using FF is it's poor profile support. There is a profile manager but it sucks. You have to launch it directly (can't open from a FF window) and you can only have one profile active at a time. Compared to Chrome where I can seamlessly have my work and personal profiles active at once, allowing me to do all of my work in a segregated profile while still having access to all my personal stuff like music playing in another window.
• taurath 8y ago
  It still makes my battery on my 3 different MacBooks die 10x as faster than chrome and and safari. Literally the only reason I don’t use it, but it’s apparently not a problem for anyone else.
• codejeff 8y ago
  I've been using Firefox on mobile almost all the time for a year now. Also on Chromebook side I have been trying to use it but it still has its display issues with Chromebook.
• latexr 8y ago
  I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: the reason I don’t switch to Firefox is their lack of AppleScript support, and I’m certain several other automators share that feeling. Without AppleScript support, Firefox is unusable as the day-to-day browser for many of us. And that’s just one of its problems on macOS. Every time there’s a Firefox thread on HN, I see people complaining about performance or lackluster support for a macOS feature, such as Keychain. Firefox isn’t losing because people don’t care about privacy; it’s losing because it sucks so much in certain areas, many of us who want to use it just can’t bear to.
• mehdix 8y ago
  It's now close to one year that I have completely switched back to Firefox. For performance reasons and also fear. Fear of Google having full control over browser market and pushing forward their own agenda. Their revenue is mostly ad-driven. What if they decide to change technology in such a way that prevent people like me from using add-blockers and privacy-protection measures against their sophisticated tracking techniques? This fear above all other fears, drove me toward alternatives, including Firefox. Not only I use it and promote it, but I help with development, however limited. I report bugs and invest my free time fixing them. That's what I can do as an indie developer. Web technology in general and DOM to be specific gives us freedom. They took parts of it away with DRM and pushing it into browsers and standardizing it. I don't want to see this happen for the rest of the web that is remaining.
• stratosmacker 8y ago
  I wish I the vim like plugins for Firefox were as good as Qutebrowser. I'm considering switching, but I love the workflow I get with my keybindings... Someone please tell me why I'm wrong